My first book, Make Space to Lead, came out last week and within several days was at the top of six best-selling Amazon categories. But let me tell you a dirty little secret. While this book is considered successful by many standards in the publishing industry, especially for a first-time author and an independent publisher, it’s about learning the rules of the game and choosing which ones to follow. You see, it’s really not that hard to become an Amazon best-seller. And I’m a good student at learning and following the rules.

Read on to learn the secret to becoming an Amazon best seller. Perhaps more importantly, I’ll share how leaders can learn from understanding the rules of the game they’re playing in, whether at their corporate jobs or fund-raising or entrepreneurship, and how to find internal success within these external metrics.

How to Become an Amazon Best Seller

Feel free to skim through this “how-to”-ish section and jump ahead to the leadership learnings below.

1. Pick Your Ten Categories

First of all, know that my reporting is based on personal experience and a week’s worth of data. One of my values is experimentation, and I continue to be fascinated by how different industries work. I like to observe, watch, and then share.

Amazon organizes its book browsing by ebooks and books, then further splits them into additional categories. The easiest way to become a bestseller is to pick an obscure category to have your book highlighted within. Pick categories that are attainable but also believable.

So, I chose three competitive categories, four medium (or evergreen), and three easy categories. And as advised, I focused on ebooks versus books because it’s far easier for people to make quick digital sale, and as an author, I won’t incur the printing & delivery costs of a physical book.

Pick your categories by browsing through the kindle ebook store and scrolling down to the Department section on the bottom left. Expand each of the categories to view subcategories and see the books listed. If they are popular books that you’ve heard of, then this is likely a competitive category. You can review the Amazon Best Sales Rank (ABSR) of the #1 best sellers in these categories to see which ones might be beatable. These were my categories.

Competitive

Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Leadership
Self-Help > Personal Transformation
Business & Money > Business Life > Motivation & Self-Improvement

Medium (Evergreen)

Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction
Self-Help > Creativity
Computers & Technology > Tech Culture & Computer Literacy > Social Aspects
Computers & Technology > Business > History

Easy

Computers & Technology > Interactive & Multimedia
Education & Teaching > Higher & Continuing Education > Graduate School > Business
Computers & Technology > Digital Media

However, Amazon does not make this process easy. Once your book has been uploaded and published to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), you must submit a help request to customer support to request that they manually add you to these selected categories. It’s a seamless process, and they updated my categories within 12 hours.

Requesting an update to your Amazon Categories via KDP

2. Gather Reviews for Social Proof

The next two parts of the process are likely more familiar. Potential book readers want to read reviews and know what others thought of the book. Amazon lets you set five free days for your ebook, which I did before the launch, and personally asked about forty-five friends and colleagues to read the book and leave reviews. Several weeks earlier, I had sent them PDF copies of the book to read beforehand. On launch day, I had about twenty reviews.

3. Ask People to Buy. Make it Easy.

The expert advisors told me to set my ebook price at 99c for the first week of launch. This makes it an easy yes when you ask your friends & family members to buy the book. Anyone can spare 99c to support you. It also helps make the message less uncomfortable; rather than asking someone directly for money, you can let them know about the special promotional price.

My Results

My book launched on Tuesday. By the end of the day, it had made #1 in some of the easy categories. By Friday, it had made #1 in six categories — three easy and three evergreen. And the true dirty little secret?

In four days, I had sold roughly 100 ebooks. That put me as a #1 best seller in six categories.

That low number—only 100?— was a little crazy to me given the numbers I’m used to dealing with in tech or even for the readership of my medium posts; however, I needed to understand the different rules of the book publishing ecosystem.

That is how to win at the Amazon Best Seller Game. You too can play and choose what rules to follow.

What about leadership?

You can apply all the lessons from understanding the Amazon best-seller game to both leadership and entrepreneurship.

1. Understanding a new industry (or company) requires knowing the rules of the game

As a leader, you will constantly face new challenges and spaces. It might be expanding into a new industry, or starting work at a different company with its own unwritten norms and rules. First, recognize that all of this is new to you. meaning that you’ll need to put in the time to understand this system. Treat it as a game where you’re still figuring out the rules.

2. Build relationships and do your research

To learn the game, seek out people who can help educate you. Building relationships is best through asking for 1–1 conversations and approaching them with a genuine sense of curiosity. For the most part, people want to share their expertise. You can seek people out via recommendations in your network, or you pay expert consultants. Another approach is to do your own research through reading or consuming media.

3. Understand your internal motivations for playing the game

Everyone will have their own motivations for starting something new, whether it’s a new company or a first book. For me, I wrote my book to both process / share my internal growth as well as share frameworks and experiments that have worked well for clients that I support. There’s only a limited number of 1–1 clients I can work with directly, and I wanted to share some of these leadership lessons more widely. I’ve spent years writing blog posts, and the long-form book creation process felt like a culmination of all the learnings, packaged in one place.

It was important to me to realize that intrinsic success was comprised of:

Writing the book and honing my skills as a writer
Sharing the Make Space to Lead messages more broadly and to different audiences
Providing tried-and-true coaching frameworks, tools, and experiments in one consolidated package

4. Understand what external motivations matter

For me, achieving Amazon best seller status as well as gathering reviews meant that I had social proof that the book was worth reading. These external measures would help spread the content more widely.

It was clear that the book wasn’t about the money from book sales but a way of scaling my business so that my message could reach more people and perhaps a different audience than my existing network of people in technology.

It’s okay to care about external motivations. Caring about what other people think of you is simply a part of being human. Understanding what external motivations mattered to me made it easier to follow the rules and play the game.

Bottom-Line

Ultimately leadership is about following your own rules. It’s crucial to first understand the rules of the system because we all exist within that container. With that understanding, you’ll have the knowledge of what rules to keep and which ones to break. Making that decision will depend on your internal and external motivations.

I’m proud of having my first book achieve Amazon best seller status, and I’m even prouder of having a greater understanding of the publishing world and what goes into the success of a book.

Book Insider: Winning the Amazon Best Seller Game & How to Create Your own Leadership Rules