Marketing these days can feel like tackling a high-wire on a unicycle… while juggling chainsaws. And that's for experienced authors. For those with lower budgets or fewer books, the challenge can seem like entering the World Ice-Sculpting Championships armed with a box of matches and an ice cube.

Because
what you are aiming to do is this:

  • Sell enough to rise in the Best Seller Lists and get seen by lots of new readers.
  • Shift sufficient units over an extended period to jump up the Popularity List and get pushed en masse to Amazon customers via emails and on-site recommendations.
  • Keep that higher level of sales consistent enough over at least four or five days – i.e.  minimizing spikes and, especially, dips throughout – hoping to convince the Kindle Store algorithms that you are the real deal, whereupon they may take over and do the selling for you.

Errr,
and this also:

  • Exclusively target the right readers so that your conversion rates are decent and the bloodthirsty Amazon algorithms don't take your book to the woodshed.
  • Avoid having the wrong readers purchase, so your Also Boughts are in fine fettle and Amazon has a clear idea of who might like your book. If this get muddled, Amazon will start recommending you to all the wrong people, often a one-way ticket to the primordial ranking ooze.

At
this point, you might be planning some quality time with a bottle of vodka.

Getting
all this right is hard. Even wrapping
your head around all the underlying concepts is not exactly natural for someone
whose primary job is writing great stories and bringing characters to life, and
desperately trying to maintain a relationship with their editor despite never
knowing where to put a comma.

It's not all bad news though. Aside from the huge rewards for getting all this right, you don't actually need to get all this right. The prizes for near misses can be considerable too. And getting just some of this working will bring significant benefits. Also, you can take it step-by-step and bootstrap yourself into place, and layer on the complexity (and budget) as you learn.

But
first you need to really understand what all that stuff means and how all the
parts should interact.

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