It’s finally happened: A self-published ebook has hit the No. 1 spot on the Digital Book World Ebook Best-Seller list. A few have hung around in the top-five, some reaching even No. 2, but this is the first to hold that top spot, following in the footsteps of Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girls and other titles from huge publishing houses.
The author to be congratulated is Jennifer L. Armentrout, writing under the pen name J.Lynn. The title is What you Want and was available last week for $0.99 but is now selling for $2.99. Armentrout is what we’re now calling a “hybrid author,” or someone who has both self-published and published traditionally.
While it doesn’t prove that self-published authors can play with the big boys (that was proven ages ago by Amanda Hocking and dozens of other since), it does show that they can play and win.
Getting a No. 1 best-selling on the DBW list is hard and many of the biggest, most successful publishers have yet to do it. The list tracks sales at five major ebook retailers across an entire week. Here’s what a title needs to do to have a good chance at being No. 1:
1. Be sold at all of the retailers. While some of the retailers (read: Amazon, Barnes & Noble) have more weight than others, a flat bonus is given for appearing on each retailer. The bonus is small, but an ebook that only is sold at one retailer for an entire week would feel the negative scoring effects fairly heavily in aggregate.
2. Be ranked in the top-ten or, better yet, top-five at the largest retailers consistently throughout the week. One thing that sets our list apart from the Kindle 100, say, is that an ebook won’t make the list unless it has strong sales throughout the week. A flash in the pan or highly successful Kindle Daily Deal won’t cut it.
(Read the full methodology here.)
What is especially impressive about Armentrout’s accomplishment is that what pushed her over the top was a carefully orchestrated price promotion. For three days last week, she sold her book for $0.99. The days before and after the promotion the book was priced at $2.99. The price change was combined with a Barnes & Noble homepage promotion.
Sounds simple, right? Well, it’s not. Doing a specific price change over a specific period across multiple retailers is very complex and not an easy task for even publishers to handle sometimes. It involves working with metadata on multiple platforms and timing things just right. Beyond that, the instincts to execute such a promotion and have it hit are to be envied.
Armentrout, however, isn’t your run-of-the-mill author. She’s a hybrid author. In our recent survey of nearly 5,000 authors, the subset of hybrid authors (about 700 of them) made more money from book publishing than any other kind of author (aspiring, self-published and traditionally published), had more success building their author platforms (social media presence, blogging, etc.) and were more savvy in general about their views toward the publishing industry. Essentially, they know how to make money publishing books, even without the help of a publishing company.
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