How I became a #1 Amazon Bestseller
Still processing this: Chained Birds just earned TWOΒ #1 Best Seller Amazon badges this week! And fun fact: even though I’ve ranked #1 in two categories, Amazon will only display one badge on my retail page. π
The badge(s) might disappear tomorrow, although I’ve had the first one (in my Criminal Procedure category) for three days. Technically, this means I can forever claim the title #1 Amazon Bestseller in Criminal Procedure AND Penology. (Penology, my second category, means prison, people.)
This is not super sexy like how New York Times Bestselling Author rolls off the tongue, but hey, it’s an indie author’s dream to hit #1 in at least one of their categories, and I did it twice this week. But I want to be clear: this achievement has occurred with my eBook only. I’m selling very few print copies anywhere, but no matter, because an eBook orange badge looks as pretty as one earned from selling paperbacks or hardcovers, and is indistinguishable to Amazon patrons.
These rankings will not stick forever, and that’s why I’ve screen-captured the heck out of them and archived the Criminal Procedure and Penology pages with a handy service from Archive.Today.
Breaking Down Chained Birds’ Path to #1 Amazon Bestseller
There’s no secret recipe for achieving this. It’s a matter of building awareness and standing out from the 3 million new books published in the U.S. every year. (Not so simple, I know.) My Amazon BSR (Best Seller Ranking) for Chained Birds has risen to just under 13k, from its worst position of 788k a week ago. That puts my book in the top 1% in the entire Kindle Store of 12 million titles. (And to put it another way, almost 13,000 Kindle Store eBooks rank higher than mine.)
To make this happen, it has only taken about 60 Amazon book sales this week, with most of them occurring in the last two days. Not exactly a runaway success, but not bad for an indie author competing against Grisham and Stevenson and publishers with massive marketing budgets π₯³
So how did I do this? By picking the right Amazon categories to start with, then diving into online ads (mainly Meta), and then dropping a heavy discount in preparation for a big upcoming audiobook and eBook promotion. **Note: I attribute these #1 BSRs solely to my current ad strategy that I’ve set in motion ahead of a planned digital promo blast that begins November 10th. It will be interesting to see what happens as a result of that big promoβmore on this below.**
Pick the right Amazon categories
This is not an advertisement for Publisher Rocket (I have no affiliation), but I mention it because it’s an incredibly helpful tool for picking relevant Amazon categories where you might have a chance to rank #1 in. One feature I love is an estimation of the number of books you need to sell to reach #10 and then #1 in a given book subcategory. You’ll note that in my Criminal Procedure subcategory, I only needed to sell three books to get to #1! And in Penology, I needed to sell just nine to get to #1. That is called strategic marketing.
You’ll notice I am knocking on the door to #1 in my third, more competitive category: I’m at #2 in True Crime-Organized Crime. I’ll be watching that one for a potential third orange badge (even though I can only have one on my page π©) as well as the overall general (and very competitive) True Crime category in all book formats as my big upcoming promotion gets underway.
Chained Birds is currently ranked #33 in Kindle’s True Crime category, and according to Publisher Rocket, I’d have to sell 146 copies in a day to reach #1 there. Will it happen? Stay tuned … if it does, I’ll swap out #1 in Criminal Procedure and Penology for #1 in True Crime in a heartbeat π±
Get your favorite AI to help you with book ads
This all started because I finally took the time and invested a little cash into figuring out how the ad space for books works. For my tutorials, I relied heavily on instructions and recommendations from AI. Two weeks ago, I started playing with Amazon ads with Claude-Sonnet 4.5‘s help. It was an exhaustive process to understand and then transpose Claude’s directives, but I finally got several ads up and running that seemed promising. All you can do with an Amazon book ad is change up the text above the cover graphic, and Claude helped me with a few versions for testing.
The most valuable thing I got from Claude was an analysis of the Amazon ad stats and lack of sales. It turns out that Chained Birds does not necessarily appeal to the average true crime reader who wants books about serial killers or murder mysteries. Instead, my target readers enjoy stories about journalism, prison, and social justice.
So I took this insightful feedback to a second AI, Perplexity, because I wanted a fresh start. I love Claude, but it is wordy and repetitive, and the thread was getting too long. And if I started a new thread, Claude would forget everything we already covered. That is not the case for Perplexity, which also lists all of its online sources for each answer.
I ditched the Amazon ads for Meta ads, which I’ve read work better for many authors. Once again, I relied on a tutorial from Perplexity, but this time I was armed with much better audience targeting.
Being able to create my own graphics (called creatives) with tools like Canva was helpful. I literally uploaded the creatives to Perplexity as I worked on them, and received terrific suggestions each time, such as adding drop shadows to make the text pop, color changes, background options, text titles, etc.
Price change from $9.99 to $1.99 was key
My Meta ads started off much better than the Amazon experiment. However, what really helped them gain traction was the price drop from $9.99 to $1.99, which I implemented as soon as Chained Birds left Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program on October 30. People love a bargain. It’s hard to know what will happen when pricing returns to normal. Things will certainly level off, I’m sure. I guess I’ll cross that bridge with Perplexity when the time comes.
One of the main reasons I jumped into online ads now (and of course, I wish I had done it sooner, but you know, life and bandwidth) is to prime Amazon’s algorithms ahead of a big upcoming promotion for both the eBook and audiobook π
Chained Birds Will End the Year With a Big Promotion
Because I am now an indie author controlling my price and distribution, I qualified for a very-hard-to-get audiobook promotion through Chirp, a division of BookBub. Beginning November 10, 2025, Chirp will introduce my audiobook (discounted to $1.99 from $14.99) to hundreds of thousands of its newsletter subscribers, giving Chained Birds its widest-ever marketplace exposure.
To coincide with the Chirp deal, I lined up several eBook promotions with newsletter services like The Fussy Librarian, Bargain Booksy, Robin Reads, Early Birds, etc. and dropped the eBook price to $1.99 to match. It was a lot of finagling to get my eBook on all of these “wide” platforms with correct pricing, but everything is set now for the big promotionβincluding getting Amazon’s algo ready to absorb a much bigger flurry of eBook bargain buyers.
I will report back on how this big promo affects my BSR and what, if any, sustained tailwind comes of it.
Final Thoughts
I’m approaching my one-year anniversary as a published author, and I’ve shared a lot of what I’ve learned about this fickle, demoralizing, and yet exhilarating business on this blog. Book marketing has taken on a whole new life for me as a formerly trad-pubbed author, now doing it on my own. Does it help to have a critically acclaimed story honored with lots of book awards? Of course. But without some kind of marketing, no one will know the book existsβthis is especially true for us indie authors. So that is the trench I find myself in now, as I prepare to move on to my next true crime story: The Jacklighter.
I hope you stay tuned for updates!
Carla Conti is a former journalist and the award-winning author of Chained Birds: A Crimemoir. Her true crime debut won multiple 2025 national book awards, including 1st Place in True Crime from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Winner in True Crime from the Indie Reader Discovery Awards, Silver in True Crime from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY), and a 1st Place Nellie Bly Journalism award from the Chanticleer International Book Awards. Carla is at work on her next true crime book, The Jacklighter, scheduled for release in 2026. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, who supports her true crime habit.
