Interview with Aggie Villanueva, author of "Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers"

With the exception of five days, Aggie Villanueva’s new book Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers hit immediate Kindle bestseller in three categories, and held steady in 1-3 categories for over 13 weeks. I'm delighted to have Aggie as a guest on the blog today to share tips from her book about how to make YOUR book an Amazon Best Seller!

What was your inspiration/motivation behind this book? 

I’m so glad to be back visiting here again, Dallas. I always enjoy it so much.

When I tell people about my book, Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers: But That’s Not All They Do, I often get two responses, which are what prompted me to write the book to begin with. Some shrug, “So what? Categories are like Tags. Everywhere I place my book requires choosing categories. They are basically just another search engine assistant.” Categories are nothing like search engine tags. 

The second response I often get is from authors with a bit more experience selling books at Amazon, who know a book is tallied for category bestseller by outselling others within the same category. Unfortunately some have been taught that a smart strategy for ranking in this top-100 bestseller list is to pick the smallest category you can find, even if it’s not absolutely relevant to your book’s topic. 

Yes, I’ve heard of those kinds of classes about getting a quick best seller by just choosing the smallest category possible. Could you explain what is wrong with this teaching? 

These authors may have been taught (in a nutshell): “Close is good enough. Bestseller status at all costs.” This is very short-sighted, because category bestsellers are not the be-all and end-all purpose of categories, and worse, these actions can doom your Amazon book sales permanently. 

How can choosing the wrong category doom book sales? 

When we understand the true function of Amazon’s categories it’s a whole new world. My book delves further into this fascinating system, but right now we’ll suffice with the end result: It’s a world where Amazon becomes your personal book publicist. And it all starts with choosing the RIGHT category, not the smallest. 

Gaining a bestseller is wonderful, it truly is, but that is only part of what Amazon can do for you, and specifically it’s only part of the purpose of categories. Amazon uses categories as the pool from which to draw almost every promotion throughout their site and beyond (pushes such as direct emailings). This publicity is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

Categories are your first step in taking advantage of Amazon’s targeted system. Tight targeting of your categories is the goal. Never choose a category based on lack of competition. If your book is not in the most targeted category, Amazon cannot successfully sell the book for you. 

So, what happens if you choose the not-so-right category?

Though you may get category bestseller status for a while, your sales may stop there. Try to sucker your audience and you may pay with poor sales and losing out on all of Amazon’s free publicity. For example, let’s say you placed your humorous novel in the category “Comic books” because there are only 91 other books to compete with. Humorous novel, graphic novel, comic book – close enough, right? You have already doomed your book’s success on several levels. 

In just one of the many possible scenarios, imagine you are a young graphic novel lover who receives email updates about his favorite categories, and Amazon’s algorithms have deduced “Comic books” is one of them. Your humorous novel is prominently featured in his email, an email that is supposed to inform him of the newest comic book bestsellers. When he clicks on yours he will be angry that you wasted his time, and his money if he purchased it with one click without checking it out. You may become a blacklisted author. 

Don’t scoff. Though this is a worst case scenario, it is not an exaggeration. E-device-savvy-readers are so demanding of and involved with their online world that, without a second lost, he may leave a scathing review on your sales page, talk about you in the discussion boards, report you to Amazon, and blacklist you in ways and places you and I have never heard of. The damage may even be irreparable. 

But let’s not forget that those readers who would have loved your humorous novel will never see it because you listed it in the wrong category. You will not be featured in email promotions to those looking for precisely your subject; and you will not be eligible for any other top-100 lists such as Top Rated. These are all Amazon promotions meant to sell your books, and they do their jobs well. So, the goal is NOT just to be included in a category bestseller list at all costs. Bestsellers come from sales. And your tightly targeted categories catapult your book into a publicity campaign like you’ve never dreamed of, courtesy (and cost) of Amazon.com.  

What is your biggest tip for authors who want to become Amazon best-sellers? 

Use Amazon.com heavily to promote your book, but approach it with integrity. Let’s not make the same mistakes as in the example above, making illegitimate use of the amazing mega-publicity engine that is Amazon.com. There is a lot of controversy still raging about Amazon’s deletion of thousands of reviews. I think it might be a combination of understandable over-reaction on Amazon’s part and our ignorance of their rules (knowledge of these rules is covered in the book). But it is mostly we authors who are honest and work with integrity who suffer because of those who illegitimately used the system. For more great tips and info about my reader exclusive companion site see my bio below. The knowledge contained there amounts to several more books and includes advice from some of the best book marketing experts in the field. And I add to it continually. 

What is your biggest advice for young people reaching for their dreams? 

My favorite advice is various versions of the same saying I was taught as a child. “Always shoot for everything the universe offers. If you don’t quite make it you will still have reached the stars.” 

Thank you so much for being a guest on the blog today, Aggie! I have learned a lot from your insightful answers!

Aggie has generously offered to give an ebook copy of Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers to one lucky blog reader! To enter for your chance to win, all you need to do is write a comment below!

BIO: Below are a few sentences from reviews, and a link back to the book’s reader-exclusive companion site. Aggie Villanueva’s full bio and anything else can be found there. It’s a fountain of learning, contests and appearance from experts for her readers, but there are also many pages of public information. 

Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers Book Companion Site 

Purchase Amazon Categories Create Best Sellers: But That’s Not All They Do

“…Aggie Villanueva’s how-to changes your perspective of Amazon from that of an online book store to that of an author publicity machine.” -Vikram Narayan, CEO of BookBuzzr.com 

 “…I also already had a basic understanding about Amazon categories - but Villanueva has obviously been combing through Amazons methods and policies -- analyzing everything in critical detail, and what she has discovered is significant and important.” -Ken Korczak, Reviewer. Read full review at Amazon

Guest Post by Aggie Villanueva: Avoid Passive Writing!

Our friend Aggie Villanueva was kind enough to share this great video post about avoiding passive writing. Enjoy!

About Aggie: A published author at Thomas Nelson before she was 30, Aggie Villanueva published Chase the Wind, and Rightfully Mine, both Thomas Nelson 1980s, and is now a multiple fiction & nonfiction Amazon/Kindle category bestseller, also making Top Rated list in three categories for her how-to The Rewritten Word. Aggie founded Promotion á la Carte, author promotional services July 2010 and 6 months later was voted #2 at Predators & Editors in the Promotion category. Among other sites, she teaches author promotion at BookBuzzr Blog, Book Marketing Technoligies Center Webinars, Promotion a la Carte Blog and Promotion a la Carte Radio. Villanueva is also a critically acclaimed photographic artist represented by galleries nationwide, including Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. Contact Villanueva at aggie@promotionalacarte.com.

Interview with Aggie Villanueva

For decades peers have described Aggie Villanueva as a whirlwind who draws others into her vortex. And no wonder. She was a published author at Thomas Nelson before she was 30, and has founded many local writers’ groups including the Mid-America Fellowship of Christian Writers three–day conference. She has also taught at nationwide writing conferences and published numerous writing newsletters for various organizations.

Writing since the late 70s, bestselling author Aggie Villanueva’s first novel, Chase the Wind, was published by Thomas Nelson 1983; Rightfully Mine, also Thomas Nelson, was published in 1986. She is also a critically acclaimed photographic artist represented by galleries nationwide, including Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. Aggie freelanced throughout the 80s and 90s, also writing three craft columns and three software review columns for national magazines, and was featured on the cover of The Christian Writer Magazine in October 1983.

Aggie founded Visual Arts Junction blog February 2009 and by the end of the same year it was voted #5 at Predators & Editors in the category “Writers’ Resource, Information & News Source” for 2009.

Her non-fiction writing includes the handbook The Rewritten Word: Sculpting Literary Art No Matter The Genre, numerous marketing white paper reports, and professional blogging at Visual Arts Junction. She is a regular writer at the BookBuzzr Blog and Orange Soda, a prestigious SEO marketing company. Authors called on her so often for marketing guidance that in the summer of 2010 she founded her own company, Promotion a la Carte.

Aggie is generously offering a free ebook of her latest release, The Rewritten Word, which we discuss later in this interview. To enter the contest, all you have to do is comment on this post! 


Welcome, Aggie! What a treat for us to have you here today sharing your wisdom! What would you like readers to know about you as an introduction?

Thanks so much for having me, Dallas. I'm excited to be here. Let's see. I've always taken tons of photos of things I love. Most of my adult life that was my beloved children. Now they live states away so it's become my beloved mountains. I guess that's why I became a professional photographer, so I could share the beauty.

And I recently served as wedding photographer for my daughter’s wedding. But I’m a landscapist—I don’t even own any indoor lighting equipment, proper filters, etc. I was honored beyond words that she asked me, but talk about one nervous photographer!

Tell us about The Rewritten Word. What was your inspiration/motivation behind this book?

Wanting to share what I’ve discovered, but I have to laugh because I didn't write it because I'm an Editor or English professor or any such expected reason. I wrote it because I'm a terrible writer. I had already figured that out by looking at any first draft. I'm just an average Joe who had to figure out what rewriting is all about in order to produce quality writing, whether fact or fiction.

When I first started writing I learned the admonishment "write, write and rewrite." And I obeyed, but my fourth drafts were no better than my first. The reason was simply that I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't understand what rewriting meant.

So then I read books on editing your work, but they were lofty, using grammar terms that college level grammar students would have a hard time following.

So I did exactly what I do with the examples in The Rewritten Word--I took the sentences and paragraphs that were unclear and clarified and simplified and shortened.

I rewrote each sentence and word, translating into ones I could understand and eliminating what didn’t relate. At times that meant searching grammar books to find out what the heck the author had said. What I didn't realize at the time was that I was inadvertently learning the craft of rewriting, and with advanced applications.

Here’s an example from the book:

Have you ever read a sentence like this?

Humanity is conceived here exclusively in terms of ritual function—man is made in order to offer sacrifices to the gods—and so the highly differentiated realms of history and moral action are not intimated in the account of man’s creation.

Wouldn’t it make more sense like this?

According to this account of man’s creation, our only function is to sacrifice to the gods. The many facets of our purpose, such as our varied history and morality, are not even hinted at.

My edit may not impress the intelligentsia, but I understood it.


What have you learned through writing this book?

I think I re-learned what I've noticed most writers seem to automatically do. We like to share what we've learned. And writing it into books and articles comes natural for us. We seem to all share a love of learning and then sharing that knowledge.


What is your writing routine? Do you write every day? Do you have a certain time or place you write?

I always write on my laptop, and write continually. It takes daily writing for everything: my blog teaching authors to promote their own work, Visual Arts Junction http://www.visualartsjunction.com, my job as an author publicist at Promotion a la Carte http://www.promotionalacarte.com, being a regular contributor for the SEO marketing blog Orange Soda http://www.orangesoda.com/blog/turn-your-social-media-peekers-into-faithful-followers/ and BookBuzzr Blog http://www.bookbuzzr.com/blog/book-marketing/pimp-your-cover/, and then always there are industry reports we sell at Promotion a la Carte http://promotionalacarte.com/white-paper-reports/ and free reports for our clients, not to mention ongoing book projects. Unfortunately I haven't time for fiction nowadays. Hopefully someday soon.


How did you first begin writing? What was your path to publication?

Like most writers I wrote from the time I could create stories and get them from my head into words on paper, which was about five years old.

But I started writing for publication at about 27, a biblical novel that I asked a friend, Deborah Lawrence, to co-author with me. It was published by Thomas Nelson when I was 28 or 29 and I was hooked. My next historical novel was written solo, and Thomas Nelson published it too.

That was Rightfully Mine which I re-published myself July of 2009 as Rightfully Mine: God's Equal Rights Amendment. With lots of hard promotional work it became a top-ten best seller about 8 months later in three small categories on Amazon. I was so thrilled I took screen shots to prove it!


You are not only a successful writer, you are also an acclaimed photographic artist. How does art enrich your writing, and visa versa?

Photography helped my rewriting tremendously. With a photographed picture you create a story, but that story is set in stone once it’s finished just as a published manuscript. You can’t allow too little or too much into it, ONLY that which clearly communicates.

You don't show too much by allowing an overhead electric line to detract from the story your scene tells (verbosity). You may allow some objects to remain in shadow if they advance the whole of the story (nuances). You can’t allow colors or textures that unintentionally infer things opposite to your message. Composition is everything to a photograph, just as it is to writing.

With writing (as is evident in The Rewritten Word) you must create not only clear and concise written images that communicate ONLY what you wish, but every aspect of your words and sentences and structure must tell that same story, and no other story.

To obtain that you carefully compose your written image, distill each kernel, matching the rhythm and nuances of each word with the scene’s essence. Unless you are utterly engrossed with your composition it won't emerge as a relevant whole. You would include things in the written picture that actually take away from it, or use words with nuances that are opposite to your message/scene.

The similarities of the arts are amazing. That's why Visual Arts Junction (my teaching blog) has a subtitle, The Invisible Visual Arts, because that's exactly how I see writing.


What is your biggest advice for aspiring writers?

Give it your all. Invest your heart and soul, but don't forget the mind. It’s important to study our craft, to understand the depths as well as the finished heights.


In your opinion, why is REwriting such an important part of the writing process?

I talked about that quite a bit above in my comparison to photography. I honestly don't know a writer whose first draft isn't horrible. But the first step is just to get our thoughts on paper. That's when the true writing craft begins.

Rewriting allows us to correct the composition errors of the first draft. In the rewrites we can carve away those aspects that are irrelevant, smooth out the curves that segue ideas together, gouge areas of light and shadow where all aspects infer ONLY what we wish to convey.


Is there anything else you would like to add?

Thank you so much for having me Dallas. I'd like to offer a free ebook version of The Rewritten Word to your readers, the winner to be your choice in the drawing. My way of saying thanks to everyone for allowing me to ramble on about the things I love.


Thank you so much! To enter the contest to win a free ebook of The Rewritten Word, all you need to do is write a comment on this post. 


Contact Aggie!

Facebook Profile: http://www.facebook.com/aggiev
Facebook Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/visualartsjunction
Twitter: http://twitter.com/visualartsaggie
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/cielosrojos
Promotion a la Carte: http://www.promotionalacarte.com