{"id":7064892,"date":"2026-09-23T15:31:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T15:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/how-my-book-hit-1-in-the-world-on-amazon\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T15:31:23","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T15:31:23","slug":"how-my-book-hit-1-in-the-world-on-amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7064892","title":{"rendered":"How My Book Hit #1 in the World on Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"
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So in 2017, my book hit number #1 on Amazon for a very strange reason.<\/p>\n
This is a story about the Dalai Lama and vodka shots, and how those two ideas came together to push my book to number #1 on Amazon.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And I don\u2019t mean number #1 in a category, like personal growth for men over forty who own Labradors. I mean number one in every category, across all of Amazon, which briefly made me the number #2 author in the world, ahead of Tolkien and his combined works, and J.K. Rowling and her combined works (yes, every Harry Potter book, together). Here are the screenshots to prove it.<\/p>\n
The book hit #1 on Amazon Sep 16, 2017<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
The book stayed as a top book on Amazon for the next 3 months (screenshot taken on Nov 11, 2027) , periodically bouncing back to the #1 spot across all books on Amazon.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
Briefly making me the #2 Author in the world (ahead of even JK Rowling and Tolkien for a few brief days)<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n
Now let me tell you how it happened, and why I\u2019m sharing this with you, especially today.<\/p>\n
So the book opens in a hotel bar in Calgary, 2009. In a few hours, I\u2019m going on stage right after the Dalai Lama, in the slot they keep for the speaker nobody came to see, and I\u2019m so nervous that a shot of vodka from the lobby bar feels like a professional decision.<\/p>\n
Now think about that for a second. A holy man and a shot glass. Those two things do not belong in the same sentence, and the moment they are, your brain needs to know how it ends. Do I embarrass myself? Do I get banned from Tibet? Does His Holiness join me for one? You turn the page.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And by the time you\u2019ve found out, I\u2019ve started something else you need to finish.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s called an idea collision.<\/strong><\/p>\n
Idea collision: two ideas that don\u2019t belong together, forced into one story.<\/em><\/p>\n
And here\u2019s the thing. It wasn\u2019t the only one. When I went back through the first eleven pages of that book (The Code of the Extraordinary Mind), I found a whole system in there that I\u2019d built without knowing I was building it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a move I call the unsell<\/strong>, where I tell you on page one that you might hate this book, and the reader who was about to drift has just been dared to stay. There\u2019s the thing you can\u2019t unsee, a promise that the book will change you, not inform you.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are open loops<\/strong>, every one with an address, a chapter number where it closes. There\u2019s phraseology, the new words, more than twenty of them, so you have a handle to carry each idea out of the room by. And there\u2019s the slippery slope<\/strong>, short sentences where each one makes the next unavoidable.<\/p>\n
Now, why eleven? Because every so often Amazon gives a book away free to thousands of its premium members, and most of those books get skimmed and shelved, so Amazon only counts a book as read once you get past page eleven. Amazon didn\u2019t read my book. It counted. And almost everyone who opened it got past page eleven, because that\u2019s where the system lives. The ranking had to move. It moved all the way to the top.<\/p>\n
Let that sink in for a second.<\/p>\n
The ideas got the book written. The system got it read.<\/strong><\/p>\n
And I believe this is the thing nobody teaches experts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You spent years getting good at your idea. Nobody spent one afternoon showing you how to make a person turn the page. It\u2019s not luck, and it\u2019s not talent. There\u2019s a structure. And once you see it, you can\u2019t unsee it.<\/p>\n
So here\u2019s why I\u2019m telling you this today.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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