Whether your brand new to the self-publishing game or have one or more book launches under your belt, you already know that one of the fastest and easiest ways to get your book out of your head and into the hands of your audience is by publishing it through Amazon’s Kindle platform.
What you may not be aware of is that by carefully researching and selecting the niches you chose to enter with your fiction and non-fiction books you can position yourself to get many more sales of each book you release without having to do any ‘extra’ work.
From a book marketing perspective, a very important but often overlooked aspect of Amazon is that you don’t have to guess about much of anything. Along with being one of the worlds most trafficked commercial websites, Amazon is literally a data goldmine.
If you want to do well and make sales with Amazon Kindle, the secret is to not waste time trying to carve out your own niche. Instead, find out what is already popular and in demand and create books to fill that need.
The Major Criteria for Finding Profitable Kindle Niches
Creating Kindle books that get sales and earn you a significant income requires following some basic rules that should always be met for best results.
- There must be a healthy demand for books in your niche.
No searches for topics that your books cover means no sales.
There may very well be a topic that you love and want to create a book on, but if your goal is to write manuscripts that have the potential for profits, you must stick to niches that have earning potential.
The first thing to establish is whether or not there is an actual demand for the book you want to create and market.
- There must be people willing to pay for books in your niche.
You may think that any level of demand online equals a niche with the potential to make sales. However, if you take a closer look at some Kindle niches you’ll quickly notice that many of the books available for download are freebies.
Avoid these types of niches completely. Your chances of selling someone information they can get for free are slim to none.
You can usually tell these types of books because they don’t have very specialized information and don’t target a tight niche. These books are also usually thrown together using information that can be found freely on the internet.
To crack the sales and profit code on Kindle, an important thing to keep in mind is that unique and specialized the information is more valuable to a niche, which increases the amount of money readers are willing to pay to access that information.
- You must be able to overcome the competition in your niche.
When you settle on a niche that interests you, has enough demand and where people are actively spending money, the last thing to do to ensure that your chosen niche is ripe for profits is to scout out the competition.
This way you can assess whether or not you can produce content that is as good, if not way better than what they have to offer.
Even if you do believe that you can create an offer as good as the competitions’, it may still be best to avoid certain niches. The climb to the top may be a little too steep and require too much time and effort.
For instance, if your competitor already has thousands of book reviews and is regarded as the author of the number one book in a niche, your time would be much better spent going after lower hanging fruit.
Taking the time to examine the competition also helps you to find out if there are any gaps in what they offer to their readers and if you have the potential to come in with a book that satisfies the information and/or entertainment needs of that audience.
Start with the Best Sellers List
The best place to start your hunt for profitable topics is on Kindle’s own best seller list.
There you’ll find out exactly which books are movers and shakers and quickly identify the books that are being snapped up by hungry audiences in a wide range of niches.
Another area you want to focus on is best seller rankings on each book idea you want to explore. The closer the rank of a specific book is to 1, the faster the book sells on Kindle.
To give you an even clearer picture of how this works, Kindle book consumers purchase more than 6000 copies of the number 1 ranking title. On the other hand, the author of the book in position 100,000 can expect to sell approximately one book per day.
That’s a significant difference.
By focusing on books with a lower best seller ranking you can quickly hone in on niches with high sales and profit potential.
Look for Keywords that Stand Out
As you browse around the Kindle best seller lists looking for opportunities, keep an eye out for any keywords that stand out out and pique your interest.
Always remember that online keywords equal niches and niches equal riches.
An abundant source of potential niche ideas and keywords is Amazon’s own search bar. This is in fact one of the best tools to use for research on the platform.
Why?
Because the wonderful folks over at Amazon offer predictive text to try and help searchers find what they are looking for quickly and easily.
The advantage for self-published authors and marketers is that you can type in the first few letters or words in a keyword phrase and you instantly see the most searched for phrases that begin with those letters or words.
Find Niche Ideas in Amazon’s Helpful Prompts
With a primary goal of helping their customers to discover products they want to buy, Amazon always provides breadcrumbs and rabbit holes for their patrons to follow with the goal of leading them to even more products they may want to buy.
How can you use this information to your advantage for research purposes?
Investigate the “customers who bought this item also bought” section on each Kindle book page that interests you.
Taking a minute or two to go through the existing offers often reveals sales boosting niche ideas you may have never even thought of.
Look for Opportunities to Add Value
Instead of trying to carve out your own niche, focus on finding well-established and hungry niches that want information or entertainment that is lacking with existing offers.
Most users that take the time to leave a comment (hint: read the 3-star and 4-star reviews) are usually thoughtful enough to point out what they liked about a particular book, which aspects of it didn’t hit the mark and how they feel the information could have been better presented.
Use this information to create your own offers that add value and increase the likelihood of your book generating significant sales.
Avoid Markets Where No One Else is Selling
If you happen to think up an idea for a book and visit Amazon only to see that no one else has published anything in that niche you may think that you’ve stumbled upon a rare discovery that has the potential to make you a lot of money.
It is possible, but it’s also very unlikely.
On Amazon’s platform, if someone isn’t already targeting a specific niche market, the likely reason is that nobody is interested in it.
Why re-invent the wheel if you don’t have to?
With a little time and effort, you will uncover several lucrative niches where you can create book offers that your audience wants and needs, that drive your sales and increase your self-publishing income.
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