Finding my niche

The current state of things:

• Books published: 8

• Books pending publication: 1

• Money made: $0

Let me start by saying that I’m not expecting to make money yet, but it’s still depressing to see that $0. What’s not reflected there is the amount I’ve learned even in the last week. My main takeaway: I’m publishing the wrong things.

Amazon SERPs

SERP is a common acronym in the world of internet marketing. It stands for Search Engine Results Page. This is the page on which your listing shows up in a search engine for a given search term. The lower the number the better, as you want to be on the first page if at all possible.

I’m not sure SERP is the correct term on Amazon, but the concept is the same. When someone searches for a keyword on Amazon, you want to show up on the first page of results. If not the first page, then as high as possible.

This seems especially important for low content books because the balance between supply and demand can vary widely. Some categories are very popular, but they also have a ton of competition. Some less popular categories might actually lead to more sales because there are fewer competing options available. You’re essentially searching for a sweet spot where the demand is high enough, but the competition is low enough to allow for success.

My mistakes

Many things likely factor into where your book ranks on Amazon. Let's consider the obvious ones:

• Relevance to the keyword

• Number of purchases

• Number of reviews

• Publisher reputation

• Competition

You only have control over one of those things, and as a new author, you have no purchases, reviews or reputation. That means when you’re getting started, you have to find niches where the competition is low above all else. That’s where I made my mistakes.

In looking at the books I’ve published so far, they fall into two broad categories:

• High demand, high competition

• Low demand, medium competition

In both of these cases, I was doomed to fail. Even if I made perfect books in a high demand, high competition niche, I’d never make any sales because there are already so many well established sellers and products in those categories. With low demand, medium competition, my odds weren’t much better. In these categories, the number of buyers is small, so only a few books will ever make any sales. I might get lucky here, but the payoff is small.

Ideally, you’d like to find a “high demand, low competition” niche, but that’s a tall order. My new strategy is to find “medium demand, low/medium competition” niches.

New tools, better discovery

But how do you find these niches? I had no idea, so I started researching. like anything on the internet, there are apps for this. The one that I like the best so far is Publisher Rocket. I ended up purchasing this one for a $97 one time fee*. What I like about Rocket is that it shows you all the valuable information about a keyword in one place. It tells you the number of competitors, average monthly earnings in the category, Google searches per month, estimated Amazon searches per month and a competitive score. This last field is created by Publisher Rocket, and it’s a scale of 1 to 100. The higher the number, the more competitive the keyword is. For my purposes, I’m aiming at keywords in the 30-50 range. These are competitive enough to show some value, but not so competitive that an unproven publisher has no shot.

The number of competitors here is not very useful, as it’s almost always >1200. I think this is an API limit they are hitting with Amazon. Still, it’s good to know if there are very few products for a keyword. The rest of this information is extremely valuable when planning a strategy.

What’s next?

I’ve identified a few niches where I think I can be successful. My pending book is in one of these, and I’ll work on publishing a few more in the coming week. These books take a little more planning and work (they aren’t lined journals - I’m having to write a bit of content and do a little research). This also plays in my favor. Anything that’s a little bit harder will attract less competition. I’m hoping by employing this new strategy, my revenue number will leave $0 behind.

See y’all next week, hopefully with at least $1 on my ledger.

* For those keeping score, I actually ditched Book Bolt in favor of this, which will save me a few bucks in the long run. I found that I could do most of the valuable pieces of Book Bolt in Tangent Templates, and the keyword research in Publisher Rocket was much better.