Publishing non-fiction in the Kindle marketplace is a highly lucrative business model. It’s also much more straightforward than other methods of generating an income online.
With Kindle Publishing, there are only about 4 steps you need to follow:
- Discover a profitable topic
- Write, edit, and format the book
- Publish your masterpiece in the Kindle marketplace
- Actively market your book and try to get as many reviews as possible
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. This is a breeze when compared to business models such as Amazon FBA, infoproduct creation, dropshipping, etc.
That said, there are a few crucial fundamentals that you absolutely must get right for your book to be a winner.
There’s nothing worse than writing a book that ends up languishing on the digital shelves of Amazon and the only copy you sell is to your mom – and you bought it for her.
To avoid being in this scenario, you must be able to spot a profitable non-fiction niche/topic and validate your idea before going ahead and writing the book.
In this article, you’ll be shown a step-by-step method that works almost all the time. Follow it to the letter and you’ll skyrocket your chances of publishing a book that is eagerly purchased and devoured by a hungry group of readers.
Step #1: You’ll need to get 3 ‘tools’
DS Amazon Quickview
The first tool is the DS Amazon Quickview Chrome extension. This is a free extension that works in the Google Chrome browser. In fact, we highly recommend doing all your research in Chrome, just to keep things neat and streamlined.
You can get the DS Amazon Quickview extension here
KDSPY
This tool is invaluable in helping us determine the profitability of a topic.
KDSPY will give you an estimate of how many copies of a book is selling every month, the monthly revenue, the number of reviews, etc.
This is priceless information that we’ll need to ascertain if a topic is worth writing about… or not.
While the data it provides is nowhere as detailed as what Publisher Rocket (below) will give you, it still has the key information that we’ll need to validate our idea.
The KDSPY tool is a one-time fee and extremely simple to use. Just like the Quickview extension, after purchase, you’ll get access to a link and can add KDSPY as another extension on your toolbar.
You can get KDSPY here.
Publisher Rocket (optional)
If you’re serious about publishing and building a solid business in the Kindle marketplace, Publisher Rocket is a MUST-HAVE tool.
With this tool, you’ll be able to:
- Spot the top-selling books for a keyword, so you can beat them eventually
- Discover how many sales you need to be #1 in your category
- Find out what words people search for on Amazon
- Estimate how often people search for each keyword
- See how many books are competing for each keyword
- Discover specific book categories that suit your book
- Identify categories that help sell more books
- Learn how many sales get you to #1 or the top 10
- Check what percent of a category is in Kindle Unlimited or by a Big Publisher
These features are just a few of the many that Publisher Rocket provides. Having this tool will speed up your research process and make it more accurate.
You can get Publisher Rocket here.
Next…
Once you have these tools, add the extensions to your browser. Make sure you enable the extensions to work in incognito.
For this article, you’ll only be shown how to use KDSPY since it’s the more affordable option.
Whatever you do with KDSPY can be done with Publisher Rocket. So choose the tool you prefer and familiarize yourself with it.
Now let’s begin!
Step #2: Visit the ‘Books’ category on Amazon in incognito mode
Click here to open the ‘Books’ category…
Scroll down until you see the list of book categories.
There are 3 things to bear in mind when choosing a category:
- Not all categories are made equal. Some are ripe with opportunity to profit while others don’t have too many hungry buyers.
- When choosing a niche, you’ll want to avoid categories that can cause issues later when (or if) you choose to run Amazon ads. Topics such as drugs, marijuana, politics, sex, etc.
- Topics such as architecture, recipe books, travel, art, photography, etc. are best avoided because of the high cost of color printing, which will eat into your profit margins.
With these in mind, pick a category that interests you. Don’t panic that we’re looking in the ‘books’ category rather than the Kindle store. Trust the process.
In this example, we’ll pick the ‘Crafts, Hobbies and Home’ category here.
Once we click on the category page, on the left, you’ll see many sub-categories related to the main category.
The best way to find topics that are in high demand but have lower competition will be to niche down.
So we’ll click on the ‘Gardening & Landscape Design’ sub-category…
Even after this, you’ll find more sub-categories. Let’s choose the ‘Vegetables’ sub-category. This is what we’ll see…
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on ‘See all results’…
The next page will show you all the books that are selling in this category. If you study the listings below, you’ll see that we’ve circled the ranking of the books below.
You’re seeing these numbers displayed in the listings because you have the DS Amazon Quickview extension.
If you didn’t have it, you’d have to open each listing manually, scroll down to the bottom of the page and find the BSR.
So the extension makes it convenient for you. That’s why we set it up.
This is known as the BSR… Best Seller Ranking. Anything 100,000 and below is excellent. Both the books above are hot sellers and are selling like hot cakes.
You’re probably wondering how many copies are being sold every month… and how much revenue the author is generating.
Once you click on the icon, this is what you’ll see…
KDSPY tells us that the first book is selling 1,764 copies a month and generating an estimated monthly revenue of $23,444.
The second book (Raised Bed Gardening) sells 1,052 copies monthly and generates an estimated monthly revenue of $9,468.
These are highly profitable books!
By now, you’re probably realizing that Kindle publishing can be highly lucrative if you do it right.
In fact, you might even be tempted to rush off and create books on the topics we just showed you….
“Hold your horses!”
Writing books on these topics might not be the best option for you. There are several reasons for this…
- The books in the example above are probably written by authority figures in the niche.
- They may have been selling for quite a while. Publisher Rocket will tell you the age of the books.
- Each book has thousands of reviews!
The competition is stiff.
You could have a book on this topic that’s even better than the top sellers in this category and you’d still struggle to gain traction and sales.
One of the keys to writing a profitable book is to find a topic where the books satisfy the criteria below:
- 200 reviews or less
- Written by non-authority figures
- Generating $400-$500 a month
Most importantly, the topic should have 3 – 4 books in this niche that meet the criteria above.
This will prove that the topic is profitable and there’s a relatively level playing field for you to compete in.
So far, we’ve deduced that the vegetable gardening niche is profitable. But since the topic above is highly competitive, we’ll either have to niche down further or find another topic to write about.
Time for more research!
Step #3: Time to niche down.
We’ll go to ChatGPT and enter this prompt, “I need you to niche down this topic [vegetable gardening] into 20 sub-niches. Table format: 2 columns. Bullet point format.”
Now we have a list of sub-topics which are keywords that we can research.
From the image above, right at the top of the list is ‘container gardening.’ So we’ll do a search on Amazon for ‘container gardening vegetables.’
And we’ll click on the KDSPY icon again… and this is what we’ll see…
We’ve highlighted the books that meet our criteria or come close. While the criteria are not set in stone, the books must come close to meeting it.
And the books highlighted above do.
This is what we’ve done so far…
We found a profitable category on Amazon.
We then analyzed the book listings with KDSPY.
Since the top categories were too competitive, we asked ChatGPT to niche down the topic into sub-topics.
From here, we searched for each sub-topic (keyword) on Amazon and ran KDSPY to see if there were 3 – 4 books in the sub-category which met our criteria.
In this case, the very first sub-topic, ‘container gardening,’ met our criteria.
It’s safe to say that writing a book on this topic has a very high chance of being profitable. Of course, the book title, description, cover, etc. will matter too.
However, finding the right topic to write a book about is the MOST IMPORTANT part of the process.
Get this wrong and it’ll be extremely difficult to profit with your book.
Conclusion
Follow the steps in this article to the letter. Take your time with the research and ensure that the topic you choose meets the criteria.
It’s easy to get carried away with a topic that you’re passionate about even if it doesn’t meet the stated requirements. So focus on the details and adhere to the instructions laid out above.
Your book’s profitability is decided by the topic you pick. Choose wisely and start publishing books that read well and earn well.