How to Find The Best Categories & Keywords
As a self-publisher, you are responsible for placing your book under the right categories. The wrong one will bury your book. But how do you find the best ones? The ones with interested buyers, but no too many competitors?
When a customer comes to Amazon to search for a book, they are met with a category system that Amazon has developed and keep adding new sub-categories to.
They look at buyer habits, and when a new trend occurs, they will create a new sub-category.
Amazon’s self-publishing platform, KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) will then look at the categories you chose and the keywords you selected to place your book into their external categories.
To do manual research, you must open an incognito window in your browser, so that your previous browsing data from Amazon does not affect the results.
If you live outside of the US, and your market is within the US, then change your delivery address to one with a US zip code.
Then type a keyword into Amazon’s search bar and see what results come up. Those reflect what users are searching for. And that means there will be some traffic—aka buyers—searching for those terms.
Next, look at the results you get. At the top left corner, you will see how many results Amazon has found for your query. The fewer the better, because that means lower competition
KDSPY uses its own algorithm to check Popularity, Potential, and Competition, and it shows the quality of each of these either with red, yellow or green lights.
Three green lights mean that if KDSPY is right, then you should publish in this category.
You will be able see how much money you can potentially make in this category as well based on an estimate.
Its strong side is finding profitable keywords.
You can either type in a keyword you think will fit your book and get alternative suggestions. Or you can search categories and even check competitors.
Publisher Rocket will show you how easy or difficult a keyword is by adding a number from 0 to 100 to the keyword. The closer to zero, the easier it will be to compete.
K-lytics Datasheets consist of Excel spreadsheets that you can either download and use in Excel. Or you can use them online within K-lytics’ membership area.
It lists a number of categories, depending on your membership level. And you can sort the spreadsheet or filter out things that you are not interested in.