If you are driven by passion first, then creating a series is especially important. You can turn a limited readership into a profitable business simply by offering each reader more content to purchase from you.
I love reading supernatural detective stories. Right now this is a very limited niche with less than ten authors on Amazon. Most people would look at that space and avoid it because there just isn’t enough meat on the bone. But the authors in that space sell a lot of books. I will read every book in one of those series simply because there is no alternative.
Some of the books that I read, I don't like very much. I don’t enjoy how the author writes, or the main characters are unpleasant, but I keep reading because I am locked into the series.
No matter your topic, goals or passion, creating a series of books is the foundation of financial success. Planning multiple books is the first step in the path to building your literary empire.
3
Finding Your Niche
You can write a book that you want to write and hope to find an audience, or you can make money, but you have to choose right now.
I work with a lot of coaching students and personally help them build their book strategy. Often they come to me with a superb idea but no research. They have a brilliant idea but no idea if anyone wants it.
Inventors make the same mistake when they create a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist.
When I was in high school, someone invented a very expensive radar system to help you park in your garage. It would beep if you were too close to the wall. There is a low-tech alternative solution to this problem.
Park your car correctly once and then hang a tennis ball on a string touching your windshield. Every time you park your car, drive until you hit the tennis ball and then stop. You can park without annoying beeping driving you crazy or spending hundreds of dollars on this invention.
You might have a brilliant idea, but if the audience doesn’t exist, nothing matters. You can write the greatest book in the world, but if nobody reads it, your message is lost.
I know it feels like I’ve been talking about this for ages, but this foundational lesson is critical to your long-term success. The way you start your journey will determine the ending. I want you to achieve massive financial success, write a bestseller, quit your job and then leave me a glowing review for this book. Unfortunately, to get you there I have to start with a little tough love.
At the beginning of this book, I offered you a free gift. I created additional training on converting your book into audiobook format. You just fill in your email address, and I send you the bonus material instantly.
If you aren’t sure about your topic and want a little feedback, just reply to that email. It goes directly to me, not an assistant halfway around the world. I’ll take a peek and help guide you down the path. I want you to succeed, and I’m happy to help guide you to your audience. You are not alone on this journey. This book is not a one-way conversation; if you talk to me, I will help you.
Amazon Search
The start of any project is research. The first place I like to research is on Amazon itself. There are some very particular tools that I use to help me with my research, but first I want to show you how to find your audience without spending a penny.
On Amazon, search for your topic inside the Kindle category. Just type “space marines” or “tinnitus” into the search box. We only want to search Kindle, because the data is better than looking at the entire books category.
Amazon tracks everything you do when you read a digital book. Amazon right now knows you are reading this page in my book. They know how fast you read, what time of day you read, and your favorite subjects.
Amazon gathers digital data in real-time. With physical books, Amazon only knows if you made the purchase. There is no data on your reading habits. If you are reading the paperback version of this book, then Amazon has no idea if you read the book or not.
Look at the ten most popular books on your potential topic. If Amazon ranks a book in the top 30,000, then it is a winner. I want to find five books in this range to ensure that it’s something people are interested in. When Amazon ranks a book in the top 30,000, I know that it’s making at least $100 a month on its own. That might not sound like a lot, but when you have twenty books in your series, it turns into a nice passive income stream.
Only your Kindle sales affect this number. Later on, I will show you how to multiply this revenue with physical sales, sales directly from your website, and affiliate sales.
I don’t want to get into a market where there isn’t enough money to go around. I performed the tinnitus search yesterday and noticed that the top book is selling one or two copies a week. Do I want to make ten bucks a month from a book? Not really.
Topics that are huge in other markets sometimes have no traction on Amazon. There are no great books on teaching kids to swim on Amazon. It’s an important topic, and as a father it’s close to my heart. I taught my daughter to swim, and I’m currently teaching my son. When I wanted to improve as a teacher, I went to Amazon first; I was curious to see if there was a market.
If you think for just a moment, you will not be surprised that this is a limited market. This niche is limited to parents who have children and a pool. Or parents with young children near a lake, river or ocean. The number of people who meet these conditions limits the size of the niche.
The second limitation is the format. Can you really teach a kid to swim from a book? Most people prefer using video for this type of training. You would do much better creating a swim-training DVD. That would sell a lot more than a book.
When you begin to analyze the top books under your keyword, you will notice their category ranks. If there is a category that closely matches your idea, you want to go to that category page. In my tinnitus research, I found that there are two highly relevant categories. There is a Kindle category just for hearing problems, and another one for audiology and speech pathology.
When I go to the audiology category, I notice that the books are very expensive. The top book is over $115. Audiology must be a textbook category. We have found an interesting category if you are a professional who wants to create a textbook. For most people, this category is not a good fit. Writing textbooks is a long and arduous project. That top book is over four hundred pages long, and filled with research and footnotes.
Additionally, none of the top books are about tinnitus. They are mostly about larger speech and communication issues. This category isn’t a good fit for my initial idea.
The hearing problems category is a much better fit for this concept. Several of the top books in this category are about tinnitus, so I know I’m now in the right place. Scrolling through, I notice that there are romance novels and nursing exam training books in here. When I see books that clearly don’t belong in a category, I know that someone is trying to manipulate Amazon to get a bestseller star. Inappropriate books invading a category is a red flag and the sign of a weak category. The best-selling books in the hearing problems category aren’t even related to the topic.
The top book in the entire category is ranked 37,127 on Amazon today. According to my tool, that book is making $54 a month, and I think that figure might be a little generous. Do I want to dominate a category where my best case scenario is ten bucks a week? I would have to write one hundred books at that level to generate a decent living.
When you find a topic, keyword or category where several books are in the top 30,000 on Amazon, you have a winner. When you don't, you have a loser.
Clickbank
Amazon is just the beginning of my research process. I want to know how the wider world views the topic as well. We must find out if this topic is popular and profitable in the direct response world.
Before I write a book, I think about building a business. I want to sell additional products, services and training to my customers. I want to meet all of their needs. One of the great ways to expand your offerings is to find
more expensive, but related, products to promote. Getting paid to recommend products is called affiliate marketing, and I’ll go into greater detail later in the book in the section on building a list, but for now I just want to see if there is a secondary market.
My preferred secondary market is called Clickbank. I can go through their marketplace to see if there are products related to my potential topics. There are statistics on pricing, how well the offer sells, and my potential commissions if I recommend a product. This information gives me a feel for the DEPTH of a market. Depth is critical when building a business.
For some markets, people buy a single product to fix a single problem and then they disappear. They never ask the author for help again. One of the greatest examples of this is in the dating and relationship space. The majority of the books for men are about starting a relationship. How to meet a woman, say hello and start a relationship.
The books for women are about relationship maintenance and growth. There are books on dating, engagement, marriage, kids and more.
If you sell a man a book and solve his problem, you will never see him ever again. He buys your book, learns how to meet women, finds a great girlfriend and forgets you ever existed. You fixed his problem, but now the relationship is over.
When you sell a relationship book to a woman, however, she takes the long view. Men view relationships as an event, but women view them as a journey. For this reason, you can sell a woman products that help her throughout the course of the relationship. Relationship advice for women is a great market because there is great depth.
When I’m looking at Clickbank, I want to see more than just depth of market. I also want to see the sales pages for similar products. If you have a book about dog training, take a look at the most popular dog training courses. What promises do they make on the sales page? What problems do they fix? What information does this course include?
I will use the answers to these questions in my book and on my Amazon listing page. This information is gold that most people ignore. If a promise can sell a fifty-dollar book, it can certainly sell a three-dollar one.
Udemy
Udemy is another platform that is growing right now. This platform only sells video courses. They have a little affiliate program, but I’m more interested in their data.
Search for your topic and look at the top listings. Most courses on Udemy are now between ten and twenty dollars, which is closer to the price point of your potential book.
The number of people who purchased each course, the sales message, the number of reviews, the content of every single review and the course table of contents are all listed on the course page. If nobody is buying the course or the reviews are bad, that is a red flag.
When you find a course with good traction and reviews, you know that your topic has legs. Your new market has secondary products at low and medium price points. Therefore this is a market where you can build an entire business. Save the links to any courses that fit your criteria to use later in the second research phase.
Google
Next, you want to expand your search beyond specific marketplaces. Instead of just looking at products and sales channels, it’s time to find where your audience lives. Search your key terms in multiple search engines to get a wider perspective of the types of websites that rise to the top.
You are looking for blogs, forums, and websites that are specifically about your space. A forum about hearing is good, but a forum about tinnitus is even better. Once you find a few sites that are close to your topic, check their rankings in Alexa. This tool tracks the popularity of websites and ranks them. You are looking to see how much traction a topic has. If the most popular blog in the world has no traffic, that is a big red flag. If the forum has no traffic and very few posts, that is another red flag.
Take the time to look at what people in your new audience are discussing. The most popular blog posts and forum topics reveal what your audience worries about the most. Save the links to these sites; you are going to use them again in the book creation process.
Forums are an invaluable resource. People ask the very questions that your book needs to answer. Your audience tells you exactly what they need to hear before you write the first word. The more you understand your audience, the easier it is to satisfy them.
This research applies to fiction as much as non-fiction. Readers in forums share what they like and don’t like about every book they read. It’s so helpful to get a review before you write your book. You can avoid pitfalls that you didn’t even know were there!
Inventing the Wheel
Being the first person with a new idea is exciting. When I have an idea that nobody else is pursuing, my first thought is that I’m a genius, and I thought of something before anyone else. But just maybe it’s an idea with no competition because nobody cares about it.
I have no interest in re-inventing the wheel; I would rather improve it. I was talking to someone on my team yesterday, who was shocked that I would put out a book in a market with competition. That’s what I want. I want to be in a space that I know is working.
I am completely aware that there are other books on Amazon about how to publish books on Amazon. There are probably hundreds of them by now. That tells me it’s a good topic. A few people are doing really well, and many others that aren’t selling anything.
I performed deep research, as I will show you later in this book. As long as my book is high quality and works, there is room in the market for me. This guide is the exact process I have used to become a bestseller over thirty times in a row. I have taught it to other clients and students in the past. I know that my system works. I know that if you take action, you will achieve the success you desire.
People are always reading more books. I have read hundreds of books on space marines, and I will probably read thousands more in my lifetime. The market is not finite. Don’t worry about competition. Focus on creating the best product you can and you will rise to the top in your space.
4
Tools of the Trade - Research
I am an affiliate for some of the products and services that I will mention in this book. They pay me a percentage of each sale as a thank-you for recommending them if you use my link. You are free to do a Google search for each tool to bypass my commission if you so choose.
With each tool, I will show you a free alternative first. I have already taught you how to research a topic without spending a penny, but now I’m going to show you the tools that I use to speed up that process.
There is not a single tool or technique in this book that I don’t use for my projects. Everything in this book is something that I have used in the last seven days, and usually in the past 24 hours. Don’t feel obligated to use any of my links, but if you choose to, I greatly appreciate it. When you are building your business, much of your income will be generated by similar links. You will want your audience to click them. Using my links is an excellent way to build up some great karma. ;)
KDP Rocket
KDP Rocket is a new tool, and it’s pretty secret. I checked the sales stats, and I think less than fifty people in the world are using it. One of my students pointed this tool out to me, and I appreciate that. KDP Rocket works as a standalone search tool.
Enter your search term and the software generates unique variations, as well as Google traffic, Amazon traffic, and some profitability calculations. This software is hands-down the best Amazon keyword tool on the market. Every other tool only uses the Amazon suggestion box. This tool will generate three or four times more keywords that you didn’t even consider.
The tool can quickly tell me if a market or keyword has any traction. When I find some keywords or topics that give me a good feeling, I want to dig into Amazon more deeply.
The one danger with using tools or doing quick research is false positives, which can happen when searching manually as well.
A false positive is where you enter a keyword, and only the top book is making a killing
. This outlier will throw off all of your averages. KDP Rocket looks at the top twenty results of a search, estimates the total revenue of all twenty books combined and then divides that number by twenty. What you have there is the average income from a book in the top twenty.
Normally this method is fine, but if the top book is making ten grand a month and the next nineteen are making zero, the software will tell you that the average profit for the keyword is $500 a month. While technically accurate, this information doesn’t help when you create a book that is #2 in the keyword and makes three dollars a month.
The second false positive is a dead keyword. No matter what term you type into Amazon, it will generate results. It never says “nothing here.” Sometimes I come up with a keyword that has loads of sales, but when I dig deeper, I learn that nobody actually uses that term. It’s just similar to a real term.
With KDP Rocket, you can click on “analyze” to see a detailed breakdown of the top twenty books. It’s all housed within the external tool so that you can scan stats very quickly. You can quickly check to see if all of the books are making money or if there is just one outlier messing up the curve.
I wholeheartedly recommend using KDP Rocket as your starting point; it’s one of the most powerful tools in your research arsenal. No other tool or manual technique generates as many unique keywords.
KDspy
I have been using KDSpy for a very long time now. This tool is a browser plugin. When I run a search within Amazon, I can click on this tool to get data faster. It shows me each book's ranking, price and other stats without me having to look at each book's listing page manually. This tool saves me time.
Breaking Orbit: How to Write, Publish and Launch Your First Bestseller on Amazon Without a Mailing List, Blog or Social Media Following (Serve No Master Book 4) Page 2