If you're looking to make money online,
self publishing KDP books on Amazon,
then I found a very interesting niche for you.
That's making a decent amount in profits, relatively easy to create,
and the competition isn't too high also.
So if you are looking to create this type of a business or add to books that
you're already publishing, then follow along. Now,
if you've not been to this channel before then welcome my name's Paul Marles,
and I do videos on how to make it, keep it and grow it.
And that's your money I'm talking about. If you do like videos like that,
then please do give it a thumbs up,
hit the subscribe button and smash that notification bell to receive
notification of when I produce more videos like this.
So what is this niche that I found? Well,
it's the fashion design sketchbook niche.
I suppose it's almost a sub-niche of the overall sketchbook
niche. And it's making decent profits. Now,
what I'm going to do in this video is basically split it into three broad areas.
First of all,
the research that I do when I'm looking at a niche and show you how I go about
it and just discuss the market,
have a look at how much money some of the books we're making.
Then I'm going to show you some resources to enable you to create the interiors
and the covers for these books and give you some inspiration. And lastly,
we're going to look at the all important keywords that are vital for
getting traffic to your books.
And I've got a gift for you at the end of the video as well,
if you last that long. Now,
what I normally do when I'm researching a niche is I go over to Google trends
and have a quick look to see if the demand varies throughout the year.
And this seems pretty constant.
I'm just having a look here at any related search queries. Well,
it's just got fashion design sketchbook.
Then I had a look at how big the possible market could be.
Well in the US there's 350 fashion design schools,
has 150 colleges teach fashion design,
and there's approximately 2.2 million people in the US
employed in this sort of fashion design profession.
So there's a potential demand there. Now, after looking at some of these books,
there's also a big market for these types of books for kids.
So it's a good niche in that it appeals to both adults and kids and
those that are doing it recreationally,
and those that are doing it as part of their profession, part of their job.
So let's head over to Amazon and have a look at some of these books.
So I've just put in the general search term fashion sketchbook.
And what I'm looking for are two main things. One,
the number of search results for a niche or a particular keyword and
how well the books are selling.
So I'm looking at two main bits of data. Now here,
you can see we've got 1000 results for the keyword fashion
sketchbook, and that's important because that's the first thing I'm looking at.
Now,
I found from my experience that if a keyword has
1000 searches or less,
then it's relatively easy to rank that book on the first page of Amazon,
which is where you want to be to get your traffic any higher than that and it
can be a bit more difficult unless you're looking at running Amazon ads on your
books.
The next thing I'm looking at is how well the books are selling in a particular
niche. And for that, I look at the best sellers ranks, the lower, the better,
means more books are being sold.
And what I'm looking for are three or more books on the first page that have
best sellers ranks of 300,000 or less, because it means they're making sales.
And it means it's worthwhile, therefore, you know,
exploring this niche and going ahead and creating some of these types of books.
So if we scroll down and have a look at some of the books,
well we've got these two books here that are both running ads,
and they've got best sellers ranks of less than 300,000.
We've got this book here.
It has a little best sellers badge and has a best sellers rank of
17,925. Now,
if we hover over,
it will tell us whether this book is independently published or not.
If it says independently published, it means it's published on KDP.
So that just gives us a bit more information. So that's selling very well.
If we look down here, we've got another one bestsellers rank of 32,000,
but we've got this one here, which is KDP book bestsellers rank of 240,000.
And this one here with a best sales rank of 131,000.
So that meets the criteria. So books are selling in this niche.
Now let's get an idea of how much one of these books is actually making.
So if we go to this one that was a best seller and then go across to the book
sales calculator at tckpublishing.com.
Now this calculator gives us an idea. It's not exact figures.
I get people in comments saying, oh, it's incorrect. It's too high.
It's too low. It's just gives us an idea.
Now I tend to find this calculator actually under reports the number of
books that have been sold for a particular best sellers rank.
So you could take the figures that I'm about to show you as being a bit higher
in reality. But let's take these figures. So we can see here,
it's selling between 228 to 450 books a
month, which, if we then go to over to tangent templates,
put in the page count and the list price,
we can see it's making approximate royalty of $3.82 per book,
which means I'm the publisher of this book is making somewhere between
$850 to $1,700 per month. Now, again,
that's just approximate figures. And from my experience,
it's probably going to be a little bit higher than that,
but let's just take that as a broad guide.
Which I think you'll agree is pretty good. Now,
how easy or how hard are these books to create? Well,
if we go back to Amazon and just click on the look inside feature,
we can see that all the pages have these outlines of mannequins in
various poses that people can draw over and create
various clothing designs, fashion designs, uh,
over those particular images. So looks pretty easy to create.
Now,
there are some books that I've looked at that are aimed more to those
that are doing this maybe as a career or studying it in college that have a bit
more information on the page, but I'll show you an example of that in a moment.
So now what we want is to look up where we can get ideas for the
covers, get graphics for the covers and graphics for the interiors. Now,
one of my most popular resources I use and that I'm subscribed to is create
space. They sell interiors, graphics,
and fonts and have a huge selection.
But the interiors are one of the biggest pluses of this site.
So if we go over to Creative Fabrica and we've got these interiors here,
not a huge number, but a starting point. Now, if I click on this one here,
we can see that it does come in PDF form,
ready to upload or in vector format,
which is the Adobe Illustrator files, which is useful. Now,
what I did is went ahead and downloaded this particular file to have a
closer look at it. And I've opened it up in Affinity Designer,
and we can see, this is what a page looks like.
And these are the ones that are probably more aimed at the students and
those that are working in this particular profession,
because not only does it allow people to do the clothing designs,
but it also allows fashion designers to put in details here about different
colors, patterns, materials. Now,
the advantage of having the vector format available is that you
can make modifications to the file. Now,
this could be important because you can imagine if lots of people go ahead,
decide to produce these types of sketchbooks and upload to Amazon and all use
the same interior.
There could be issues with duplicate content penalties,
because Amazon doesn't like lots of books with the same
interiors, particularly some types of low content book interiors,
but especially things like coloring books and puzzle books.
So what I would normally do and what I do do in this situation,
and this is advantage of having the vector format,
is that you can open up the files in something like Adobe IllustratorAffinity
Designer, Inkscape, Gravit Designer and make changes to the interior.
Now, another common site that I use is vecteezy.com that have vector
images. And I went ahead and put in fashion sketchbook,
and we've got these images here.
All of these could be used and manipulated,
again in something like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer to create images
for the interior. But there's also some images here such as this,
which would look good on the, on the cover of a book.
So you've got images there to create attractive covers,
which is important if you're going to get conversions and make sales.
Another site is fiverr.com. And again, I put in fashion sketchbook.
Now there are people here that are selling interiors, but to be honest,
I think a lot of these are actually being sold, probably by the same designer,
on Creative Fabrica, which is good.
This person's creating a design and selling it on multiple platforms.
And this looked interesting,
and this is someone who will draw original fashion design
images,
which would be great to use again in black and white form inside your
sketchbook or on the cover.
So you'd have something completely original.
So now we come onto the all important keywords and why are keywords
important. Well,
these are the things that customers type into the search bar on Amazon.
And when they do that and click enter, products will appear.
So what you want to happen is your books to appear when someone
puts in that particular keyword.
Now different keywords will have different search results,
so different amounts of competition. And also when I do a search for keywords,
as we can see here, we've got this information in the top left hand corner,
which gives us an idea of the Google search numbers per month for a particular
keyword.
And this is from a plugin that I've got installed called Keywords Everywhere.
Now it does cost $10 for a hundred thousand credits,
but it does give that information, which is not vital,
but can be useful if you're trying to decide between a couple of different
keywords.
Because if a particular keyword does have a lot of searches on
Google per month, and that just gives that keyword a bit of extra strength.
So what I normally do is I would type in a keyword like this,
fashion sketchbook,
and you will notice all these suggestions come up from Amazon.
Now these are important because Amazon is basically telling us what customers
are searching for.
And also when customers do their searches,
these suggestions will pop up and customers will tend to suggest
will tend to click on these particular keywords.
So it's a double bonus. If you like,
Amazon's telling us what people are searching for.
And these are keywords that people will click on.
So what I normally do is open up a blank spreadsheet and start to make a
list of these keywords.
And I'll take each one of those keywords in the suggestion box,
put that into the search bar,
look at the number of search results for that particular keyword.
And I'll also look to see if there are any Google searches per month for that
particular keyword.
And I'll build up a whole list on the spreadsheet.
And as you,
but in these keywords more will start to appear and you
can end up with quite a large list of keywords,
but very useful keywords with the number of Amazon search results.
So giving you an idea of the competition and typically if you're starting
out or not intending on running Amazon ads it is often and beneficial just to go
for those keywords with lower search results, just to give you a book,
a better chance of appearing in the Amazon search results.
Now I've also got another plugin installed called AMZ Suggestion Expander,
which also will give these extra keywords here on the
right-hand side. And sometimes you can get quite a lot of these keywords.
And again, these are the keywords that have been searched for on Amazon.
So those can also go into the spreadsheet. Now, as you can imagine,
this can take some time and for big niches,
it can take quite a number of hours, three, four,
five hours to build your keywords then take each one and put it into the
Amazon search bar. Now I've done this already for this particular niche,
and I've got all these keywords here.
And I found 40 relevant keywords with quite a few in
there with low numbers of search results. Now,
what I did find in this list was that there were some keywords with really high
numbers of search results. And I think the reason for that is,
is because let's take for an example, a fashion sketchbook for designers,
which has got 10,000 search results.
If you then go through the actual search results themselves,
go through to page two, three, four, et cetera,
you find that a lot of the results aren't actually fashion
related, but it brings up a lot of the books from the general sketchbook niche.
So although some of these keywords are quite high,
I would probably tend to maybe target these as your
secondary keywords, those keywords that you put in the subtitle.
I'd still go for a main keyword,
the title of your book as a low search results keyword,
but maybe put one of these or two of these higher competition keywords in the
subtitles of your books.
Then what you can do is when you look through this list,
you can take words from some of these other keywords.
So you could have like girls, kids, teens, men, stencils,
adults, beginners, designers,
and put those into your seven keyword boxes.
So then you're covering more bases with that. But as you can see here,
I've done all the work for you.
And what I've done is uploaded this list of keywords in .CSV,
.PDF, and,
Excel format onto my Gumroad shop,
which I leave a link to in the description below.
And these keywords are absolutely free. They're free to download.
So go ahead and get them from there,
which will give you a kickstart in producing your own books.
Now using keywords to sell books is very important,
and it's very important that you know where to place these keywords.
And if you want to learn how I do it, then watch this video next,
where I show you my complete process. Hope you found the video useful.
Thank you very much for your time. It's very much appreciated.
And until next time, goodbye.