- Do you wanna know how to self-publish a book,
but not really sure where to start?
Well in today's video we're gonna start it off
with the best first step,
and that's gonna be of course Amazon KDP niche research.
Stay tuned to today's video.
(cymbals clang)
Hey, I'm Dale L. Roberts best-selling author,
as well as a self-publishing advocate
who wants to show you how to publish books that sell.
If you want that too, make sure you click the subscribe,
ring the bell notification icon, and switch it to All,
so that way you don't miss a single one of these videos.
This is the beginning of a whole new series about
how to self-publish a book,
and I actually got with the fine folks over at Fiverr,
to put together this series, so a big thank you to them,
and I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about them,
and later into the video.
The reason for the series, is I wanna take you from idea,
to writing, to editing, to formatting,
to finally publishing and beyond,
but the first most crucial step when it comes to publishing,
is going to be actually researching
what you're getting into.
You need to find good keywords, and niches,
things that are going to, of course,
get you more discovered,
and get it to where readers are willing to buy your work,
because it's just one thing for you to sit down,
and try to say, write out something,
and then just publish it out there, and hope for the best,
but what I wanna do is show you
how to find the demand first,
and then provide that demand.
Get it to where someone has a problem,
you've got the solution,
and so that's how we're gonna find what we need,
when it comes to the right keywords,
and the right niches.
The very first step you've gotta do
is identify your target audience.
Know who you're writing for,
because if you don't figure out who it is,
or what's ailing them,
or why they're gonna buy your book in the first place,
then you're really just writing it for nobody,
and honestly if you're just doing this for the craft,
you may wanna skip this video,
but if you really want to make a substantial living
at writing and publishing books,
then you really have to identify your target audience.
And, I think I heard it once said,
that if you try to write for everyone,
you write for no one, in the process.
So get good on who your audience is.
Compile a list of common keyword phrases.
Okay, so now that we've identified your target audience,
we got to be starting to think about
how are they searching for your content?
So you've gotta put yourself into their shoes.
Be in the driver's seat,
and think about what are some of the ways
that they're looking up for your particular type of work.
Now, don't hold back on this one,
you can do an entire notebook full
of keyword phrases if you wish,
or just typing it out on MS Word is perfectly fine,
but you're gonna wanna keep typing them out
just as quickly as you can.
I will sometimes sit down and brainstorm
about 30 minutes before I go ahead and call it quits,
and then start to do even more research.
Our very next place that we're gonna wanna visit,
is going to be on Amazon,
because now we're gonna see if some of these keyword phrases
are actually searchable on the Amazon Marketplace.
There are three things we wanna focus on,
and that's going to be how many products
come up in a search query?
What's the average rank of products
on the first page placement?
And, we also wanna check the top 10 best seller list,
for some of the books that are performing well.
Now here's a little bit of a tip, it's gonna help you out,
it doesn't cost a dime,
get yourself loaded up with an extension for your browser
called DS Amazon Quick View.
Because it's going to show you in a snapshot,
what their Amazon bestseller rank,
because we wanna make sure that the ranks are good,
that way we know, okay this keyword,
or this niche is worthwhile.
You're probably wondering what's going
to be a good ranking when it comes to Amazon,
and generally speaking I like to see a rank
of anywhere between 10,000, to 100,000.
If it's beyond 100,000, then chances are likely
there's just not enough demand for this given keyword,
or this niche.
If you get something that's a little bit lower
than 10,000 that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that,
but just know that it's gonna be super competitive.
I find that if I get a good keyword,
and a niche between 10,000 and 100,000,
as far as the best seller rank,
I'm on to a pretty good niche
that has a right amount of demand,
but not too much competition.
Identify winning keywords.
Okay, remember how I told you to get DS Amazon Quick View?
You're gonna get it all loaded up,
and make sure that it is enabled for incognito mode.
You're gonna end up going I think,
into settings inside your browser,
you're gonna find your extensions,
soon as you get into the extensions,
you're gonna enable it for incognito mode.
And now what we're gonna do,
is we're gonna go into your browser,
and go into incognito mode,
and visit the Amazon Kindle Store, or the Bookstore.
I generally speak and go over towards the Kindle Store
for most of my research,
when it comes to getting keywords, and niches.
Here's a formula for you to kind of bear in mind.
What we really want to find is good keywords,
that are going to be something we're gonna wanna hang on to.
So the formula includes products, plus average rank,
equals relevant keywords.
So I wanna see how many products
are going to be pulled up in a search query,
and the next thing is,
what is the first page placement looking like?
What's the average rank?
So I'm gonna see each one of those products,
and you can kind of just, you know,
figure it out in your head when it comes to, you know,
what's the average rank between them,
if you feel really fastidious,
you can always just take all 16 of the ranks
on the first page, and write them all down,
and then divide it by 16 to get the average rank.
Now, full disclosure, I'm gonna say this,
I'm a bit of a cheater,
I very rarely do this old-fashioned method,
I actually have a software that's called Publisher Rocket,
and publisher rocket gets all that stuff done
for me within seconds, and I can just go through,
and get as many keywords as I want to.
So, sometimes my list of keywords can be way shorter,
and I just jump over to Publisher Rocket,
and it just pops up everything that I need.
Now it's time to narrow down the selection.
So what you did was, you're going through,
you had your keywords, all right that list,
and you're gonna go through, and you're gonna figure out,
okay are these keywords worthwhile,
no, that one's not good, yes this one's good.
Now we've narrowed down the selection,
we got to narrow it down even more.
I'm gonna put it in order of importance.
I'm gonna put it in order of priority,
you're gonna have to pick favorites,
and figure out, okay,
this seems what I'm gonna be most likely writing about,
what I'm gonna be polishing about.
Get those ones kind of, you know, narrowed down,
and I like to find one, to two really good keywords.
For nonfiction, most importantly,
I'll try to load up the title,
and/or the subtitle with a good keyword of some sort.
Now it's gonna be a little bit more difficult
if you're doing fiction writing.
You know, from time to time,
you're just going to have to name it what it's going to be,
and not worry about having a key word inside the title,
for a fiction book.
Now, so the other key words that we have on there,
we're gonna have to pick favorites again,
and what we're gonna do is narrow it down
to seven good back end keywords.
Now these back end keywords are gonna be used later on,
when we get ready to publish.
I want you to think about these keywords,
as the best identifier of what your content's going to be.
typically what I like to do,
is I try to find any keyword that has some type of overlap,
and I use this quite a bit, I'm gonna use it again here,
you can find a root keyword like workout,
but if you were to search up, you can find an autosuggest,
it might say workout plan.
If you were to type in say home, and then workout,
it might put up home workout for men,
or it could say home workout plan for women,
so I try to find some keywords that have overlap in them,
and then what I'm gonna do is,
I'm gonna build what's called a keyword stem.
And, what it's gonna do is, it's gonna create this like,
super keyword, a long-tail keyword,
that we're going to use inside the back end,
and we don't want it to be any longer than 50 characters,
and that's including spaces as well,
because we're gonna end up using that later on,
when we go to publish our book.
We've got seven slots,
I like to reserve one to three of them,
for some real doozies,
some keywords that have some punch to them,
ones that you say okay this is precisely
what my books about.
Sometimes you gotta kinda take a bit of a gamble,
but I say one to three of your keyword phrases,
for the seven back end keywords,
should be an exact match.
In other words, we're not gonna stem it at all.
We're not gonna be putting in other keywords with it,
it's just gonna be one by itself.
Don't utilize your title or subtitle keywords,
it's already inside the title, the subtitle,
it's just redundant if you put it
in your seven back end keywords.
Again, if you don't know what I'm saying yet,
we're gonna be talking more about this
in the publishing process later on in the series.
Okay, I've got one more vital step,
I'm gonna need you to stick around,
I'm gonna tell you why I didn't choose my own name
for this next publication.
That's right, we're gonna be publishing and writing a book,
but I'm not gonna use my name, and I'll tell you why,
as soon as they tell you a little bit more
about our exclusive sponsors.
All of this has been put together with the team of Fiverr,
and we're gonna be showing you some really awesome features
that they have, part of their services,
this includes the Fiverr book, and e-book store.
It's the ultimate home for developing, perfecting,
and publishing book-length content.
Fiverr's all-in-one platform provides everything you need,
to go from concept, to finished and packaged book,
that's what we're shooting for in this whole series here.
The services in the store follow the logical order,
of the book's life cycle,
so they're taking you from A, to B, to C,
and everything and beyond.
You can actually see it for yourself if you head over
to dalelinks.com/fiverr, that's F-I-V-E-R-R.
And now comes the author name.
Now if you happen to be writing your own work,
chances are very likely,
you're just gonna probably attach your name.
But for the work that I'm gonna be doing,
I'm gonna talk a little bit about in the next video,
I'm actually not gonna use my own name.
You're gonna find out really why later on,
but for right now, I don't wanna muddy up my own name
of Dale L. Roberts, since it's already a fitness brand,
and something involved in self-publishing,
because the content I'm putting together
is going to be a little bit different,
in the nonfiction realm.
So that's one tip I would say, if you're an author,
don't muddy up your brand with numerous niches.
You want to make sure you niche down, and stick to it.
You can only imagine how confused you'd be,
if you came to this channel expecting to learn
a little bit about self-publishing,
and then I start to show you how to do doilies.
I mean that just wouldn't make sense.
So here's how I choose a pen name.
Now you're gonna wanna make sure you're very diligent,
this is not a step you wanna skip over,
and try to guess your way through,
because you could accidentally try to use
somebody else's name,
and that can put you in hot water with whatever
distribution platform you plan to use, including KDP.
What I try to do is, I think about,
okay, my target audience, what's gonna be their age,
who's going to be reading this?
And from that point I start to think about,
what are some common names around there?
Because how are they gonna be able to identify
with the author, if they've got a name that's just,
it's, it doesn't make sense, they can't identify with it.
So I think about the age range.
So for this particular book that I'm putting together,
I thought to myself, okay what's a good contemporary name?
Something that is going to be someone,
in the say their twenties, and so all I did was,
I looked up popular names of the 2000s,
and I was able to pull up a name here,
and I'm gonna tell you the name eventually,
and then also, I was just, I found myself stumped,
because I took this number one name,
and I tried to put last name, after last name,
after last name, and what I did was,
I got onto Google, I type in the word author,
and then the first name, and then I put the last name,
and I do a search,
and of course if it pulls up an author, then I kinda go,
"Nope, that's not an author name that I want to get."
If you find that it passes the Google test,
you then wanna take that specific author name,
and go over to Amazon and try to search for it.
If you don't see anything there, you might be good to go.
But I was stumped on the last name,
so I ended up going over to the fine folks of Reedsy,
they actually have a pen name generator,
and you can just put in any letter,
or name that you want in there,
and it'll generate one for you,
and after a few tries,
I finally landed on a last name
that worked out really well for my pen name.
If you want to find out that pen name,
you actually have to stay tuned to this channel,
because I will share more about the whole process,
in fact, I'm gonna talk about the very next video
that's going to be coming up, about outlining,
and writing when you're pressed for time.
I know I'm pressed for time.
You're gonna see me in the next video
once it's available, see you then.