This KDP research tool has got me excited
and that's unusual because I've been publishing books since 2013 and low
content books since 2018. Those are those things like log books, coloring books,
activity books, et cetera.
And during that time I've used and tried a lot of KDP tools that are
out there and it's very rare that I come across anything that's really new
until that is I received this email. Hi Paul,
just wanted to give you a heads up that Rocket has a major release coming this
week called the Historic Category Feature. Now I've got to admit,
historic category feature didn't really give me that buzz.
And so I actually put off having a look at what this feature was,
which was a big mistake because this has become my new
KDP niche research tool and we need to have a closer look
at it. What is this tool in question while it's Publisher Rocket?
Now this has been around for a while and in fact I bought Publisher Rocket back
in 2013 and this as well as Helium 10 have been
my two keyword research tools,
the two main tools that I use. However, they've updated this feature here,
which is the category search. Now with this tool,
it's been very useful for finding those categories in which to list your books.
You see normally on KDP you have this list you've got to go through and it
can be a real pain trying to find two categories that are relevant or
appropriate to your book. However,
a tool like this can speed up the process and we can see here we can just have a
look at all the different categories within a broad overall niche,
in this case children's books.
And so from this we can find a couple of categories in which to list our book
or more categories if you do decide you want to publish in more than just those
two basic categories. However,
things have changed quite significantly here.
And when I first had a look at this tool,
I just entered coloring to test things out and we've got all our lists of
categories here, which you would expect.
Then we've got our two columns here and this gives us the number of books you
need to sell per day to get in that number one position,
that number one ranking in that particular category and this column here to get
in the top 10. Now,
why would you want to get in that top position for a particular category? Well,
there's two reasons.
One is you can get that lovely orange Bestsellers badge and this gives you a
book that social proof. So if customers see a book with an orange badge,
they do tend to click on it and so you can possibly make more sales with it.
The other thing is, if you do rank high in a particular category,
it does give your book a bit of extra push up the rankings
overall on Amazon. But this is where things have changed. First of all,
we've got this column here which is large publisher percentage and this is the
percentage of books in the category that are from significantly sized
publishers. So for us independent publishers,
we want this figure to be as low as possible because those large publishers
have the big marketing budgets and so they can promote their books and give them
a better chance of ranking on Amazon and getting those sales.
So the lower this number the better. Then we have these two columns here.
The first one is insights. So if we click on this here,
it gives us that information that we've just seen on this top row,
but it gives us this other information, the average age of books within
particular category that are making significant sales.
The lower this number the better.
It means there's a decent number of younger books in that particular category.
So again, if we're just about to publish a book,
it means we've got a slightly better chance of getting our book in that
particular category or ranked highly in that particular category.
Then you've got this graph of sales of the top 30 best bestsellers.
And I found this useful just to see if there is any particular variations
throughout a year in a particular category. In this case,
we can see there's more sales in December,
which is what we would expect from coloring books.
We do have this category growth, which I didn't find it quite as much use,
but I guess it could be of use in some circumstances.
You may find there's a big rise in the number of sales or growth in a particular
category,
which may indicate certain books within a category might be coming popular.
So when I was looking at this, when I put in coloring,
I had a look at these lists and this particular category stood out for me,
for a number of reasons. One wasn't gonna take many sales per day,
only 11 books compared to these other figures and also the large publisher
percentage was low.
And the other thing that stood out for me was this was a fashion coloring
book niche, which I wasn't familiar with. And so I thought,
excellent,
this has come up with a new idea and possibly a good chance of getting a book
ranked high in the categories.
So I clicked on insights to get some more information.
The average age was lower than the previous one we've just looked at. So good,
potential maybe of getting a new book ranked high in that particular category.
This data here looks a bit strange and that is this big drop I think is
possibly more due to the data from Amazon than anything to
do with the sales. But we do get this increase in December,
which is what we would expect. And over here we get this category overview,
which just puts this data here into words.
But this is what I liked in terms of speeding things up.
And that is we could click on this link here and this takes us to the category
page on Amazon.
Now you could get to this category page manually similar to those
categories here on Amazon. You could just go and click through each one,
go through each category, can take a bit of time, a bit laborious,
but this takes us straight to that particular category.
And what I do is when I look at this page is a number of things.
One is I look for sub niches within this overall broad niche of fashion coloring
books.
And also because these books are ranking highly in this
category,
most of them are going to be highly optimized for their keywords or search terms
that Amazon customers use. So I'll be looking at Sub niches and also the
keywords they're using.
So straight away in these first couple of rows we can see here we've got fashion
coloring book girls, we've got black women fashion coloring book,
we've got this one here, dresses coloring book.
We can see the bestsellers ranks of these books.
Now you may be wondering why I've ignored this book here. Well,
it does screen to me potential issues with trademarks,
so I would ignore that completely.
So we've gone from broad niche down to some sub niche ideas
and some potential keywords.
So now we can do two potential things.
First thing is that we can go over to Amazon and put in one of these keywords or
sub niche search terms, and that is fashion coloring book.
And what I'm looking for are these keywords here or search terms here.
Because if I see a lot of these and know that there's a lot of people searching
for these types of books, Amazon is telling us what people are searching for,
then customers tend to click on these as well. So I'd put all these down in a
spreadsheet. I've also got a plugin install called AMZ Suggestion Expander,
which has also given us these other search terms that customers are searching
for as well.
And you can see some of these are those sub niches or keywords that we've just
looked at.
And so straightaway in a matter of minutes we've gone from a broad niche fashion
coloring book down to those sub niches,
down to those baskets of keywords we can now use to optimize
our books to hopefully give them a better chance of being found on Amazon.
And those are the first two steps I always take when creating books on Amazon,
niche research, keyword research. And then I go on to creating the books.
So this really speeds up the process. Now,
I did say there was two things we can do. The other thing is,
if we're in Publisher Rocket,
we may as well take advantage of its keyword research tool.
So if we go to home, go to keyword research, put in fashion coloring book,
hit go get em rocket,
we can see we've got this list here of keywords related to that main
search term. And again, we've got all these useful suggestions.
Put the beauty of Publisher Rocket,
similar to Helium 10 as we get this column here that we can't get by
doing free keyword research and that is the estimated number of
searches on Amazon per month for a particular search term.
And this is very useful. And in fact,
publisher Rocket helps us even more by giving us this competitive score,
which is basically a ratio of the number of Amazon searches per month
over the competition. And so the.
Lower the number, the better.
And straight away you can see we've got these here.
And what I would do if I was thinking about creating books in this particular
niche,
I would probably look at using fashion coloring books for girls as my main
keyword using that as the title of my book with the idea being that if I
can get some sales with this less competitive keyword,
my book will then start to rank for that more competitive keyword of
fashion coloring book. So to me,
this was quite a surprise and that's why it got me excited because personally
this is a game changer because I can now go from the broad
KDP niche research down to those sub niches and
collecting those baskets of keywords in a fraction of the time that it used to
take. Now if you're interested in checking out Publisher Rocket,
I wi leave a link to it down below in the description,
if you are new to this publishing game on Amazon,
then what I suggest doing next is checking out my book tutorial playlist here
where I run through all the steps of creating, researching,
and publishing books on Amazon. Thank you much for your time.
It is very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and until next time, and goodbye.