Is KDP saturated.
Are there no longer any opportunities to self publish on the KDP
platform in those very competitive or saturated niches
anymore? Well, one publisher doesn't think so and she, well I think it's a she,
is crushing it to the tune of making between $8,000 to $15,000 a
month in a very competitive.
Niche with.
One of her bestselling books only published within the last three months.
So we're going to take a closer look on how she did it to get some
insights, which you can use yourself to find some profitable niches,
hopefully get your books ranked and hopefully make those all important sales.
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, to 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,
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videos like this. So, I get a lot of messages,
particularly when I create videos on a particular niche.
And these messages go along the lines of, you know,
this niche will now be saturated. I've ruined this niche, or just in general,
you know, the whole KDP business is saturated.
There's no longer any opportunities.
So I thought I would take a closer look at this and we're going to look at
one of the most competitive KDP low content book niches out there.
And that's a coloring book niche. And I did a search for it on Amazon.
And we can see that there are over 70,000 results for the coloring book
keyword, which is highly competitive.
So what I want to do is, on the first page,
look for books that are independently published,
that means they're published on the KDP platform,
which means that opportunity is open to you guys out there to publish
books on the same platform.
And I want to look at books to see if they have been
published recently. Because if they've been published recently,
we want to know how they've possibly done it.
So I scrolled through the list we've got here and had a look at
books that were published independently.
We've got this one here published in May 21. That looks pretty good.
This one here May 21 or so that's within the last three months again,
pretty good. It's one year, April 21. And this one here, March 21.
So on the face of it,
it looks like you can publish a book and within a few months,
possibly get on the first page in a very competitive niche
with very competitive keywords. So let's dig a bit deeper.
So I thought I'd take a look at this author here.
Lariza May who has this book published here,
creepy kawaii coloring book. So I had a look at her list of books, and in fact,
she's got around 13 books here with a lot of them having excellent
low best-sellers ranks.
And they all seem to be coloring books with a lot in this general
kawaii coloring book theme. Now I took all those best-sellers ranks.
I put them into a book sales calculator at tckpublishing.com to get an
idea of how many sales were being made a month.
And then I multiplied that by the royalties, by the profit,
she's been getting for each book.
And this came back to a figure of pure profit of between $8,000 to
$15,000 a month. Now, based on experience from my books,
it's normally towards the higher end of that figure,
but we'll take the lower end of $8,000 with this number of books,
which I think you'll agree makes a pretty good, decent income.
So how is she doing it? Well, she could be running ads on her books. Now,
when I looked, I couldn't see any sponsored ads there,
but that doesn't mean to say she hasn't been running any.
But I know from experience of running ads on my own books,
to rank on the first page within three months for a
very competitive search term, like coloring books would be very hard indeed.
And you would have to one to throw a lot of money at it and two,
I think it would take a bit longer than three months to cement an organic
ranking on that first page for this particular keyword.
So there must be something else going on.
So I decided to do a search for the Lariza May to see if there was any
big marketing campaign going on here. But I couldn't find a lot.
I found these videos that are being published on YouTube on these various
channels,
which seem to be reviewing some of Lariza May's books.
She's got a goodreads page. I looked at the Instagram,
but that wasn't anything related to books and I couldn't find anything else.
There wasn't even a author central page.
There was no website devoted to her.
There was no Facebook page.
There was no big publishing house or brand
promoting her books. So I think there's something more going on.
And I think this is something more fundamental to creating and getting your
books seen on Amazon. And I'm going to show you what it is right now.
So if we go over to Amazon and just take a look at this book, first of all,
we can see it's in the kawaii coloring book niche.
So I went and put that into the search bar and we can see there are 2000 results
for kawaii coloring books, so straightaway that's better than 70,000.
And if we scroll down, there's some people running sponsored ads,
and you can see this particular publisher has the number one and number three
spots.
And actually it looks like the number four spot as well for this particular
keyword. She's got good designed covers look very professional and she's
using relevant keywords in the title and subtitles of
her books. Now I went to look at this a bit further.
Now what struck me was a couple of terms here that I wasn't familiar with,
and that is creepy kawaii and pastel goth.
So I entered these into the search bar on Amazon,
and you can see that for creepy kawaii, there's 720 searches per month,
which was on Google,
which is quite surprising particularly as personally I'd never heard of it,
but there's obviously a big creepy kawaii movement.
And Amazon is suggesting keywords here.
So that looks promising in terms of a possible audience for this particular type
of book. So I drilled down a bit more on putting creepy,
quiet coloring book into the search bar.
And you can see here there's only 224 results,
which means there's now a lot less competition for that particular keyword.
However, there appears to be a decent sized market and people searching
for books in this particular niche. And again, we've got these sponsored ads,
but this publisher is appearing at number one and number two for these
keywords.
But if you scroll down and look at the other listings for this keyword,
there's not many here, if any others at all,
using creepy kawaii in the title.
And so I think Lariza May has got that number one,
organic ranking spot purely based on the fact that she's using creepy kawaii and
coloring book in the title of her book.
I then went to do a similar thing with pastel goth.
And I was amazed once again,
look at the number of searches on Google per month for this keyword. Again,
I'd never heard of it. 90,500 per month.
So this is a huge, huge, niche.
And again, Amazon is suggesting pastel goth coloring book,
which indicates that people are searching for coloring books in this
niche. So I had a look,
put in pastel goth coloring book and only 229 results.
And again,
we've got the sponsored ads and this publisher dominating the number one spot
for this particular keyword. And again,
look at the title using pastel goth coloring book in the title.
So what does this tell us? Is it easy? No. Is it possible?
Yes,
but it requires work and it requires work to
find those sub niches and to find those less competitive keywords.
Because if you can rank highly for those less competitive keywords,
where there is a market for that particular niche or keyword,
then you can get sales and reviews. And once that starts to happen,
Amazon will then push your book and show your book for those
more competitive,
broader keywords to the point where ,as we see in this example,here,
you can rank on the first page for an extremely competitive general keyword
like coloring book.
And you need to get into that mindset of,
you don't need a huge marketing budget.
You can publish these books on KDP and have the same opportunities as
these other authors who also publish on KDP.
You may need to run ads to get books kick-started,
but not necessarily so.
But you do need to put in that work to get those niches and keywords,
as I've just mentioned.
You see people often come up with reasons for why other people are successful
and they are not. You see the easiest thing in the world to do is nothing.
It doesn't require any energy and it doesn't require any effort.
But in order to justify that,
a lot of people come out with excuses like KDP is saturated,
this niche is saturated, or you've got to run ads.
And it's a lot easier to justify not to do something rather
than put in the work and effort to do something.
Now this business like any business is not going to give you an overnight
success. It does require work.
It is a skill that requires practice also.
But it is something you can do.
And anyone out there can do. Now, as I mentioned earlier,
one of the skills to getting books seen and ranked is keyword research.
And I've done a video here,
which I suggest watching next on keyword research and how I find those low,
competitive and profitable keywords. Thank you very much for your time.
It's very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and until next time, goodbye.