The hardest part of writing a book is getting started. After all, you want to make sure you’ve got an idea that will attract readers. And, you want to make sure you don’t get lost somewhere in the middle writing it and give up.
I’ve published 30+ books (plus written dozens of manuscripts that didn’t turn into books!) and find the most successful ones all had a similar start.
I did the research and planning up front. I’ve done a lot of market research completely free using Amazon. However, over the years I’ve come to rely on the fast and easy way to learn about your market before (or after!) you start writing with K-Lytics Custom Research Reports.
Test Your Idea
Ideas are easy to come up with, right? In fact, you may come up with dozens every week. Or, you may have helpful friends and family who share their ideas for books they’d like to read but can’t find.
The thing is not all ideas will actually attract many readers.
But how do you know?
It all starts with market research. Well, that is if you’re hoping to get lots of readers and make some money. If you’re an author who has an idea that’s just begging to be written and you’re not worried about sales — go for it and do the market research later to see where it fits.
For now, let’s walk through the research I’m doing for a cozy mystery I’m getting ready to outline.
When to do market research?
Market research for a successful book begins before you outline the book. Why? Because your idea is the core of your writing project, but market research can help you fill in the details.
So, let’s start with the idea I’m working on for a cozy mystery series of books for adults. It’s a new genre for me, although all of the novels I’ve written have contained elements of mystery. Incorporating a mystery helps me write a story that keeps readers turning pages.
By doing market research at the beginning, you can paint a picture of your ideal reader. In marketing terms, you’re segmenting your market and targeting a particular reader/buyer.
For example, many cozy mysteries feature an animal of some sort. Indeed, the subcategories under Amazon.com’s cozy mysteries are animals, crafts & hobbies, and culinary.
By comparing the title sales rank (see below!) between cozy mysteries that fall into these subcategories with those that don’t, you can see what’s more popular with the general cozy mystery market.
Why does it matter? Because book buyers typically have particular tastes.
So, if your ideal reader dreams of travel, she may fulfil part of her dreams by reading cozy mysteries (or romances or nonfiction) with a travel setting. She won’t be easily persuaded to buy your cozy mystery in a small town even though she’d love your character and all the other elements of your plot.
Book Writing Market Research on Amazon
The free way to do book research is on Amazon. Each different Amazon store (.ca, .com, .uk, etc.) has different sales rankings. In fact, each one even has somewhat different categories (there’s no Kindle YA in .ca for example, so you have to choose either children’s or adult categories for your ebooks).
I select the Amazon.com store because I feel that will be my best market. How do I start? By typing cozy mystery into Amazon’s search bar.
The Amazon search bar uses an algorithm that considers things like the relevance of the keywords, customer ratings, sales rank, and availability of the products.
In short, the dropdown list shows you all the searches related to cozy mystery, likely in order of relevance and popularity.
So, select cozy mystery and begin your market research! Note that the first titles under the search (as shown in the screenshot) are all Sponsored, or paid advertisements.
- Scroll past the Sponsored books to get the top titles Amazon returns
- Select the title closest to the type of book you want to write
- Read the product page for the book, taking note of title, summary, publisher marketing materials (if any) and similar books
- Select the format of book you want to focus on from the right side of the product page (Kindle, Audiobook, or Paperback)
- Scroll down through the product details to the three categories the book is ranked in and its overall rank in the Amazon store (compare the formats if you like by writing down the results, then selecting a different format)
- Select the category link that most closely matches what you plan to write (e.g. Cozy Animal Mystery )
- And there you have it — the best sellers list of paid and free books (free is only available if the listing is for ebooks)
- Go through both lists, checking best sellers rank and downloading all the free ebooks you want to review
- For more help with how Amazon categories work see this Kindlepreneur article
What do you do with your research data?
So, what do you do with this information? Test your idea by seeing where it fits and its popularity. For example, the day I wrote this article out of the top 50 paid cozy mystery (general category) titles 26 featured an animal on the cover. Of those animals, 10 were cats, 1 was a cat and dog, 9 were dogs, 1 was a couple of dogs and a chicken, 1 was an octapus, 1 was a dolphin, 1 was a porcupine, and 2 were birds.
Then I checked the top 50 free titles (these books are enrolled in KDP Select, so exclusive to Amazon). Of those, 21 had animals incuding 14 with cats, 5 with dogs, 1 with a manatee, and 1 with a bird.
My conclusion was that animals seem to be a significant part of a cozy mystery, even when ranking outside the Animals subcategory.
Luckily, my cozy mystery idea has been floating around in my head for a couple of years and I was finally inspired by a bird that I could include in the plot. Whew!
What’s the easy way to find out what’s selling in a particular Amazon book category?
I’ve been with K-Lytics for half a dozen years now (I’m even an affiliate so if you decide to buy one of their market reports I earn a commission at no extra cost to you). So, I head straight to the latest market report on my planned book category if one exists.
I’ll share some of my findings with you, while I’m checking out how my idea looks so far.
The following information on animal sub-markets is from the K-Lytics Cozy Mystery E-Book Market Edition report.
- Share of books (not mutually exclusive, so if the title featured a cat and a dog, the book is in both categories): 1) cats, kittens, and felines – 29% of books, 2) Dogs and hounds – 12% of books, 3) Uncategorized animal – 5% of books, 4) Birds and birdwatching – 5% of books, 5) Pets – 3% of books, 6) Horses, pony, equestrian – 1% of books.
- Sales vs. competition index (100 = Best. This considers Amazon sales rank, or popularity, x competition, or number of titles in category) cats, kittens, and felines – 76, 2) Dogs and hounds – 100, 3) Uncategorized animal – 83, 4) Birds and birdwatching – 74, 5) Pets – 76, 6) Horses, pony, equestrian – 50. sales ): 1) cats, kittens, and felines – 76, 2) Dogs and hounds – 100, 3) Uncategorized animal – 83, 4) Birds and birdwatching – 74, 5) Pets – 76, 6) Horses, pony, equestrian – 50.
- Estimated total Kindle royalties per month $K: 1) cats, kittens, and felines – 264, 2) Dogs and hounds – 140, 3) Uncategorized animal – 51, 4) Birds and birdwatching – 48, 5) Pets – 31, 6) Horses, pony, equestrian – 7.
Some interesting things emerged, didn’t they?
I learned stuff I can’t get with my manual review on Amazon without more work than I could possibly put in! For example, cozy mysteries featuring horses, ponies, and equestrians make up only 1% of the category and earn $7,000 in royalties for all their authors combined.
However, the sales vs. competition index is at 50, so has low ebook sales to competition (so there are more ebooks than buyers — which goes to prove the point that readers know what they want and aren’t easily persuaded to buy something else to read).
But how did the total income on the other categories actually compare to income on horses, ponies and equestrians?
When reduced to a common denominator, the ebook category making the most total sales was dogs and hounds. And they were the best sales vs. competition index (or lots of buyers compared to available titles), so the easiest to break into.
Hmmm…maybe that bird should turn into a stray dog that shows up at the strangest times.
What’s market performance all about?
Okay, so maybe your idea is still being fleshed out. Maybe you really just want to write a mystery and have a pretty darn good idea for a plot. But does it really need to be a cozy mystery or would a female sleuth subcategory work just as well? After all, they’re both in Amazon’s general category, Mystery, Thriller & Suspense.
So, let’s see what we find. In addition to the K-Lytics Cozy Mystery E-Book Market Edition report, I’ll also use the Female Detectives & Sleuths Report.
Table title: Estimated e-book copies sold per day by rank in subcategory
| #1 | #20 | #100 | |
| Cozy mystery (out of 7483 titles) | 303 | 36 | 16 |
| Female detectives & sleuths (out of 1945 titles) | 417 | 72 | 28 |
What does this tell us about market performance? Well, from the considered Amazon sales data, the #1 ebook title in the female detectives & sleuths category outsold the #1 ebook cozy mystery title by 114 books or about 31%. That’s a lot!
I can also see that there are 5538 more cozy mystery titles than titles categorized as female detectives & sleuths. That means buyers are more likely to discover your book because they have limited choices.
The numbers also tell me that cozy mystery sales fall off (16 books at sales rank 100) faster than female sleuths and detectives (28 books at sales rank 100).
What does market analysis tell me so far about money?
Well, let’s talk about money. You’re interested, right?
If you’ve got a marketing budget to work with, you may want to try Publisher Rocket. I find its Competition Analyzer and Category Search extremely useful! (Note that I’m an affiliate so will earn a commission if you decide to purchase). The great thing about Publisher Rocket is that you only pay a one-time fee that covers all Amazon categories and you get all the updates forever!
But back to free tools.
TCK has this great free tool for estimating income based on sales rank and price. Use the tool here (the article explains in detail how to use it). The Kindlepreneur has a similar tool that generates similar results, if you want to compare (you’ll have to multiply by 30 to compare by month — results appear on the right of the screen in ).
The tools use the overall Amazon Best Sellers Rank (BSR – rather than the book’s rank within the subcategories), so you’ll need to identify the overall ranks of the #1 best seller ranked books in the two subcategories you’re comparing.
Here’s what I learned with today’s two titles, if they both stayed in #1 for a month.
Table Title: Projected BSR to Sales Calcultor Rank
| Overall Amazon Sales Rank | Ebook Sales Per Month | Print Book Sales Per Month | |
| #1 Cozy | #1073 – Books #493 – Kindle | 5,224 | 2,091 |
| #1 Female Sleuth | #67 – Books #10 – Kindle | 60,422 | 12,200 |
How much you’ll earn depends on your royalty for ebooks on Amazon and royalty for print books on Amazon.
But hey, let’s just do a rough estimate for income based on what we’ve learned using the sales calculator estimates. Say we make $2 profit per book, whether that’s an ebook or a print book. Also, say we go with the projected sales for a whole month.
- #1 Cozy title – 7315 sales (ebook and paperback) x $2 = $14,630
- #1 Female sleuth – 72622 (ebook and paperback) x $2 = $145,244
My goodness, were you as shocked as I was? I’m certainly glad I have K-Lytics! Maybe I don’t need to worry about whether the animal in my mystery with a female main character is a bird or dog. I can just leave an animal out altogether!
Food for thought.
Linda Aksomitis 
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