In your adventurous journey as an indie author, you surely faced the delicate question of choosing kindle categories where to publish your ebook. There are more than 10 000 categories on Amazon alone, so it is far from a straightforward choice. Especially since,
this crucial decision will directly affect your ebook’s visibility and thus its sales performance!

If you book is not listed on the front page of the kindle bestseller list of its category, it’s as good as dead. Or to put it differently, will you be making thousands of dollars or simply collecting a dozen bucks a month?

Now that I got your attention, let us go through a real life example to show you how to use Kindle Ranker to your advantage.

Least competitive kindle categories in Historical Fiction

Say, you have written a breath taking ebook about a character braving 7 sorts of hell to rescue his daughter emprionned in a medieval castle.
Your ebook is about historical fiction, so the natural choice is to feature it in the “Kindle eBooks -> Literature & Fiction -> Historical Fiction” and be done with it right? right?

hmm…Not quite.

A quick look on Kindle Ranker shows us that :
A) There are around 50 categories related to historical fiction, so the choice is not so self evident.
B) In order to break it into the main “Historical fiction” bestseller list you need to sell more than 900 ebooks a day…

Maybe you are the kind of author that scoffs at this number wondering  where’s the challenge, but 900 copies a day is a big deal for most of indie authors!
To put it in perspective, if you consistently sell 900 ebooks a day, you can expect to make around $80 000 a month (for an average bbook price of $4.99).

If that’s your case, good on you! If not, well do not despair, you gotta learn to crawl before you get to run…or fly. Your next immediate step is to choose a less challenging category to feature your awesome book!

Now, what other choices do we have?
Back to Kindle Ranker. We sort bestseller lists based on the rank of the 50th book’s rank:

Ah, not bad! The above categories only require one sale a day to display your book on the front page bestseller list! Isn’t that the dream?

Well not quite. If you look at the median sales volume you will quickly realize that these categories do not promise a high payout. What good is it to be on the front page of a bestseller list with 12 readers per year…

Most profitable kindle categories in Historical Fiction

In order to measure popularity we rely on the median sales volume. The more popular a category, the more likely it is filled with successful books that rank higher on Amazon. If we scroll down the list of Historical Fiction categories, we find an interesting niche:

Much better! The payout is in the thousands of dollars per month for a low sales threshold, going from 2 copies  a day to 11 daily sales for the “Teens -> Historical Fiction“. Moreover, the volatility indicator hovers between 5 and 9%, meaning that every six hours 1 to 2 new books enter the bestseller list. This percentage is around the same for all Historical Fiction sub categories.

So the top 10 categories factoring in the sales threshold for the front page bestseller list, the median monthly sales volume and the the volatility indicator is :

Now you know which kindle bestseller lists to target in order to achieve quick success and have a good grasp of the indicators to look when choosing your niche, you can get back to focusing on regular marketing techniques (Kindle SEO, reviews, ads, etc.) to push your book to the top!

Hopefully I will add some features to Kindle Ranker to help you with those tasks as well!

Until next time

Alex from KR