Promoting your book can quickly become your main source of expenses. We are talking about hundreds or thousands of dollars! It is thus imperative to publish your book in niche Kindle categories presenting the least amount of resistence. Promoting your book to outrank Stephen King’s books can require a good deal of money. Outranking unknown author #11, on the other hand, is a much more feasible task!

There are 7 metrics on Kindle Ranker to help you achieve the bestseller status in any niche Kindle category. We will go over them and show how they might help you in your investigation.

Kindle Ranker routinely collects raw data from Amazon book categories: bestseller lists, book prices, book ranks, etc. It processes this data to give you the most useful indicators and metrics to choose the right niche category for your book.

Let’s take a tour of the different metrics available on Kindle Ranker’s search interface:

Niche categories to help promote your book to be a bestseller

This one is quite obvious; It simply is the absolute rank of the bestseller in a given Amazon book category. To make it even more palpable for writers and marketers, we infer a number of daily sales needed to achieve this rank.

As you can see the rank is automatically colored according to its competitiveness. In red, high ranks where you need to sell at least 50 books a day. In orange ranks that require between 11 and 50 daily sales. In green, the more accessible ranks – lower than 10 daily sales.

50th book’s rank – the gateway to the kindle bestseller list

This column is very similar to the bestseller rank, except that it displays the 50th book’s rank. Why 50 exactly? Because Amazon automatically displays the top 50 books to readers when they are browsing categories. It is essential that you book appears on this first page, otherwise it will lose huge exposure, and thus sale potential. It’s like being on the fourth page on Google. Nobody ever goes to the fourth page..

The 50th book’s rank (and thus number of daily sales required) is the most essential metric to keep in mind when choosing your Amazon book category. That’s usually the column I sort by to begin my study of potential categories.

The median sales volume of a niche kindle category

This one is very interesting! This column depicts a category’s popularity. In other words, how successful are the books in that Amazon book category?

Given that a book’s success directly affects its absolute rank, we can reasonably assume that a popular category contains mostly books with higher ranks. The more popular the category becomes, the higher its median rank gets.

We can push the analysis further by combining this median rank with the category’s median price, and thus estimate the median sales volume one can expect from a book listed in the top 20 of a given category.

These are the most promising categories in the Romance category at the time of this writing:

Do not take this number to represent your future royalties, as there are many factors to consider (Amazon’s cut that varies depending on the region and ebook’s price, the book’s download price, etc.). The median sales volume depicts a category’s popularity, no more.

The median price of any Kindle category

This metric can be quite helpful for first time writers that have trouble setting the right price for their book. Use this median price as an indicator of a category’s pricing trend.

Sometimes you will notice a double arrow next to the median price. If the arrow is green it means that there are some outliers that are driving the price higher. For instance in the “Fairy tales & Folklore” category, a couple of books are priced at $10.99, $9.99, $10.20. This leaves you with the option of pricing your book a bit higher than the median price knowing that you will not likely shock readers. You could also go the other way around and price your book lower than the median price to attract more readers.

The volatility indicator – Is the Amazon book category stable enough?

This one is brand new and is kind of responsible for this whole post!

Kindle Ranker keeps track of Amazon categories – all 10 000 of them. Every few hours, it scans kindle bestseller lists and updates its internal database. Whenever new books hop into/or leave a kindle bestseller list, the volatility indicator gains a few point. In summary, it is the percentage of new books appearing on the bestseller list.

25% of the “legal self-help” category changes every few hours. Even though the sales threshold to enter the bestseller list is very low, your book will likely be superseeded by other books if it does not maintain its sales rythm.

New book releases – how popular is the Amazon book category amongst writers?

This metric represents the percentage of books released during the last three months.

Who would have thought that Vampires and Werewolves were still a thing?

Self published books – Amazon book categories where indie writers are most successful?

The last metric that Kindle Ranker keeps track of is the percentage of indie published books in the bestseller list. In other words, how many self published books make it to the bestseller list of any given Amazon book category:

Romance and Erotica are very present in the top of this list order.

So there you have it, a full description of all the data tracked by Kindle Ranker. Hopefully this post will shed some lights on the indicators displayed on the search page. All is left for you is to dive into it 😉

Cheers,

Alex from KR