Diving into the self publishing world was definitely one of the best decisions of my life. Kindle publishing helped me realize a dream I did not knew I had in the first place: publishing books about computer security.

Looking back on that particular moment of self doubt and apprehension, I remember being torn by loads of questions. The most pressing of which was:

What about other indie writers on Amazon? How well are they doing? Is it really worth it?

I realize these are really three questions, but as you can understand, I was very confused back then.

Sure, I stumbled upon a few writer blog reports here and there. Some promised rocketing sales and a 6 figure income while others reported a couple of hundred dollars a month.

The author earnings reports also shed some light on the percentage of self published books and their success, but the answer was too broad to satisfy my hungry curiosity.

Things have changed since then.

Today, using Kindle Ranker we will explore tangible numbers and arguments about the success of the indie community and give you enough data to make an informed and peaceful decision about your indie career.

Kindle categories for successful indie writers

Kindle Ranker routinely collects the top 20 bestsellers in every book category and calculates the percentage of self published books in that list. Based on this data, we can reasonably consider that a category is dominated by indie writers if at least 15 books (75%) of its top 20 are self published.

As of this moment, there are 90 Kindle categories fulfilling this criterion….out of 5000!

Most of the categories showing a 100% rate of self published books only hold a couple of books in their stores. They are hardly of any interest, especially given the low sales volume reported.

The Kindle eBooks -> Foreign Languages -> Spanish -> Romance category, however, is one of the few exceptions. The top 20 books are all self published and enjoy a relatively mild success amongst readers (over $1100 in monthly sales volume). If you manage to publish a few books in this category, you could earn a decent income.

The bigger winner in terms of popularity though is the Kindle eBooks -> Romance -> Sports category. A very tempting $22,866 in sales volume. Many of the books are self published (75%) and follow a busy release schedule (85% of books released during the last 3 months).

Erotic books are heavily present on the list – 16 categories showing at least an 85% indie dominance and decent sales volume. I can’t say I was really surprised since Erotica is one of the recurring themes in indie blogs.

Non fiction books represent a good chunk of the categories listed above: Kindle eBooks -> Education & Teaching -> Higher & Continuing Education -> Graduate School -> Medical, Kindle eBooks -> Crafts, Hobbies & Home -> Crafts & Hobbies -> Ribbons, etc. But they are not very popular amongst readers (barely averaging a few hundred bucks a month in sales, whereas Erotica themes are in the thousands).

Balanced Kindle categories

As you just saw, categories dominated by indie writers are the exception rather than the rule. Around half the Kindle categories feature less than 20% of self published books in the top 20 bestsellers. That’s close to 2500 categories with less than 4 indie books in the top 20.

Therefore, let us take a more reasonable approach. We will look at categories with a balanced ratio of indie writers and household publishers. Let’s say between 45% and 55% indie book in the top 20.

Again, if we check Kindle Ranker, we get 394 categories. I narrowed them down to 90 to only keep those with a decent sales volume (over a $1000 a month):

The big winner is Kindle eBooks -> Romance -> Romantic Comedy with an average of $100 000 in monthly sales and a balanced indie/traditional publisher distribution. The competition to make it to this particular category’s bestseller lit is pretty tough (around 90 sales a day, check it here), but you can see that indie writers do make the cut!

This new list is mostly dominated by Fiction categories: Kindle eBooks -> Science Fiction & Fantasy -> Fantasy -> Myths & Legends -> Asian, Kindle eBooks -> Teen & Young Adult -> Horror, etc.

Do not hesitate to go through these gems looking for your future gig. You can be assured that:

• A) you have a decent readership community given the volume sales displayed
• B) other indie writers made it to the top 20, so why shoudn’t you try?

I hope this data helps you get a clearer view of the position of indie writers in the Kindle market. If you have any questions let me know by email, or better yet, have a look at Kindle Ranker to dig out promising categories.

Cheers,

Alex from KR