Find a Profitable Book Topic on Amazon in 3 Easy Steps

We already discussed in the previous article how important it is to choose a profitable niche for your non-fiction books and what steps you should take to do that. Now it’s time to answer a few more questions to find a book topic for your book. In order to evaluate, if it might be profitable on Amazon, you need to do three easy steps.

3 Easy Steps to Find a Profitable Book Topic on Amazon:

1. Determine the demand for your book topic on Amazon

One of the simplest and easiest ways to find popular book topics is to check out the Amazon bestseller lists. If you look to the left side of the screen, you can see all the different categories on Amazon. Go through various categories and subcategories and analyze their book topics and titles. This will help you to get more ideas for your own book.

Make sure you are looking through the ‘Top 100 Paid’, not ‘Top 100 Free’ books, because you want to generate topic ideas for a book that people would pay to get.

Your task here is to find keywords and terms that your book can be based on and that solves a particular problem for the reader. Most probably, you will notice some trends and ideas that are repeating. It means these are hot topics that have a significant demand.

Go through various lists and categories and note down any potential keywords and phrases that you see. During the process, you may also get ideas that will pop into your head.

2. Find profitable Kindle keywords

You might perceive Amazon as a bookstore, but in fact, it operates as a search engine. When people are looking for books to buy on Amazon, they usually type in keywords to find them. For example, if they want to find a book about cooking, they type in the Amazon search bar a keyword “cooking books”, or something more specific like “cooking books for kids”. And books that have those keywords in their title, description, or keyword list appear in the search results. Since your goal is to make sure your book will appear in the relevant search results, you need to find the most effective keywords for your book topic.

So, how to find profitable Kindle book keywords?

1. Use Incognito mode on your browser so that your previous search history doesn’t affect what Amazon shows you. If you aren’t familiar with Incognito mode, or how to do it, check out this article.

2. Select “Kindle Store” as the Amazon category, because you need relevant data about eBooks only.

3. Put yourself in the shoes of one of your readers and picture the kind of phrases he might enter into the search box when looking for your book. Start typing a word in the search box and see what auto-suggestions Amazon offers. For example, “social media a”, “social media b…”, “social media c…”. And so on with every letter of the alphabet – till “z”. You will be surprised by how many keyword ideas you will get.

For example, if I begin typing in a phrase like “social media a..”, Amazon automatically suggests me to finish the phrase like in the picture below.

Each “keyword” can actually be made up of several separate words as long as you remain within the limit of 50 characters. For best results, use phrases that are 2-3 words long. Don’t use single words, because they are too general and won’t work. Your readers are most likely not going to search for a single word on Amazon but rather a more specific phrase, so the search results are more relevant. Shorter phrases or single words also usually have a very high competition. The goal is to have a list of 10-15 appropriate keywords.

4. When you have typed in your keyword and clicked “search”, note how many search results Amazon has generated.

In general, it’s advisable to target markets with more than 2000 book search results. Why is this important? If there are less than 2000 results, it may be a sign that the book topic is not in high demand. On the other hand, if there are too many search results, it may indicate that the market is saturated, or the topic is too broad. For example, “social media marketing” has over 10,000 related books, which means it’s a very competitive keyword, and it will be difficult for your book to rank for it.

The ideal situation is to find a keyword that generates about 2000 of search results with the books that have good sales ranks – at least 30,000 or better. Because then you would have a higher chance to appear in the first pages of the search results for the particular keyword and get sales.

3. Understand Kindle book sale ranks

Now, when you have your list of potential Kindle keywords for your book, it’s time to determine if they might be profitable.

Go to Amazon and type in one of your chosen keywords into the search bar (under the Kindle Store menu). For example, “social media marketing”.

Click on some of the books and scroll down to “Product Details” section to find “Amazon Best Sellers Rank” or ABSR. It shows where each book ranks compared to other books within the entire Kindle store.

The general rule is – the SMALLER the number, the MORE sales this book is making.

It also means that if your sales increase, your ranking improves (i.e. moves closer to #1). If your sales decrease, your ranking worsens.

To put it in perspective, if the rank is #95,100, it means that there are currently 95,99 books that are selling better than this book. Although nobody (except Amazon) knows the exact numbers, general estimates are that anything over #100,000 is less than one copy a day. But anything that is under #1000 is selling in thousands of copies a day. Even if ABSR is 10,000-20,000, the sales are really great – about 10-20 books a day.

Use this calculator to get more precise daily sales estimates. If there are more than three books under ABSR 10,000, your chosen keyword might be too competitive for you. But, if almost none of the books are under ABSR 30,000, there is not enough demand for the book topic.

I know it might sound rather complicated for a beginner, but the best way to understand how this process works is SIMPLY DOING IT. Go to Amazon and follow the steps I described, and you will find a profitable topic for your book.

Still, if you want to go in an easier and faster way, use Publisher Rocket. This tool will help you find bestselling book ideas, profitable niches, rank better in Amazon, and select Kindle keywords.