Julie Broad (Book Launchers) explains how authors can test market demand for a nonfiction book before investing in writing and publishing. She demonstrates using Publisher Rocket to find likely Amazon categories, estimate how many sales are needed to rank in a category, investigate competing titles and their sales, and run keyword research (alongside Google keyword tools) to find niches with high demand and lower competition. She emphasizes separating ebook and print research, tailoring niche focus to your goals (e.g., reaching a target audience vs. mass-market), and that authors who are speakers may sell more off-Amazon at events.
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Wouldn't it be nice to have a guarantee that your book will sell before you go ahead and invest time and money and energy into writing, polishing and publishing it? I wish there was a way to assure you that you will absolutely get a great return on that resource investment. But things change and sometimes what is hot or not is a surprise. That said, there is a way to test out the current market for your book idea. So if you're wondering how you can figure out what you might be able to make from your book sales, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will help you have a huge impact on your readers. And done right will help you grow your brand, build your business, and make you money. The best part, you keep all rights and royalties. Promises, promises. You all want promises. Authors always say to me, now I know you can't make guarantees about how many books I'll sell, but how many books do you think I'll sell? 1. 1? You've done a good job of writing compelling book descriptions and getting reviews and doing good keywords. Amazon might help you sell a lot of books, but how many? Well, that's where publisher Rocket is my favorite tool for figuring this out. And I'll link below with an affiliate link. And I'm only using an affiliate link because it's something we use all, all the time, not because it gets me kickbacks. Let's say you're writing a book about keto and cancer. You could start by opening Rocket and going to the category Researcher. This is useful because it helps you figure out what category Amazon might put your book in. More on categories in this video up there. Can you point to it? Jackson? That one right there, which I'll link to at the end. It also will tell you how many books you need to sell to hit number one in that category and how many to be in the top 10. Now this is why I don't think it's a big deal to be number one in the category. Woo hoo. Three sales or 18 sales gets you number one. Am I boring? You guys make me tired. Do you want to go lay down somewhere? Yeah. Okay. While you're here, click the category and see the top books in Amazon. Check out these books to make sure they're a decent fit for what you're writing about. In this case, maybe you don't want cookbooks, so you try a different category. Now if you find a book or two that you would be competing against. I would then type in the titles over here and I would see what their sales volume is. Ooh, wouldn't you like to be this book? And then you can click here to see the ebook or the print volume. So roughly, this book is bringing in $40,000 per month in book sales between ebook and print on Amazon only. That's not too bad. I'd be feeling pretty good about putting out another book in that category if I'm seeing numbers like that. Especially if it's not just this book crushing it in the category. So go through other books that come out come up. So go through other books that come up and see what else you learn and how other books are doing. And if you want to really get into this, you can start to read comments on the books and to see what people love and don't love to really carve out what you're going to do differently with your book. Another way to approach this research is to type in keywords that you think your ideal reader would use. I'm writing a book on writing a no boring book, so let's do this. For my category, I'll go to keywords. I can type this in. Now this gives me average sales data. Not discouraging at all. I like this average sales number, but let's see what's included by clicking on the View Competition. Now I can start to look for books that are potentially just like mine. Ooh, this one's a little bit like mine and has almost no ebook sales. When I see that, I'm going to head over to the Amazon page and investigate because I'm not going to rule out my book just because one book doesn't have sales. How many reviews does it have? What are they saying? What's the book description? How is my book going to be better or different? I'm going to keep doing this until I feel confident in the sales volume or I see where the opportunity is to write a book that will be marketable. This is is what I would call preliminary research. When your book is written and you start writing your book description and finalizing the subtitle, you should do category price and keyword research. And you should be doing it using Google keyword research tool as well as a tool like Publisher Rocket for Amazon keyword research. We've talked about keyword research before. I'll link to that video below in the description. I'm really doing this to make sure there's a market and clearly there is. Even if I'm not as big as keto and cancer. But I'm not worried about that because this is just Amazon. You do have to do print and ebook separately. Publisher Rocket Also, for my book topic, I know it's very niche and my focus isn't on being a Wall Street Journal bestseller. My focus is on reaching people who want to write a great nonfiction book to build their name, grow a business, or have a powerful impact on a reader. I want to see volume in sales, but I'm not worried about huge volume because I'm not trying to reach a mass market. And thirdly, I expect I'll actually sell a lot more books through events and presentations and speaking engagements than I actually think I'll sell on Amazon. So this is really only reflecting a portion of my market. I just really to make sure there is a market. If you hit a category or a keyword with no sales, you might want to rethink it if you're not seeing any volume on any books at all. Also, if you hit on something like writing that has a Competition score of 100, like you see here, that means you have the most competition imaginable and you probably should go more niche. In fact, you should go more niche. We've worked with a lot of financial experts and when we do this search we often come up with some really interesting angles that have low competition but high sales. That can be very exciting because the financial book market is fairly competitive. Of course, you may not want to angle your book in a way just for keywords, but it's always nice to find a subject that people are searching for that doesn't have a ton of competitors. If you're speaker, this research still has value, but make sure you've got a plan to write a book that will lead to paid speaking gigs. We've talked about that a lot in other videos like this tip. Go ahead and smash that thumbs up button. Go ahead, try it. It feels so good. Now I am curious. What market research do you do to figure out if a book will sell before you write it? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet book launcher swag. New videos every Tuesday and Friday, so make sure you've subscribed to the channel and turn those notifications on so we can hang out in the comments when the video comes out. Now I've really enjoyed our time together today and Jackson enjoyed his time with you too, before he had to go lay down and have a nap. There's still a little bit. You should know this video right here is an awesome Author spotlight with Ryan Berman on writing a book to get speaking gigs. It is brilliant. So check that out. Or if you're not interested in that aspect, this video right here is the one on bisect codes, and it's a good one too. Either way, I've put the coffee on and we're gonna get that noboringbooksmuggo and spend just a little bit more time together. So go ahead, click on over and I'll see you there.
