136 How to Use K-Lytics to Sell More Kindle Ebooks
Jim: There’s an old saying: “What gets measured gets managed.” If we measure our sales process and see what’s working and what’s not, there’s a much greater chance we’ll pay attention to it. The more you understand about how readers find you and why they buy books on Amazon, the more books you’ll sell.
Today’s guest is Alex Newton, CEO and founder of K-lytics.com (Affiliate Link), a leading market research resource for authors and publishers. His expertise helps authors sell more books, face less competition, and get a bigger return on the time and money they put into their careers. Alex is based in Germany and has 20 years of worldwide consulting experience. For the past four years he’s focused on Amazon and ebooks. He has a unique ability to translate complex data into layman’s terms so that the average writer can not only understand it, but actually apply it to their books.
Why did you walk away from a corporate consulting career to go into book marketing?
Alex: A couple of things came together. For about 20 years I’d been living out of a suitcase as a corporate management consultant, Monday through Friday. My daughter was born, and I had to look for other ways to generate income. I started researching internet business models and how to create income online, especially from home. This was around the time of what I’d call the Kindle gold rush.
Many authors at the time suffered from what I called Paleo Breakfast Recipes Syndrome. I’d signed up for one of those “get rich with Kindle” courses, and everyone in it was jumping on the bandwagon of publishing cookbooks and recipes. Having been in corporate consulting for 20 years, I’m a fact person. I started looking at the facts and said, well, I’ve never seen anybody cook in the kitchen with a Kindle.
I started looking at the Amazon platform, examining sales rank and category sizes, and started putting things together. Before I knew it, I had a report on the sales performance of the top 30 main Amazon categories. I gave it to a few authors in the group, and they tore it out of my hands, asking if I had more and could I do it for subcategories. Four years later, that was when K-lytics was born.
Jim: And you get to spend time with your daughter. No more traveling.
Alex: That’s the most important thing. These days I can bring my daughter to school and I’m home for every breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
What does the name K-lytics actually stand for?
Thomas: What does K-lytics stand for?
Alex: The K stands for Kindle and lytics stands for analytics. Originally it was called Kindlelytics, which I thought was an extremely fancy name. The website went live and immediately people told me Amazon was going to sue me for having Kindle in the domain name. So I took out the “indle” from Kindle, and that’s how we ended up with K-lytics.
What does K-lytics actually do for authors?
Alex: In simple terms, we provide market information that allows authors and publishers to make better book publishing decisions and save themselves weeks, if not months, of research, so they can focus on writing. As an indie author or publisher, you shouldn’t get immersed in all the business tasks; outsource what you can. We are your market research department.
For any genre, and there are more than 3,000, we can tell you the sales potential, the sales trends, the level of competition in a genre or niche, the price levels, keywords, top-selling covers, top authors, and top publishers. It’s a large database we’ve been building by monitoring Amazon over the years, combined with ready-made research where all the legwork is done for you. You can use it for strategic questions like what to write and what direction to take your science fiction novels, down to tactical questions like which categories to put your book in and what your competition is doing.
Jim: This is huge. Our typical listener would love this information but does not want to do any of the work to get it. I’m guessing you have everything from general reports to customized reports.
Alex: There’s an on-demand service where you access the database yourself and sort and filter by, say, all the science fiction subcategories by sales or competition. For authors less comfortable with data, we have ready-made reports that cover, for example, all 70 subgenres within mystery, thriller, suspense.
Jim: If somebody writes fantasy and wants to know which of three or four subgenres to concentrate on, you provide that data. They can see which one is selling much better than the others.
Alex: Exactly. You can add a lot of criteria to that question, like competition level and price. One important thing to point out from the start: the data is one thing, but the artist brings craft and passion for a certain genre. My personal mission is to bring market data to the writer and the creative person, and find where art meets science to create a good product.
Is K-lytics only useful if you’re writing to market?
Thomas: It’s not just about knowing which categories are hot. It’s about knowing which specific subgenre to write for. If you have an artistic mindset and just want to write the story you want to write, K-lytics is less useful. You can see what popular covers look like in your category and figure out which subgenre to pick, but where this really helps is when you’re flexible and willing to adapt to what people want to buy. It doesn’t mean selling out or writing a genre you hate. Knowing how to make slight adaptations can make a huge difference in how many copies you sell. If you’re writing in a crowded genre with low demand, like cookbooks, even the best cookbook in the world won’t find many readers, because no one wants to read a cookbook on a Kindle.
Alex: The last thing we want is for writers to waste their time. If you write purely from passion, great. If you write to build authority in a field, you can use the data to find nonfiction areas that are easy to rank in. But if you’re a fiction writer with some flexibility, especially if you call yourself an indie publisher, you have a responsibility to look at what the market wants. Is mystery thriller suspense trending toward thrillers? Within mystery, is it cozy or vigilante justice or female protagonist? These are the sort of questions the data can answer.
What are the hottest categories on Amazon right now?
Alex: It depends on the perspective you take. From a high level, Amazon currently has about 4.79 million English titles, with 70,000 books added every month. Book supply is still growing at about 18% per year, while ebook demand has slowed to single-digit growth. So you really have to look at what’s hot.
What most people aren’t aware of is that the top genre on Amazon Kindle is Romance, followed by mystery, thriller, suspense, then science fiction and fantasy, teen and young adult, religion and spirituality, and then a long tail of everything else. From there you can break it down into more than 3,000 subgenres.
Jim: I’m amazed at how many subgenres there can be.
Is there any category with high popularity but low competition?
Thomas: There’s popularity, and then there’s how competitive a category is. Romance is the most popular, but it must also be where the most authors are writing. Are there categories with high popularity and relatively low competition?
Alex: You raise a very important point. Demand is one side of the equation. Even within romance, you have big subgenres like contemporary romantic comedy and romantic suspense selling very well, then military romance, new adult, and college. Then it goes into niches like sports romance and gothic romance.
On the competition side, the differences are vast depending on the level you look at. Interestingly, the biggest genre by competition, not demand, is religion and spirituality, with 597,000 English-speaking titles. Romance has 435,000. Science fiction and fantasy has roughly 150,000, so the competition in sci-fi and fantasy is less than half of what it is in romance.
Then you can go further. Within romance, you can still find niche markets today, like Gothic romance, with about 2,170 English titles. In science fiction and fantasy, Arthurian fantasy has around 280 titles. At one end of the spectrum you have romance with more than 400,000 titles; at the other end, you can niche down to categories with only one title.
Thomas: So you could come in as title two and be automatically guaranteed a number-two bestseller spot.
Alex: If you select the right one, you’ll be number one immediately. There’s a subcategory right now, Crafts, Hobbies and Home / Small Appliance Repair, with only one English book in it. Funny enough, that book is a paleo diet cookbook, not a how-to appliance guide, because someone used exactly this strategy.
Thomas: It’s a bit of a hack. A paleo diet book ranks number one in a category with almost no books in it. I’m not sure I’d recommend that, because it’s a little disingenuous. But it does show that there is real opportunity in sub-subcategories with no competition. I want to talk about how to pick the best category, but first, Jim, do we have a featured patron?
How do you pick the best category for your book?
Thomas: Alex, how does someone pick the best category for their book? Not everyone can write every kind of book. How would our listeners approach this?
Alex: First, think about your goal as a writer. If you write purely for love and passion, you don’t care about categories. If you want to reach readers, look at your available subgenres. If you’re in nonfiction and want to be the number one authority in a field, look for categories with very little competition. The Kindle market may not be the right channel to earn money with your knowledge, but it can be a vehicle to prove you’re a number one bestseller in, say, bonsai growing. Kindle won’t make you rich, but it can establish your authority.
For fiction writers, the basic framework is: what is the level of demand, and what is the level of competition? Is it a crowded space, or is there room to breathe? Then you can get more sophisticated by adding criteria like your own craft skill in that genre, or price levels. Prices differ quite a bit across genres. Mystery, thriller, suspense price levels are healthier than science fiction and fantasy, which are healthier than romance, the mass-market end of the spectrum.
Thomas: So, mystery thriller suspense is like the Lexus and romance is the Toyota, where everyone competes on price. Mystery writers aren’t lowering prices as much, which means you can charge more and readers won’t think you’re expensive.
Alex: Exactly. In the nonfiction and technical book space, the extreme example is maritime law, which can cost $200 on Kindle. Prices vary widely. In romance, you have to be highly productive and churn out books by the dozen, because it really is a mass market.
Thomas: A good strategy for a beginning author is to start in a less competitive market, where it’s easier to find your place. As your platform grows, as your readers grow, and as your craft improves, you can move into more competitive markets. Start with high school football before going straight to the World Cup.
Alex: Especially if you have a limited marketing budget. If you simply say you write mystery thriller suspense with no further specificity, you’re head-on against John Grisham, David Baldacci, and the traditional publishers. But if you niche down to, say, financial thrillers with a female protagonist, you have a much higher chance of finding and targeting the right readers, and hopefully better odds of success with a limited budget at the start of your career.
Jim: Is there a danger of niching down so far that there are only 10 people in the world who read those books?
Alex: That’s a real danger, especially in nonfiction, on the back of all those “upload a book and get rich with Kindle” courses over the years. With more than 4.5 million books on Kindle, the math is stark. Of the roughly $1 billion to $1.5 billion Amazon allegedly earns from the Kindle platform, the top 12% of that revenue is generated by the top 100 rank positions. 30% is generated by the top 1,000 rank positions. 87% of all revenue is generated by the top 50,000 books out of 4.7 million.
Of the roughly 5,000 categories we monitor, only about 15%, around 600 to 700, are what we’d call commercially viable, meaning relatively high sales against manageable competition. I once had an elderly couple who said they knew everything about gardening and horticulture and wanted to write a Kindle book. I told them not to bother. The top 20 title in gardening and horticulture sells a maximum of three books a day.
What’s your best tip for nonfiction authors right now?
Alex: On the Kindle platform, you really have to look at the data on what’s selling. There are evergreen nonfiction topics like relationships, parenting, and certain diet niches. Ketogenic diet is still very strong. But here’s a fact many people don’t know: Amazon has a Kindle bestseller list that’s actually a cross-format bestseller list. When we looked at format penetration across genres, for fiction, romance, mystery, thriller, suspense, sci-fi, and fantasy, ebook penetration of the top 100 is above 70%. You can’t go wrong there. But in nonfiction self-help, only 15% of the top 100 are ebooks. So you need a paperback and hardcover strategy if you go into nonfiction.
There are still pockets where you can make money in nonfiction, but you’ll likely need a print strategy and potentially an Audible strategy as well. More importantly, ask yourself: is the book the vehicle through which I want to earn money, or is it a vehicle for something else, like webinars, a YouTube channel, or live seminars? That’s a critical question to answer before committing to a nonfiction publishing strategy.
Thomas: You can make a lot of money giving speeches, and it’s much easier to get speaking engagements if event coordinators find you on Amazon and see you’re a number one bestseller. They’ll book you immediately, and that’s where the real money can be. For nonfiction, it’s important to think outside the book and think in terms of making money from your expertise more broadly.
Where do you see the Kindle Store going in the next five to ten years?
Alex: Almost by definition, it will keep growing. Amazon has already grown bigger than the Library of Congress, with about 20 times as many electronically available items. The big question is whether Amazon will remain a Library of Congress, where nothing gets deleted and shelf space is unlimited, or whether the user experience will start to deteriorate. If you type in “financial thriller” and get 20,000 search results, that experience eventually breaks down.
One big prediction: I think Amazon will introduce some kind of quality gate for what gets uploaded to the store. The current standard is very low and is hurting their user experience, which should be a priority for them.
Related to that, ad costs will go up and the platform will keep growing. Amazon has about 80-85% market share of the ebook market, so that dominance isn’t going anywhere. If you’re in the ebook game, there is no way around Amazon for the foreseeable future.
Thomas: Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show. For anyone who wants to go deeper and get questions answered about their specific genre, we’re doing a free webinar on Monday at 3 o’clock. Check the show notes for the link.
Alex: I look forward to it. Don’t be afraid of the numbers. My job for 20 years was to take complex analysis and convey it so simply that, as we used to say, kids, grandmothers, grandfathers, and corporate CEOs could all understand it.
Webinar Replay
Alex brings such a wealth of facts, figures and tools that we decided to organize a whole webinar with him
- When: Monday, May 14, 2018 3pm – 4:30pm Central Time
- Where: Watch the Replay (Affiliate Link)
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