After publishing over 200 books on Amazon, IngramSpark, Lulu and a few other platforms, I see the same pattern again and again. The authors who struggle most are not the ones with bad books. They are the ones who wrote into a market that is not there.
The client who picked a market with no buyers
A few years ago a client I will call Sarah was working through my book formatting course. While she formatted, I looked at the market for her book. I use KDSPY for this, and it showed that Amazon had no other books of the type she was about to publish.
That sounds like good news. No competition. It is the opposite. If nobody is selling books on a topic, it usually means nobody is buying them. I told her plainly that she was trying to put a product into a market that does not exist, and that the time and energy of getting the book out would cost her more than it returned.
A market needs both sides, people selling something and people buying it. Puppy training books are a market because people have puppies and want to learn. If you are the only book on a subject, you are not in a market. You are hoping to create one.
When a book does not need to sell
Not every book has to earn money. I put out family writings regularly and I am working on one right now. It will not sell many copies and I am fine with that, because I know it going in. The same goes for a novel on a topic nobody searches for.
The problem is the author who expects sales from a book like that. Decide which kind of book you are publishing before you spend months on it.
Niche 1: fiction, and clean romance in particular
Open KDSPY and look at the Amazon best seller list. Almost all of it is fiction. Inside fiction, most of what you see is romance, and not the steamy kind. It is light-hearted, clean romance with soft pastel covers. Very few of the standard romance covers make the top hundred.
Cozy romance with pastel colours has always been a good niche, and it still is. Fiction is the longer game, though. Readers rarely search fiction by keyword. They might type the kind of story they like, but they will not find your book that way as easily as they find a non-fiction answer to a problem. So you need more marketing, and you need an audience that builds up over years through an email list and a steady run of books.
If you are willing to write book after book in the same area, the total volume of sales on Amazon says this is a profitable place to be.
Niche 2: biographies of people who are alive today
Non-fiction gets you sales faster, because a non-fiction book either solves a problem or matches something people type into the search bar. Go to the non-fiction best sellers and you will find biographies near the top.
People do not buy many biographies of dead people. They buy them about people in the news now. A reader types in a name, say Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, and the top results appear, with your book possibly among them. You can also run ads so that your book sits right next to theirs, and if your cover looks like the others in that row you have a decent chance of the click.
One person I came across did this for a presidential campaign. He published a biography of every candidate. Whoever won or lost, readers searched for the names and found one of his books.
Two rules. First, say nothing negative about a living person. Even if you dislike a candidate, an unkind line in a book gives you a chance of being sued, so tell what they did, what they achieved and what they faced, and let the reader decide. Second, do not copy a Wikipedia article. People have tried that and it can get your account banned. Start from the facts you can find, such as where the person was born and grew up, and flesh them out into a full book.
Niche 3: small business and entrepreneurship
This is my favourite and the one that sells soonest, with no years of audience building first. Small business, entrepreneurship, solopreneur and work from home books sell a lot of copies, in audio, paperback, Kindle and hardback. I have books in this area and they do well in every one of those formats.
People keep trying to work out how to win at business, and as a writer you are entering that same game. Inside the category there are sub-niches, and inside those there are sub-sub-niches. What you want is a sub-niche with fewer than 1,000 books where a good number of them are selling in the top 100,000 on all of Amazon. That tells you readers are buying and the field is not crowded.
My best book in this style brought in about $1,000 a month. It is under a pen name nobody knows, and it still earned that because the topic was underserved.
Why a weird niche loses
Say I wrote a book on types of toothpicks. Who would buy it? Someone very keen on toothpicks, and that is a sale every couple of years. Now suppose the toothpick market turns out to be big. Skilled marketers will move in and take it from you, because they will beat you on the cover, the keywords and the other things I teach on this channel.
Check the market before you write, or before you launch if the book is already done. If the book is finished, we can often angle it toward a market that already exists. That is part of the work in my one-on-one program.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your idea, book a free 25-minute discovery call and bring the topic. You can also start with my free 12-step self-publishing checklist.
Which niche have you found on Amazon that you think is profitable? Tell me in the comments.
Start with the free checklist
The checklist is the 12 steps I follow for every book I publish, from choosing a profitable niche with keyword research to setting up the marketing machine. It is free, and you get it straight away.