KDSpy Changes Everything: More Than Manual Searching

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KDSpy beats searching for keywords by hand. It finds in seconds what takes hundreds of hours manually, it is a one-time payment, and it is the tool my team and I use for our books. Below is the manual method, why it is so slow, and how I use KDSpy.

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Why do keywords matter so much on Amazon?

After running ads for books that have been shown over 200 million times, one thing is obvious: the right keywords are what people search for, and a book that ignores them is hard to find. Nobody will see your cover, the second most important thing, if your book never shows up in the results.

Sarah writes books about horses. While we worked on her formatting and image placement, I suggested she go to Amazon and look at what the best sellers in her niche were doing. We tried to find competitors’ books for her keywords, and could not find them. That was a bad sign. She had skipped the most important step, which is choosing a market where many people search for books and few books exist. She assumed that putting the book on the market would be enough. It is not.

How do you check a keyword by hand?

You can, and it shows what a good keyword looks like.

1. Type the keyword into Amazon’s Kindle section.
2. Go through each of the top 100 results (10 pages).
3. For each, choose the Kindle or paperback version your reader would more likely buy, scroll down, and note its sales rank.
4. Copy the title and subtitle into a spreadsheet with the rank, publishing date, page count and number of reviews.
5. Count how many of the top 100 rank better than 100,000, and compare with the total number of results. In my experience a rank around 100,000 in the Kindle store means roughly a sale a day, though Amazon does not publish how rank and sales relate. The ratio tells you how many books are selling compared with how many compete.

For Sarah’s horse keywords the ratio was poor. That does not mean no one buys horse books, only that those keywords were the wrong ones.

Then repeat for every keyword. Ideas come from Amazon’s search suggestions, from best-sellers’ titles, from tools such as Google Trends, AnswerThePublic and Ubersuggest, and from Publisher Rocket, which I use to find more keywords. Each keyword is 100 books on 10 pages and a spreadsheet row each. It is hundreds of hours, and most authors give up and publish without checking.

How does KDSpy do it?

You don’t have to do this by hand. I tell all my clients to use KDSpy. It is fast and easy, and it is a one-time payment. In October 2026 KDSpy’s site listed it at $79 plus tax, paid once with no monthly fees, with a 60-day money-back guarantee.

1. Start with a keyword you think matches your book.
2. Search for it in the tool. It pulls up the first 100 results with titles, authors, sales rank, number of reviews, publish date and price.
3. Sort by sales rank and see how many are in the top 100,000.
4. Compare with the number of results. That tells you whether it is a good keyword for your book.

I have used it for years on the 230 books I have put on the market. I explain the same idea of choosing a hungry market in KDP’s darkest publishing secret and the biggest Amazon KDP secret.

Where do you put the keywords?

In the title and subtitle first. That is perhaps the most important place. KDP also lets you use up to seven keywords or short phrases, and says to think like a reader, put terms in the order a customer would type them, and not repeat your title, contributors or categories. Your KDP title and subtitle must follow the metadata rules.

You can also use keywords naturally in your author bio and description. I understand Amazon does not use those for search, so they will not bring results by themselves, but I put them in anyway, and bold them in the description, because people scanning for a keyword look for what stands out and want to see that the book matches. Ads can use keywords too.

One of my clients asked what to do with a big keyword list. Keep track of the profitable ones and use them in all your future books, in the title and subtitle. When someone searches, we want our books on page one of Amazon, and when they click our author name they see our other books. I do not care which way they enter my ecosystem.

What else brings readers besides keywords?

Content marketing, ads and word of mouth, together. People find your blog or videos because they search, not because the site is amazing. Content marketing brings traffic even when readers do not find the book by searching. Ads let you reach them. Friends and family can help but do not result in long-term sales. You do not need every channel to work. You need each one to work a little, and some may work well. My group coaching goes further into this.

I wrote about what I spend on tools in everything I spend money on for my best selling book. If you would like me to check your keywords with you, book a free 25-minute discovery call. For how a romance author used KDSpy to find a profitable sub-niche, see self-publishing a novel: 3 tools with underrated benefits.

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