Self-Publishing a Novel: 3 Tools With Underrated Benefits

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What should a novelist do when sales level off? Find a sub-niche in your genre where readers still buy and few books compete, using three tools: KDSpy to see what competitors rank for, Publisher Rocket to find more keywords, and Google Trends to see which topics are rising. Changing the plot or adding characters did not help the author in this story. Changing the keywords did. If you write for young adults, see can you make money with self published YA books.

Why did Mary’s romance sales level off?

Mary, from Sydney, had been writing shapeshifter romance for several years, and she had tried everything to sell a few more copies. Nothing worked.

In the early days of that genre, almost any book sold, because its readers were always hungry for more. Then the market flooded. Mary wanted a bigger audience, but her sales levelled off and then began to sink. Other shifter romance authors kept climbing the Amazon rankings while she dropped, so it could not be the whole niche. Was it a bubble she had caught in the early years, a gold rush that was now over? If she gave up, she would lose that income for years to come.

So she changed the books. She added characters. That had no effect. She tried new twists and turns in the plot. That did not help either, because the books were not the problem. The problem was how readers found them. In the early days, “shapeshifter romance” in the title was enough to bring in a steady stream of new readers. Now it wasn’t.

Which tools found her a new sub-niche?

Mary booked a free discovery call with me, and we took a deep look at a genre I had not studied before. The big finding was that she was not looking closely at her competitors. She assumed that since they all wrote shifter romance, there was not much difference. In fact, her part of the genre was flooded, but it had sub-niches with plenty of sales and not many books.

1. KDSpy came first. It lets you see how competing books rank for specific keywords and which of them sell, which is the quickest way to start on this puzzle.
2. Next we used Publisher Rocket, another favourite of mine, to find profitable keywords she had not thought of. It is a one-time payment of $199 with a 30-day money-back guarantee (Publisher Rocket). It also does category research and competition analysis, which I show in how I use Publisher Rocket for Amazon ads.
3. We put those keywords back into KDSpy to see which books in the top 100,000 were winning for each one, and looked for keywords with a good ratio of sales to competing books. That is where the gold nuggets started to show.
4. Last, we checked Google Trends to see how shifter romance and the new keywords had done over time, and which were rising. Trends shows each topic’s interest on a scale of 0 to 100, relative to all searches, not raw search counts (Google Trends Help), so I treat it as one clue among several.

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No single tool or single search did it. Running the keywords through all of them showed us the patterns and gave Mary clear directions to take her books. I explain how to use keywords on KDP itself in how to use keywords on Amazon KDP.

Keyword research is easy in one sense, but it takes a lot of work: looping through a list of keywords again and again, guessing, testing and going back and forth between tools. I also suggested Ubersuggest to Mary, because it gives you a list of related keywords people search for (check its current free limits). Then you go back to KDSpy to see whether books on those keywords sell. People searching for something does not mean books on it are selling, and that check is what makes the combination work.

What happened when she pivoted?

Mary found a few sub-niches in shifter romance where almost every book sold a lot of copies, and she started writing for them. Same storylines and plot structure, but with the profitable keywords in the title and subtitle, and covers that matched the best sellers in that sub-niche.

Sales started coming in on the new books, and some of her older books got a bump as well. New readers loved her work and went back for her earlier shapeshifter books.

How do you ride a trend like a surfer?

Trends go up and down all the time, and as an author you ride them like a surfer rides waves. Don’t jump on a wave that is going nowhere. Look for one that has been building for a while, ride it, and when it starts to drop, look for the next wave in your own lane, inside the niche you already write in.

If you write about gardening and vertical gardens or Zen gardens suddenly become popular, you can pivot slightly and publish what readers want now. If you started with bear shifter romance, you are not stuck there. You can move to the next sub-niche, as Mary did. Finding the market is the first step to selling, which I go into in why your self-published books aren’t selling.

If your novel’s sales have levelled off like Mary’s, book a free 25-minute discovery call and we will look for your next sub-niche together. There is no commitment to buy anything.

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