What You Should Know about Sales Rankings and Competition

Category Go to the Kindle eBooks section in the Kindle Store on the Amazon website. Once you’re done with that, look at the book categories on the left side of the webpage. Try and narrow down what category you want your book to fit in. Don’t rush into this decision because it will determine what content is included in your eBook. Shortlist the ones that you want to work on instead of picking one right off the bat. It will be easier to choose from a smaller list than a larger one.

Subcategory After clicking on the category of your choice, you will find a subcategory list. Use this list to help you determine what you want your book to focus on.

Genre Make a note of the genres of the bestselling books on Amazon. Pay close attention to the genres that are repeated multiple times throughout the list. Consider fitting your eBook in a popular genre.

Context It’s also a good idea to know the context a lot of bestselling authors base their stories on. There may be some contexts that are more interesting to people than others. The choice of context may also be dependent on current events. For example, if there’s a war going on in some parts of the world, you may find a lot of books that address the war. Some books may include stories that are based on different content, providing readers with the opportunity for escapism.

Subject It’s not necessary to pay close attention to the subjects of some bestselling books, but it is good to know what people are writing about. Some topics (subjects) are more popular than others due to the times they were written and published in. If you are planning to write on a popular topic, make sure that your book provides a unique take on the subject. Your eBook won’t get much readership if you write content similar to what is already out there.

What You Should Know about Sales Rankings and Competition

To maximize the sales of your eBook, you must write a unique book. Now, this may sound daunting, but it’s not. We don’t mean that you have to come up with an idea that has never been done before. We just mean that you should be smart with your topic selection, and write on a topic that doesn’t have much competition. Competition, in this case, means that there are a lot of books already written on a

topic. Also, high competition means that the books published on the said topic are included in the top seller list.

Model Your Book on One with Low Competition It will be difficult for your book to become successful if there are already a lot of good books published on the subject you’ve written on. Therefore, your goal should be to choose a topic that has low competition. This will increase the chances of your eBook becoming successful. One way to measure competition is by checking the sales ranking for books under a topic.

Model Your Book on One with Low Sales Rankings We recommend a modeling strategy in which you model your book on one that has very low sales ranking. Sales ranking on Amazon is the rank that a particular product has within a category. A more significant number of sales result in a higher sales ranking on Amazon (in which one is the highest). The sales ranking i s essentially a measure of how popular a product is on Amazon. Your goal is to identify what topic this book is on and some reasons why this particular book did poorly. Once you identify some glaring problems, you should write your book on the same topic, but make sure not to repeat the mistakes in that book. Modeling your book on one that has a low sales ranking means that your competition, in this case, will be little. You’ll have a better chance of making your eBook successful because you won’t have much to compete against.

What Sales Rankings Are Relevant for Non-Fiction Writing If you are writing a non-fiction book, you should aim to use a book that has a sales ranking of 25,000 or below. It’s effortless to check a book’s sales ranking on Amazon, so you don’t need to worry. Go to the Kindle Store section on Amazon and scroll through the categories list. Select the category that you would like to write on. Within that category, look at the subcategories to narrow down your search for a topic. Once you select the subcategory, look for the lowest books on the list of books within that subcategory. These books have a low sales ranking –which is why they are low on the list. When you find a book that seems interesting enough to model on, check its sales ranking. You can check the sales ranking by opening the product’s page on Amazon. Scroll down to the product details section. Here you will find the bestsellers rank. It will include the book’s rank in different categories.

Look for a book that has a sales ranking of 25.000 or lower because this means that this book’s category is in demand. This is good news for you because it means that you’ll have a good chance of making money by writing a book in this category.