SFFMP 190: Analyzing the Amazon Store to Help Your Books Perform Better with Alex from K-Lytics

This week, we were joined by data cruncher Alex Newton who runs the K-Lytics (i.e. Kindle Analytics) service for authors and publishers. He’s been taking a look at trends in Science Fiction and Fantasy this summer, so we invited him on to talk about the findings of his latest report. He also gave us some great information on the Amazon store such as how keywords work (and don’t work) on the site and the differences between Amazon bestseller lists and what comes up in Amazon search results.

Here are some more of the specifics we covered:

• Some SF/F sub-categories that are trending upward.
• Finding categories where it’s easier to get a bestseller tag (and whether it can be useful to rank highly in a tiny niche few people browse).
• Finding the intersection between writing what you love and writing books that can fit into hungry and less competitive sub-genres.
• Using keywords to appear in searches related to your genre.
• Why there’s no point to throwing keywords into your book’s description or into the book itself.
• Whether books that shouldn’t be in genres (i.e. paranormal detective romance stuck in the Arthurian fantasy category) skew the data or matters in the long run.
• Why you might not want to change your keywords and categories around willy nilly.
• Amazon’s natural tendency to promote churn and whether it can be fighting an uphill battle with continuing to advertise the same books for months and year at a time.
• Average price points for books in the Top 100 for various subgenres.

If you’re interested in checking out K-Lytics, their website is here, and they also have some free videos and posts up on their blog.

If you want to see the screenshots that Alex shared, make sure to check out the YouTube video this week:

| Open Player in New Window

Click to download the mp3.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on iTunes.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast on YouTube.

Subscribe to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast via RSS.

Like us on Facebook.