amazon categories – Science Fiction & Fantasy Marketing Podcast

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

July 17, 2018 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

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:

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Alex newton, amazon, amazon categories, amazon keywords, amazon search, fantasy trends., k-lytics, science fiction trends

SFFMP 152: Pricing, Category Stuffing, Launching with Three Books, and Marketing Cross-Genre Novels

October 3, 2017 SFFpodcast Group Discussion, Podcast

This week, we answered some listener questions that had been piling up. We touched on a variety of topics, such as…

Should you try to put your books in as many categories as possible, and what can we do about books that shouldn’t be there knocking us out of our Top 100s on Amazon?
Amazon’s page of keywords for getting into unlisted categories: Selecting Browse Categories.
How many downloads a day can you expect from permafree titles?
Is it worth trying to sell English novels in countries where English isn’t the primary language?
How can trad publishers get away with charging 9.99 or more for ebooks, and can indies do this if their books are well edited and professionally done?
How do you market cross-genre books that fall into more than one category?
How do you guys feel about killing characters, and does it ever get easier?
How does your plotting process work?
Has anyone tried Kobo Plus yet and gotten results?
Where you can advertise as a newer author with less than twenty reviews on your book? Here are the links to the spreadsheets Lindsay mentioned (that C. Gockel maintains). We’re not sure if they’re up to date though, so let us know if you know of a good and recent resource. Where to Advertise Free Ebooks | Where to Advertise 99 Cent Ebooks.
How did Lindsay relaunch her pen name successfully after a long gap between releases?
If you want to write three books before launching any of them, can you use novellas as part of the plan?

Jeff and Lindsay are working on new projects, but Jo has some links if you want to check out what he’s up to right now. Here’s his serial-in-progress: The Adventures of Rustle and Eddy. Also, he’s recently done a series of “How I Write” blog posts, which cover his plotting process, among other things.

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amazon categories, book launches, book marketing, cross-genre fiction, keywords, pen names, pricing ebooks

SFFMP 70: Retold Fairy Tales, Kindle Unlimited, and Finding Less Competitive Categories with K.M. Shea

March 1, 2016 SFFpodcast Author Interview, Podcast

Fantasy author K.M. Shea talks about how she’s found a lot of success publishing retold fairy tales and is now a full-time author. We covered…

The perks of publishing in a category that is underserved by traditional publishing and that isn’t hugely competitive.
Why K.M. has everything in KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited now (yes, she’s tried going wide too).
Monitoring page reads and payouts in Kindle Unlimited to make sure it’s working for you
Pitfalls and things to be careful of when retelling fairy tales.
Creating a series even when your books are stand-alone — is there a theme that can pull them all together?
Encouraging more reviews for books by offering free extras for all when certain numbers of reviews are reached.
Connecting with readers and giving them lots of extras to turn them into ravenous fans who want to see you succeed.
Choosing a cover style when you’re in a category where this isn’t a Big 5 presence and examples are all over the place.

If you’ve enjoyed the show, be sure to check out K.M. Shea’s books on Amazon. She recommend starting with The Snow Queen, Book 1.