What is the Amazon KDP Formula?
Amazon has 12 million books for sale for Kindle. I see pages suggesting that there are 30 million active kindle users.
My problem is how to turn my book, 1 in 12 million, into a 1 in 30 million, Kindle user.
The first solution is based on my Harmonica book. I receive two or three sales a month, making $50 or so a year. This is because I have a unique book on a topic that is interesting in a category that is not overly clogged with similar books. I have the only book that teaches a person how to play in the style of Sonny Boy Williamson, an interesting and important harmonica play from the 1950s.
So rule 1 is to write a unique book that appeals to an audience that is starved for this type of book.
I have three books of Science Fiction short stories. Amazon reports that there are at least 20,000 Science Fiction anthologies for sale on kindle. My best book is ranked at 2,770. I do not believe that this is high enough to generate any sales through organic Amazon searches. My other books are ranked 4 or 5 thousand.
My anthology is rated 2,770 because I recently put it up with for free using the KDP promotions options. You get 5 free days for every three months. The book was #1 in FREE kindle for all of last Sunday. The book got about 100 downloads. 100 free downloads results in 86th percentile for rank. If you consider that it is a log curve, without doing the math, I guess that it might take 1,000 or more free downloads to make it into the top 100.
Clearly, the way to make things work is to somehow connect a book with a subject that is in demand. My book claims to be hard Science Fiction, which seems to improve my odds, somewhat. My Cyberpunk book does poorly, about the same as my Weird tales book.
I will be releasing a novel, soon. I have given up trying to sell the novel to a publisher or an agent. It seems a stupid idea. I need to go over the book, making corrections, one more time. Everyone who reads the book comments that I have enough characters to write another volume in a series. I am thinking that series of books do better than single novels.
I still haven’t come up with a formula. Google gives me no answers that are useful. I will ask Bing chat to see what it says.
Bing’s answer:
There are several ways to sell more fiction books on Amazon Kindle. One way is to use targeted Amazon ads that capitalize on your keyword strategy 1. Another way is to build an author platform over the course of several years 1. You can also optimize your title and subtitle, choose the right Kindle keywords, and hire a cover designer 1.
Kindle keywords are the words a shopper types into Amazon when looking for a book or Kindle ebook. They help make it so that your book gets discovered without having to do major marketing . By selecting the right Kindle keywords, you can increase your book’s visibility and reach more readers .
In order to find profitable Kindle keywords, you need to find phrases or words that shoppers actually type into Amazon and are willing to pay money for. You also want to make sure that the competition for those keywords isn’t too hard. One way to find the most searched Amazon book keywords is to use Amazon’s autofill function in their search box. This function guesses what you are going to type into it based on the popularity of particular terms from other shoppers typing things into it .
To use the autofill function to find the most searched Amazon book keywords, you can follow these steps:
Ensure you are using Incognito mode on your browser so that your previous information doesn’t affect what Amazon shows you.
Go to Amazon.com and start typing a word or phrase related to your book into the search box.
As you type, Amazon will suggest popular search terms based on what other shoppers have typed into the search box.
By using this method, you can get an idea of what terms shoppers are using to search for books like yours on Amazon.