I find it a lot easier to write non-fiction than fiction. From my limited success the key to successful publishing this type of book on Amazon is
- Find a niche that is somewhat searched but not a lot of competition
- write an extremely targeted book on that
- Get reviews
How do you do that first step: finding the niche?
Bearing in mind that I have only had 1 real success out of 7 (although I have some hopes for #8) I am far from an expert, but I believe these things to be true
- Amazon rankings are very much like search engines used to be in the past. Very keyword centric. At least for non-fiction if you have a matching title or subtitle or a particular keyword you are likely to rank highly for that.
- This is more true if you also have some good reviews
- If you look and you see a bunch of books all with titles that have those keywords in the title, it is probably pretty competitive
- I don't know how to get a figure for how many searches something has on Amazon. You can get that data out of Google which might be a relative proxy. However if you do start typing in a phrase into Amazon, it will give suggestions. Presumably the suggestions that it pops up are more searched.
For instance, when I type "Early Ret" into Amazon, it suggests
- Early Retirement
- Early Retirement Extreme
- Early Retirement Strategies
However I'm not sure that any of those are heavily searched, since all the books that come in those searches have sales ranks > 100,000 which means they are selling less than ~1 per day according to this tool
https://kindlepreneur.com/amazon-kdp-sales-rank-calculator/By contrast, when I search for "building a house" on Amazon the top couple books returned have rankings <20,000, which means at least ~15 sales a day which is enough to be real money. If I had particular knowledge in that area I might look for a more targeted niche to write. "Building a house" is pretty broad. Something like "plumbing your own house" might be narrow enough that I would want to target it. ( I mean, I wouldn't because I don't know how to plumb house, nor have a researched that particular keyword, but theoretically that is a narrow, addressable niche)
More than that I don't really know. I'm personally planning on dropping $50 to purchase some software that claims to be able to help you easily determine the level of competition for a keyword, and how heavily it is searched when it is released next week. However I'm not affiliated with that tool other than planning to try it out, and since I haven't done that yet and can't vouch for it I'm not posting a link. If I try it and love it I will.