Should You Publish Books in Highly Competitive Categories on Amazon?
Busting the myth of low competition, high-demand niches.
There’s this weird idea in the Amazon publishing space that the “key to riches” is to find a CATEGORY with “low competition and high demand.”
While the idea sounds good in theory, it’s not a very effective strategy if you want to sell a lot of books.
I won’t go so far as to say that “low competition, high demand” categories DON’T exist, but they definitely aren’t as common as you may think.
For example, let’s take a look at a few “low competition” subcategories in the “Business & Money” niche on Amazon:
Hmmm, let’s see — you could rank #1 in the “property insurance” subcategory with just three sales a day.
Seems doable?
Right?
…
Well, maybe?
But not if you were actually trying to rank for the keyword “property insurance”.
If I look up this keyword in Helium 10, I can see that 104 people are typing the word “property insurance” into Amazon each month.
However, there are ZERO sales attributed to this keyword phrase.
So if you thought —
Hey, maybe I’ll write a book to rank in the #1 spot for this category because there’s no competition!
You probably wouldn’t sell any copies because this keyword is not resulting in any sales on Amazon.
See the problem?
Next, let’s look at a highly competitive category on Amazon.
New publishers tend to avoid crowded categories like the plague because they don’t like the idea of competing with 90,000 other book titles.
I get it.
It seems intimidating.
The coloring book niche is a great example of this.
If you wanted to rank in the number #1 spot for “Children’s Coloring Books,” you’d have to sell 826 copies a day.
While many new publishers might say —
This niche is TOO saturated! How could I possibly sell 826 copies a day?
I look at this and think —
Books in this category have the POTENTIAL to sell 826 copies a day! That’s frickin’ fantastic!
I don’t want to create thousands of books in hundreds of “low competition categories” that don’t sell any copies.
That’s NO fun!
What IS fun is creating books that target low-competition KEYWORDS in high-competition CATEGORIES.
The difference between categories and keywords may seem subtle at first, but allow me to demonstrate.
The “coloring book” category is one of the most saturated book categories on Amazon, with more than 90,000 competing titles.
But check this out —
According to Helium 10, the keyword “reverse coloring book” is responsible for 1,791 sales on Amazon each month.
That’s SALES, not searches.
Now, I had never even heard of a “reverse coloring book” until I found the keyword phrase in Helium 10.
Apparently, it’s a book full of colorful abstract images that you can doodle and draw lines on instead of coloring in.
Here’s an example —
And get this —
Instead of 90,000 competitors, there are only 1,000 competing products ranking for this niche keyword phrase.
I feel like something like this would be pretty easy to create with an AI image generator like Jasper AI Art.
What do you think?
Takeaway
Don’t be afraid to go after high-competition niches on Amazon.
High competition often = high customer demand, and that means potential SALES $$$.
Look for low-competition, high-demand KEYWORDS within a competitive category.
I do this using Helium 10.
Helium 10 Tutorials Coming Soon!
A few of you have requested more “tutorial style” articles on how to use Helium 10 to do keyword research on Amazon, and I’ll be releasing some here on Medium very soon.
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