Current Trends In Public Domain Literature And KDP Trend Analysis

With all of written human history available as sources, there are millions of books in the public domain today. Of course, a tiny fraction of those books have the lasting impact to remain relevant even in todays culture. However, the ones that do can be just as popular as contemporary books and franchises. But how to know which ones are still good? I like to use Google Trends!

Using Google Trends, I've gone ahead and looked up how some popular public domain works are faring in today's world. Google Trends gives a generic number rating for trends research, so in order to give it context, I've compared each title to one of the most popular franchises of all time, Star Wars. We can call this method The Star Wars Metric. Here is a handy infographic you can use as a quick reference for comparing public domain popularity today according to Google Trends, feel free to share.

As we can see, Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland and The Great Gatsby still seem to be fairly popular despite being written a long time ago. On the other hand, The Island of Doctor Moreau gets a 0 score and appears to be out of fashion today. However, fear not if your favorite public domain IP is unpopular today! These numbers change. Even in the last couple of months, I've seen Alice in Wonderland go from a 5 to a 6, so they really do change all the time. (Note, these figures are based on data in The United States)

The way Google Trends assigns a number is by comparing search traffic among chosen search terms and then normalizing the numbers. So these numbers are relative and only apply to being compared to Star Wars. From this data, we can infer that Winnie the Pooh gets about 15% of the traffic that Star Wars does.

There are some complications when trying to nail down the popularity of a certain IP. For instance, the book accurate spellings are Winnie-the-Pooh and Alice's Adventure in Wonderland. However, these books are better known by their popular names, Alice in Wonderland and Winnie the Pooh, so there can be some extra steps involved when comparing terms.

This can get even more complicated when considering something like The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, which scores a 0. However, if you search for Elsa, a character from Frozen, a movie based on The Snow Queen, the score becomes a 4. So there is some subjectivity in what counts as search traffic for a specific title.

Here are a few more terms rated by The Star Wars Metric not included on the infographic.

Snow White: 9

Tom Sawyer: 1

Huckleberry Finn: 1

Shakespeare: 10

The Snow Queen: 0

Elsa: 4

Sherlock Holmes: 3

Sherlock: 5

Dracula: 7

Of course, this is a website about coloring books. Just because the term is trending on Google does not mean people want coloring books about the topic. For that, we can look to Greg's method (mentioned in a previous post) and use Book Bolt.

According to the Book Bolt method, the term Alice In Wonderland Coloring Book (we gave Alice a 6 on The Star Wars Method) gets 1075 for Amazon search volume, 84 estimated monthly sales and an A grade for overall niche. (I'm not sure why Book Bolt gives an A grade, as the competition for this term is actually high.)

On the other hand, The Great Gatsby (we gave this one a 5 on The Star Wars Method) has 1430 for Amazon search volume, 1 estimated monthly sale and an A grade for the niche.

I'm not sure how Book Bolt estimates the competition for categories. In my own personal research, I found 45 direct competitors on Amazon for the Alice coloring book, whereas for Gatsby I only found 4, so I can't say why both get an A grade for niche. Perhaps in a later post I will do a deep dive into the inner workings on Book Bolt's rating algorithm.

Were you surprised by the popularity rating of any of the titles? What are your favorite public domain works?