Niche Hunting On KDP

I've had a commenter on this blog ask if I think Amazon KDP is already saturated. It's a good question. If there are already too many books on Amazon, whats the point in trying to publish more. I've seen many videos on youtube using this exact sentiment as an icon for the video.

I think the idea that Amazon is saturated is both true and untrue. You might as well say, what's the point in making new movies or new songs since there are so many out already. Since there is some evidence that the Amazon market is somewhat saturated, the question a publisher should be asking is, what types of books is there still demand for? There is no specific answer to the question, instead, there is a method to finding the answer; niche hunting.

There are a lot of ways an aspiring publisher can hunt for good niches. Greg Gottfried goes over his own techniques for niche hunting in this youtube video. (Unfortunately Greg has disabled this video from being embedded in the blog post). There's a good chance if you spend some time working with KDP, you'll arrive to a similar conclusion as Greg has. I've tried my own hand at niche hunting and it looked similar to what Greg describes but Greg's tutorial is much more succinct and he does it all within one program, Book Bolt.

The first step in Greg's process is narrowing down the niche to one type of book. In the video he provides a fairly extensive list of low to medium content book categories including coloring books, word searches, wedding guest books and dream journals. For this video, Greg focuses on word searches, which he claims is the best entry level KDP book to publish. This, he says, is beause word searches are harder to make than regular notebooks and very few people know how. (Personally, I'm not sure if he's correct about that latter statement, word searches are fairly easy to create using programs such as book bolt and most likely most people savvy enough to publish in KDP will also be savvy enough to make word searches.) Whether or not that's true is irrelevant because his main thesis is about outlining the process of niche hunting.

After picking a book type, Greg goes on to describe techniques on how you can further niche down into specfic categories. The first technique is the alphabet soup technique, where greg simply goes onto amazon and types in "word search for " in the search bar, and then looks at what comes up in the suggestions. These suggestions are presumably popular searches and therefore good potential niches to target.

Greg further refines his research process by using Book Bolt (there are other programs you can use). Using the software he can look up which search terms are most trending on Amazon and Google. The software apparently also further can be used to assess how much competition already exists for a specific niche and can estimate monthly sales.

Personally, I've never used Book Bolt in this way, but I am interested in giving it a try to find out how well this method works. You have to give it to Greg, he's found a way to use word searching to make word searches.

What niches do you think would be popular? Would you ever try Greg's technique? Do you like word searches?