Using Amazon to Evaluate Your Fiction Book’s Competition

Amazon is a one of the most useful tools for an indie author. Because it sells so many books (and is used by so many indie authors as their primary sales platform), Amazon drives the market. As long as you’ve written a compelling book, using Amazon to evaluate your competition will provide insights that complement your work and drive its success.

To begin the process, you need to go to Amazon.com. Then you type in a search term that matches the topic of your book. For example, you would type in “civil war inspirational fiction” if you were writing a civil war era book where the purpose is inspirational and the story is fictional. To narrow the search, limit it to ‘books’ rather than searching the entire Amazon site. (That’s an option in the search menu.)

What comes up is a page of search results. For evaluation purposes, you rarely need more than two or three pages of results (about 10 recommendations).

Evaluation Basics

You’re looking at a page of results. Now what?

First, recognize that search results change. What you’re looking at is a snapshot reflecting sales success within a window of time. Tomorrow’s order may be different. However, don’t worry about this. Today’s results are going to lay a solid foundation. So will tomorrow’s and the next day’s. So take action using today’s search. Even if you take several days to do your research, there’s no need to search again for the same keyword.

Second, notice that the first bank of results are ‘sponsored.’ Ignore these books. They’re just advertisements.

Explore for Information.

In our picture above, the first book is Cale’s Story: An Epic Civil War Novella. When you go its page, you’ll see that even though our search was in the ‘Books’ category, the first format Amazon is promoting is its Kindle edition. In addition, Amazon is also promoting its KindleUnlimited subscription. Click on the Paperback option to switch to that page. This is where you’ll find sales information for today’s most common print format.

Note: Researching Kindle will also be useful; however, if you only use Kindle results, you’re only seeing the buying information for Kindle users. While this includes users of Kindle apps as well as Kindle units, you need both print and Kindle information.)

Once you’re on the book’s sales page, scroll down until you see a section called ‘Product details.’ This is where you’ll find the information you need.

There are several types of information you’ll find on a book’s sales page. You’ll find some of the most important in the ‘Amazon Best Seller’s Rank’ section.

• You see where the book ranks against all books sold on Amazon. The larger the number, the poorer it ranks against the competition.
• You see how the book has ranked within two or three classifications used by Amazon to sort books. These classifications are equivalent to what publishers call genres.

Here’s why this information matters.

Sales Results Differ by Medium.

Notice that Cale’s Story ranks at #1,912,291 against total print book sales volume. That’s nowhere near the top 100! However, when you go to the Kindle page for this book, the best sellers rank is #102,507. This book is performing better as an eBook.

In addition as you review the sales information for the print version, you see the ranking in two categories the author selected for her book. You may notice is that ‘Historical Fiction’ and ‘Coming of Age Fiction’ are the categories for which this book ranks in the print edition. However, neither of these phrases were in your search—just the word fiction.

So what brought Cale’s Story to the top of your search results? This content is for members only.

Summary

Once you have completed this exercise, you’ll have a decent grasp on the competition you’re facing within your fiction genre. Reading excerpts from the most success authors will give you a feel for what your final draft must match.

If you find the comparison between your current work and theirs discouraging, take heart. No successful author’s first draft is publishable. There are techniques they use to hone their manuscripts. That’s what I help my clients master.