Tag Archive - KDSPY

Considerations When Choosing Your Niche Genre

July 5, 2021 in Marketing and Promotion with 0 Comments

Amazon has many categories and subcategories for fiction, and if you upload your book into the Kindle store and choose general categories, you’re going to be competing with hundreds of thousands of books.

What you want for best discoverability is to have your book in categories that sell well yet don’t have tremendous competition.

All novels can fit in a multitude of subgenres, which we’ll see in just a moment. So while you might have in mind to write fantasy or mystery, which are popular genres that sell well, notching down to a couple of smaller niche genres will help your book have a better chance of coming up high in the search engines.

You need to be willing to adjust the type of novel you write or want to write. You may already be writing in a popular genre, such as romance. But this objective of finding a niche subgenre might mean you have to consider writing something a bit different from what you currently write or want to write. It may mean choosing an entirely different genre altogether.

What’s most important when considering a genre to write in is this: You should feel competent or comfortable with the thought of writing in that genre. Continue Reading…

Targeting Genre with the KDSPY Kindle App

July 20, 2015 in Writing for Life with 5 Comments

Recently I wrote some posts on targeting genre for big sales, as this is a topic that I’ve been very interested in, personally, for years. I always wondered just how much genre had to do with a novel’s success, and when I did my “experiment” a couple of years ago by writing in a genre that purportedly “sold itself,” I proved to myself (and perhaps to many others) that genre really matters. (If you didn’t read my blog post on The Book Designer that went viral in the writing world, take a look at it here. )

My aim was to write a novel that carefully fit a big-selling genre and see if it would sell with little effort on my part. I used a pen name, and although I did a little bit of marketing—similar to what a new author would do—I was astounded by the sales I saw. Way more than all the sales I got from my other half dozen self-published novels.

Whether You’re in It for the Money or Not

You might not care about making money off your books. But some of us have families to support and bills to pay. I felt guilty for years writing novel after novel that didn’t sell, “wasting precious time” (my assessment) when I could have been working at Wal-Mart for minimum wage and at least bringing some money in. Continue Reading…