Your goals as an author should guide your investment in keyword or category research tools
With the majority of US book sales now happening online, the importance of a book’s discoverability through retailers such as Amazon can hardly be overstated. And that discoverability is tied in part to a book’s category and keywords.
Categories represent genres and subgenres of books recognized by librarians, booksellers, and readers, such as sweet romance or cozy mystery. Some categories are small or emerging (humorous fantasy), while others are popular and have lots of competition within them (contemporary romance).
Meanwhile, keywords are more granular and describe the story—including time periods and settings, character types and roles, plot themes, and special situations or events. Amazon offers self-publishing authors guidance on selecting both categories and keywords.
Self-publishing authors seek help researching categories and keywords for various reasons:
- Authors might not know the industry standards or where their book fits into the landscape, especially if new to the publishing community.
- Authors want to make more informed decisions or experiment with new keywords in the hopes of increasing sales. Refreshing a book’s metadata—including book descriptions and keywords—is recommended by many marketers across traditional publishing and self-publishing alike.
- Effective Amazon ads—often a must for indie visibility on the site—involve experimenting with and identifying good keywords that are profitable.
- Authors who write to market want to find hidden opportunities or underserved markets and understand how competitive a category is before they enter it.
We looked at three leading category and keyword research tools geared toward authors focused on Amazon sales. They are Publisher Rocket, KDSPY, and K-lytics.
- Publisher Rocket. Launched in 2016 (and first known as KDP Rocket), Publisher Rocket is software that presents you with Amazon stats from the last three to five days in the US market. You can learn what keywords customers are currently typing into Amazon, how many people search for each, and how competitive they are. It also includes a full list of all 14,000 Amazon categories, with estimates of how many sales you’d need to make to get listed in the top 10 sellers for that category. It carries a one-time cost of $97, which includes all updates.
- KDSPY. Launched in 2014, KDSPY is a browser extension (for Chrome and Firefox) that offers an inside look at what’s happening underneath any page you visit at Amazon. It surfaces the same type of data as Publisher Rocket, showing trends on the site over the last several days. It also includes country-specific data, not just US data. It carries a one-time cost of $47.
- K-lytics. Geared primarily for the write-to-market crowd, K-lytics focuses on human interpretation of current Amazon category and keyword data, with a longer-term focus. Every month, it sends subscribers an overview of the main book genres and sub-markets, with additional analysis of trending markets. Pricing starts at $37/month, or you can get an annual pass for $497. Authors can also buy one-off reports on just the genres they’re interested in.
We researched Facebook author groups and message boards and also reached out to several experts in the field to determine how authors put these tools to work for their business. While the following points are general, they reflect the most common uses today.
- Authors tend to prefer Publisher Rocket for researching keywords for Amazon ads and book metadata. Overall, it tends to be favored by authors who aren’t necessarily writing to market and want to best perform in a genre they know well or are dedicated to.
- KDSPY is popular with the write-to-market crowd to help authors surface opportunities or categories that are selling well. It’s likely to benefit authors writing in multiple genres or subgenres and who are ready to switch their focus in an instant.
- K-lytics is similar to KDSPY in that it helps authors identify hot trends or categories and figure out where to write next (or what to avoid), in terms of subgenres especially. However, it stands apart as offering more long-term analysis and trend identification with a human touch.
Novelist Kirsten Oliphant has used all three tools and tells us, “SPY is very helpful if you’re on Amazon and find a category and want to know the data without clicking every book. … You can also do that with a particular author.” But she emphasizes the data represents only a limited timeframe. This is particularly important when studying the estimated earnings for book titles (extrapolated from sales ranking); these figures tend to be inaccurate, since they’re based on a small, ephemeral slice of data.
Novelist Lindsay Buroker, co-host of the Six Figure Authors podcast, says that she finds Publisher Rocket useful for both keywords to put in those seven metadata boxes that Amazon gives you and also for researching keywords for Amazon ads.
While these tools can be helpful, they are not essential. It is possible to conduct Amazon keyword and category research by studying bestsellers on the site and using free tools. Of course, this takes time and experience, but some marketers advocate this approach over paid tools. Author and marketer Nicholas Erik details his process for finding Amazon keywords at his site (scroll to section four); he also describes how he identifies write-to-market categories.
A leading indie author marketing expert told us their default position is skepticism toward such tools: “They’re relatively expensive, results tend to be overblown, they often are pushed a little too much because of lucrative affiliate schemes, and they appeal to the part of the psyche which wants a magic bullet, so even if they have limited uses, people probably use them as a crutch to avoid more serious issues they should be addressing.”
Bottom line: If you’re an author writing mainly what you desire, with little regard for what’s performing well on Amazon, these tools may be of limited or no use to you. Publisher Rocket can help authors investing in Amazon ads, especially those with little or no experience in keyword-based advertising. If you’re curious about current trends in your genre or subgenre, consider the one-off reports from K-lytics; they offer a more accessible interpretation of available data.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
