I went ahead and hired a marketing person this year, off the Reedsy marketplace. (https://reedsy.com/#/freelancers/deni-c) So far, it’s been good. And it’s helped me in terms of figuring out what I need to do for my books.

I’m going to share some of what I’ve started doing to research a book market, before (or even post) book launch.

I’m sure that most of this is going to be old hat to a lot of you, who are doing so much more than we have been in terms of launching books. For me, it’s kinda new, and I thought I’d talk about it.

First off, what I’m doing only works with the books that are more trope-adjacent. Some of my books are so far off the beaten path that this approach is only vaguely useful. I was purposefully writing books that weren’t similar to anything else and so trying to compare them is just painful.

But for the more recent books, this can be a useful exercise.

For me, I’ve read information about researching the market before. I never knew exactly what that meant.

Now, I have a process. I’m still refining it, but it’s working presently for me.

I start by searching Amazon for comp books. Not authors, books. The goal is to find fifteen books that are similar enough to mine, that all have a Best Sellers Rank of less than 50,000.

I’ve created a spreadsheet where the first tab is a table for matching book info. The columns are Rank, Link, Title (and subtitle if I’m looking for that), Author Name, Price, Self or Trad pubbed, and Notes.

As for linking, I’m an Amazon associate, and I use the Amazon Site Stripe. It makes it so easy to get a shortened Amazon link that contains my affiliate code. https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/home/account/sitestripe

This spreadsheet has five tabs in it.

Comps (which I just covered above), Covers, Blurbs, Categories, and Keywords.

Once I find a close enough book, I fill out the Comps tab with the appropriate information. Then I copy the blurb and put that in the blurb tab. I also save a copy of the cover image into a folder, that I later grab and put into the spreadsheet as well.

That’s one night’s work. Doing more than that makes my head hurt.

So next, I’ll start looking at covers. I’ll drag all of the ones I saved into the spreadsheet, then move them around as necessary to put together the covers that look alike. Doing this was how I figured out that I had gone in the wrong direction in terms of the Paranormal Woman’s Fiction series that I was writing. What I’d come up with was completely appropriate for Witch Cozy Mystery. NOT for PWF. Saved me a lot of time and hassle!

Again, that’s one night’s work. Trying to do more than that in a night makes the work feel overwhelming.

Then, I start looking at blurbs. This takes me the longest, going through the blurbs, seeing what’s similar and what’s different. As I’m an intuitive, I just need to load my back brain with the information and let the solution come out of my fingers a week or so later. So I don’t look at the blurbs and then try to tweak mine. I fill my head with the info, then go do other things, and let back brain do the work.

Categories and Keywords—I’ve been using Publisher Rocket to figure these out. The product has gotten SO MUCH BETTER than it used to be. (You used to generate a huge list of categories and then hand-cull them. Process took HOURS.)

Now, the product only works if you have an internet connection because it’s constantly going out and looking at what it’s scraped from the Amazon site.

It used to be, back in the bad old days, that you would use your keywords to slot your book into the categories that you wanted. Now, it’s an accepted practice to determine your categories, then send an email to Amazon to get them to put your book into all the ones you want.

Now, for keywords, using Publisher Rocket, I’m finding phrases that readers used to search Amazon. This makes my keywords much more powerful. I find seven keyword-phrase matches if I can, that go with the book.

Same with categories. I’m searching for actual Amazon categories. Sometimes those are still tricky to find, but eventually, I’ve been able to use the tool to drill down into the category I want.

Is Publisher Rocket completely intuitive? NO. It’s going to take time and effort on your part to figure out how to make it work. I had a marketing person walk me through how to use it. It’s far beyond the scope of anything I’m doing here to deep dive into the product. Plus, there are lots of YouTube videos that will do a better job than I will.

(However, if you’re local, I still work for food, so feel free to take me out to a nice dinner and I’ll show you how I’m using Publisher Rocket.)

Now, that’s all the further that I’ve gotten in terms of researching books. But I figure this is enough for y’all for now.

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