9 Book Genres You Must Avoid

Some book niches do not fly on Amazon Kindle

--- There are a number of book genres and e-book market niches you better avoid if you want to write for money, not just for the passion.

Many commercially-minded authors and publishers ask on what book genres and niches they should spend their time and money. There are many opportunities out there—perhaps too many. And many an author struggles to make up his mind. In such a situation, it can help to start by knowing what NOT to do.

We monitored and ranked the sales of books in 426 sub-categories on Amazon Kindle. The result? — Nine book genres consistently showed up at the bottom of the list. Have a look at the graph.

A "Top 20 Best Seller" in each of these listed categories barely sells a copy a day on average. And as far as softball and rodeo fans are concerned -- well, Kindle does not seem to be the best platform for your passion.

How to find the most attractive niches on Kindle?

Of course, there are far better options than the categories in the image above. Have a look at our E-book Market Strategy Map approach. In essence, we map each of 6,000+ Kindle subcategories on two axes. Every dot on the map is one such category. The further it ends up to the right, the higher is the level of competition in the genre (as measured by the number of English-language books in it.) The higher the category is on the graph, the better its sales rank. Here is the performance data for all Kindle sub- and sub-sub-categories plotted on our book market map.

The green area represents the zone of categories with a high ratio of book sales combined vs. level of competition (i.e. that is where you want to be.) The orange zone is OK; the dark orange zone is the one where you want to stay away from.  (Well, there are cases, where you may want to make use of such low-selling categories. We cover this strategy in more detail in our seminars for members.)

The good news is, there are many opportunities for writers and publishers; you just have to know what they are. You can do so by getting access to the K-lytics ELITE database where we provide you with monthly updated performance data for all these Kindle categories. There, you also find information about book prices, price trends, sales trends, and more. You are looking for the "best Kindle categories?". Learn more about how and where to get the answers here.

And if you do not like this "numbers stuff," please do not worry. This full webinar explains the whole topic of optimal category selection in simple terms, step-by-step: WATCH THE SPECIAL WEBINAR HERE.