Transcription
In this niche research and competitor analysis deep dive, we will look at the 12 reasons why my books out sell the competition on Amazon KDP. Here you can see my top six books on Amazon KDP and how much I earn with them in one single month.
In this video, I will show you the 12 reasons why I'm able to achieve these high numbers in royalties for so many of my books. Few words about me. My name is Andre Banhad. I'm an Austrian self-publisher living in Cyprus. I started KDP in January 2024, so around two years ago. I earned $44 in my first month with Amazon KDP. And now in my best month, I earned 123,000 in lifetime royalties. I earned over half a million and I published over 50 high content books in these two years. And I'm the co-founder of publish.io.
The first biggest issue every self-publisher without any exception faces when they start publishing is niche research. I know a lot of people who started niche researching and never ended it. I know people who started KDP six months ago and they are still doing niche research. And I know why because it's not an easy topic. It's hard. It's complicated. It's maybe the most important and most complicated thing in all of Amazon KDP. If you nail the niche research, then you have the best base to create a really good book. But you need to nail it and that's really complicated. That's what we will talk about in this video because I'm happy to tell you that I solved this issue completely and we will dive into how I solved it.
Now, in this video, the 12 reasons I share with you today are the 12 points of attack I use to analyze a niche and competition in this niche to make sure I create a book that first of all is in the market with high demand. I think that's obvious. Then, second of all, has an angle to attack and overthrow its competitors and is easy to create or at least not too complex and expensive in production.
But before we start with these 12 points of attack, let's first talk about the basics of news re research. If you have done Amazon KDP for longer than a month, you know these basics. But just to make sure to get everyone on track, the very first thing when you do niche research is an analysis. If there is demand in the niche on the market, if you don't have people buying books in the niche, then it doesn't obviously make sense to um publish a book in this niche. If nobody buys a book about your topic, then you don't want to make a book with that topic.
What I do is um I check three numbers specifically. It's always the BSR, but three different thresholds of BSRS. The first one is or three different levels of BSR. First one is 60,000. Second is 30,000 and the third one is 10,000. So, I'm searching for how many books are below 60,000 PSR. For example, if I find eight books below 60,000 PSR and I find four books below 30,000 BSR and I find two books below 10,000 BSR, I know there are people in this niche buying books.
For the people who don't know what the BSR is, the BSR is the Amazon bestseller rank. That means the lower the BSR, the more people are buying books. And the more books you find with low BSRS, the better because you then know, okay, in this niche, people are looking for books in this niche. People are buying books in this niche. That's a good sign. And that's the main thing we want to see. We want to know um to see that there is demand in the niche. And that's really simple. If you have done niche research for longer than a week, you will see that in like a minute. If you search for a new niche, you will see the BSR of the books. But most it takes a minute for you to see, okay, there are books selling in this niche or there are no books selling in this niche. So that's the easy part of niche research. Most people are focused on this part of niche research, but that's as I said that takes like a minute in your niche research overall.
And then what you also can do is maybe check the search volume. It's not at all as much as important as the BSR. R is the core metric you want to check. But you can also check the search volume. Especially if you long-term also want to run Amazon adsets, it always makes sense to check the search volume. And for me, a good estimate or a good number for search volume is 300. So each keyword that has more than 300 is a keyword that has potential. Not a lot of potential if it's only 300, but it starts to have potential at 300. Of course, you would rather have keywords with a thousand, 5,000, 50,000 obviously, but of course, the more the better, but 300 is the baseline for me when I say, okay, starting from here, it makes sense to focus this keyword. But as I said, the BSR is way more important. So, I would always 95% of my demand analysis is mainly focused on the BSR.
So to find books below a certain BSR level and these are also only examples. So it depends on your goals. If you really want to have best-selling book in a niche that makes 10 thousands of dollars a month for example like bestselling book these three all do above 10k in one single month. So to reach these levels you need multiple books in the 10k BSR because without having a book below 10k 10,000 BSR you won't reach these levels. So then your goal would be to maybe find three to four books here and even more books here and even more books here normally. But as I said it completely depends on your goals how many of these books you will find. The worst case would be if you find zero here, zero here and maybe one here or also zero here and then that's a really bad sign. If you find one here, it's also bad. If you find three here but zero here, it's also bad. So I want at least one here, at least two to three here, and at least five here. But as I said, I can I can give you my numbers now. But you have different goals, you have different strategies. So don't don't necessarily stick to my numbers, but that's a rough estimate how I look at it. But I of course always want to have more. Um, if I want to have a bestseller or a book that makes a lot of money, you want to have the potential to scale in this niche. And the potential in the niche is always the like the top seller. If you aim to be the top seller, then you can imagine, okay, if the top seller has 5,000 BSR, then your goal is to have also 5,000 BSR or a little bit lower. The goal then isn't it's not really practical to have the goal to have 500 BSR because you don't see evidence in the market that there can be a book with that low BSR in that niche. So you always want to look at the current competitors and if they are at a certain BSR you know okay technically if I have the best book I can have the same low BSR than the best seller in this niche has. So that's what how I look at the beers are. But as I said, that's the easy part. That's finding the demand. And that takes around a minute. That's really really fast to be done.
But now let's come to the the more important part, the competitor analysis. And I look at KDP. I look at the um the niche in Amazon as a battlefield, not in terms of aggressive competition and that we need to destroy the other publishers. I think publishing is a companion sport. I hope that's the right English term. But I think I work with so many publishers together and I have a lot of other publishing friends. I don't really see other publishers as competition but as a a mental framework to look at a niche as a battlefield is really helpful to find gaps in a niche to find concepts where you can position your book in. I see every niche as a battlefield and I have points of attack and I have defense mechanisms. So these are the two layers that we have on this beautiful image that Germany created for me. Um we see two sides of a castle and the left side you see there is very strong protect a lot of shields. So you don't necessarily want to attack this castle. But this castle here has a lot of a lot of cracks and you see there's a hole in the wall and there you can easily attack. And that's the same for a niche. If you are in a niche where all the books have a thousand plus reviews, then the review angle is very well defended. You you can't really compete by getting more reviews because you can't that easily get above a thousand reviews. So that's the review layer that's really strong protected. But maybe all of these books have so many reviews because they're very old. And if they're very old books, they often have very bad covers. So maybe you are in a niche where they have great reviews and a lot of reviews, but all of them have very bad covers. And then you have a point of attack to enter because of bad covers. But we'll dive deeper into that in a minute. But that's the baseline. Everything can be a defense mechanism and everything can be a point of attack. If you see a book with 10 reviews that sells a 100 copies a day, so is below a,000 BSR for example, then you know, okay, if you get the same book with the same quality, but you get more reviews, you can attack this competitor by just having more reviews. So that's how you can uh think about these things. And I have 12 of these um front lines of these points of attack and defense mechanisms and that's what we will dive into now.
So the first one are the reviews. I already talked about it and I will show them now on screen. Here you can see a book that has a very strong defense mechanism in terms of reviews. If you want to attack this book, if you want to make another book inside this niche, the one angle you don't want to take is to try to get more reviews than he has because he has way too many reviews. That sounds obvious, but it's important to explain it in that depth as I'm doing now because for later points of attacks, it gets really important. But as you see, it's obvious here. Of course, you you can't compete with him in terms of reviews. So, for him, it's a defense mechanism. But there are many books that sell really well having less reviews and then you see it's the other way around. It becomes a point of attack because if the book has less reviews but it still sells well. If you get more reviews, you can compete with him on the front line of reviews. And that's how um I would think about the review topic.
Then another layer for reviews is not only the amount of reviews but also the quality of the reviews. And if you now look at um the image reviews of this book, this book has an insane high quality of reviews. Not just because of the rating, but also because the reviews normally are really long. As you can see, they love it. Um they have it has a lot of image reviews. So people see real images of the book. So that's a great benefit to have. I have some books that have 30 reviews but 20 image reviews and they sell better than competitors with 100 plus reviews. Why? Because my quality of the reviews is way better than theirs. And it means as soon as a customer clicks on my product page, they don't really care that much about the number of reviews. What they care about is what the real people are writing, what they are showing. And if my review quality is more authentic, if it sounds more real, if the readers are reading the or the potential buyers are reading my reviews and they are thinking, okay, that's exactly my situation and that book is perfectly for me as a person. then they will be more likely to buy your book. Same with the images. If you have image reviews and all your competitors don't have image reviews, that's a point of attack for you to get image reviews and then compete on the base of having higher quality reviews than them. Image reviews, for example, I have a strategy for that. I will cover this in a future video. So like and subscribe to not miss the future videos. But I have a very effective review strategy on how to get a lot of image reviews.
The next point of attack is the cover. In this example, we have a very highly optimized cover on sales, but the illustration is very basic. We only see a basic illustration, but we see all of these um benefits and bonus that this cover is stacking. If you want to compete based on the cover, it's not enough to look at it and judge how it looks because our intuition, our judgment is flawed. If I look at that cover and I think, okay, that's not really beautiful. First of all, I might be wrong objectively because it's not really I can't judge it objectively. Second of all, maybe people also think it's not beautiful, but they still buy it. Because people don't buy books because the cover looks beautiful. People buy a book because the cover does something with them. The cover affects them psychologically. So they decide to buy the book because of the cover. Not because the cover looks good, but because the cover does something to them when they see it. Something happens in their brain that they then think, "Okay, that's the perfect book for me." And this book, I think, does it really well because it just shows how many bonuses and great content it has with the 21day challenge, the video tutorial. So, it just shows what it's offering. it shows the value it has and that's why people buying it even though it doesn't have a beautiful illustration on it. So that's one thing to to think of and to really try to compete on the level of cover. It's important to not as I said judge it yourself but trust the data and to get data you always want to make surveys. If you want to publish a chair yoga for seniors book, you want to download this cover and three other competitors for example. So this one for example and this one. Now we have three competitors, these three. You want to download all three of them and then create your own cover and then make a cover survey. And in the cover survey you have your book against these three other covers. And then you want people to judge which cover of those four covers they like the most. And if they choose or if most people choose your cover against the other three covers, then you know before you even publish the book that your cover has the potential to to sell better than theirs because people without any influence decided your cover is the best. So that's really important and that's how you can compete in terms of covers. Of course, if all books have insanely goodlooking covers that convert really well and it's impossible for you to beat them in a survey, then they have very strong defense mechanisms. But in my experience, if you take enough time, if you do enough surveys and implement the feedback from surveys, maybe you you need to do three, four, five cover surveys until you get enough feedback to create a best-selling cover. But it's worth it because the cover is normally always a point of attack. you can win at. So, no book has the perfect cover. You can always make a better cover than your competitor. Sometimes it's really hard, but for mo in most niches, the cover is a really big point of attack if you invest the money for the surveys and the time to create the best cover in this niche.
Then the next point of attack is the concept of the book, the positioning of the book. And this book stacks a lot of value, stacks a lot of positioning mechanisms. One of them is a 21day challenge. Another one is video tutorials. Another one is the age range it's targeting. So seniors over 60. Then again another number 40 plus low impact easy exercises. So that's also a concept that it consists of. So you can see this book just stacks bonus after bonus after bonus and concept above concept above concept and that's how this book um sells so well or that's one of the reasons why this book sells so well because it's just really um highly optimized on a concept and the cherry forc niche is a good example for that because all of these books are doing the same thing because it's a very um optimized niche and there are many books selling really well in this niche and all of them are optimized to the to the edge because all of them are competing against each other and they all want to to get the customers from the other book. So they they really over the years the last two years especially they out competed each other one after another and got better over time and the other one changed something again got better so it's like a don't know the English name but they are always chasing each other also the same book the title is also a point of attack in a lot of niches the books are very generic and all the books in the niche have a very similar concept to each other and maybe then it makes sense to come up with a more unique concept that just sounds differently that maybe solves the problem the reader has faster, better or just different. So it sounds more interesting and then based on that they may or may not decide that your book is better and then buy more people will buy your book instead of the competitor's book. So the unique concept can always be great point of attack. But to create a unique concept, you just need to be really creative and or know your niche very well. The first bestselling book I have was a book that's purely won because of its concept. The concept was just unique. No other book in this niche and it was a very high developed niche. No other book in this niche had a concept like that comparable to that. And that's why my book won because I had a unique concept. And if you can achieve that, you can win even in a niche that's very highly developed.
And the title is very similar because the title is what reflects the concept. So based on your concept, you craft the title. So you need a great concept to have a great title. But just because you have a great concept doesn't mean you automatically have a great title. So these books all have similar concepts or the same concepts behind them, but all of their titles are different. And to make sure that your title converts better than the title of your competitor, you again can do survey. So you can copy this title, you can copy this title, and you can copy this title. And you can create your own title and again do a survey and let's 50, 60, 70 people vote which of these four titles they like the most. And if your book title wins, you know you can compete based on the title and you have found a point of attack in this niche, that is the title.
The next point of attack is or defense mechanisms it depends um is length and depth. In a lot of niches all the books have similar pages. In the cherry for seniors niche for example all the books if you look at them have around 100 to 140 pages. So they all are very slim. I hope slim is the right English term. And one angle to go into this niche would be to be more expensive. That's the seventh point of attack. And longer. I don't know the audience, so you always need to double check. I don't know if seniors would appeal to a really thick book, but the theory behind it still works. If you have a niche where all the books are really small and not that in-depth, it could make sense to just make the biggest, best, most in-depth book. And maybe it makes sense to publish a book with 300 pages in this niche. And instead of $15, price it $25, something in that area. And then you have the most expensive book, but you will have the most royalties per sale. Can run more aggressive ads. you have different angle on the market because people don't really compare your book with these books because your book is three times the length. For example, if you have 350 360 pages, your book is three times the length than this book and then it's not really comparable to the people who are looking for a book like this um to compare you with these books because they are just a different caliber. It's just a different type of book at the end. So it could make sense to try to compete in terms of length and depth. So just make a longer book, a more detailed book, a more valuable book and based on that you can charge more and based on you charging more you have more royalties and can go crazier on the ads on advertisement and so on. It could also be the other way around. If you are in a niche where all the books are 300 plus pages, it maybe makes sense to make the shortest book, to make a book that only has 90 pages or 100 pages and price it cheaper, but then you are the the fast solution. So your concept, your positioning then would be that you solve the problem faster than all the other books that are really long and detailed. So you have again two angles here that you can use to attack um the position the the the competition in a market.
Then the next one is the target audience. That means to target a subgroup, a sub audience that are currently not touched in the market. If you look at the guitar exercise for beginners niche to learn to play the guitar niche, one target audience that isn't targeted at the moment are age groups or genders. If you do a learn how to play the guitar for your seniors, maybe to combine it with them. Learn how to play the guitar for kids obvious. But they're not other age groups. For adult beginners, I think is also one of the positionings, but you can look at more subtargets. If you look at subtarget audiences, could also be females. So I think it doesn't make sense to call it learn to play the guitar for females or for women. think that's not a very effective positioning. But what you can do is to frame it like notes or or plays for a woman. So like music that's a man or a boy wouldn't really like to to listen or be able to play and then it maybe makes sense to make only girls music. So they can learn to play the guitar by learning how to play girls music on the guitar. I hope you get the concept what I trying to say. And that way you can try to tap into a subniche inside your niche that isn't currently targeted. And that's exactly how a niche like chair yoga for seniors came to existence. We first had yoga. Then out of yoga it developed chair yoga. Out of chair yoga it developed chair yoga for seniors. And out of cher yoga for seniors it developed chair yoga for seniors over 60. So it's always stepbystep layers. It got get always deeper and deeper into subniche and now this subniche is a huge niche on its own and it has the name chica for seniors over 60. A lot of books only have this exact targeting this exact um subtarget audience. You can do this in every type of of niche potentially as I said for learning an instrument but target it more for females or males or for a specific age group. And you can do that not by just calling out the age group, but call it learn how to play the guitar with 90s music. And then all the people who grew up in the ' 90s maybe appeal more to this book than other age groups. And that's how you can use subtargetings to to find gaps in a niche.
Then the seventh point is pricing. I already talked about this. It sometimes makes sense to just make a more expensive book. And if you have the most expensive book and the book is also justified to be the most expensive book, then that could be a reason to sell really well. A lot of my books are really expensive, but they sell more than the competitors who are cheap because I just have more pages. I have more value to offer and people just prefer to buy my books because it solves more of the problem that they have. And then it makes sense to charge more and to have a higher pricing. And a higher pricing has a lot of different benefits. As I already mentioned, for example, you have more royalties. I have one book that has over $19 of royalties. Not the price, the royalties are $19. If I sell one of these books, I get $19 in royalties. And if you have this high of a royalty margin, you can spend a lot on ads and outspend most of your competitors because you just have so much money for one single sale. If I pay $15 for one sale, I don't care because I make a profit. All my competitors, if they spend more than $8 for one sale, they make minus. They don't earn money. Then I can just spend more money and that way out compete them. And that's why a higher pricing could be one point of attack. Also, psychologically, if your book is priced higher, some people think it has higher quality. Because when people see a high price, they maybe think, okay, that there is a reason why it's so expensive. So, it must be good. Because else why do they charge so much if it's not good? And of course, you also really should be good. So, your book should really be high quality and a valuable book. But psychologically, it doesn't make a difference if your book is just expensive. Even if the book is bad, some people think it's good just because it has a high price. If it's done really bad and they buy it and they're unhappy, you get bad reviews. So, I wouldn't recommend that, but that's just what happens in the minds of the people.
Then the eighth point of attack um is the description. For example, here we have a description that's really optimized but has a lot of emojis. And that's something I wouldn't recommend because it's not allowed to use emojis in the Amazon description. So don't do that. But else if you just read the text, it's really optimized and a good defense mechanism for this book. But a lot of books don't really care about the description because many self-publishers have the mindset that the description isn't that important. Most people don't read the description. they just scroll down to the A+ maybe or just read the title, look at the cover and then buy or read the reviews. But it's true that a lot of people don't read the description, but that doesn't make the description less important. It's actually a good attack point for you if you find a niche where there's a book that has a really bad description because you can then write a better description and get attack angle there. Why does it matter to have a good description? Because even if only two people out of 10 people read a description, the two people who read your description will buy if the description is great and won't buy if the description is bad. So it makes sense to optimize for the description because the people who read it will convert if you did a great job writing a description. And those two more sales will boost your algorithm, will boost your organic ranking, and will give you long-term more sales overall. So, it's really lost potential if you don't care about your description. So, focus on description, try to make it better than the competitor's description because it's a great point of attack that most publishers underestimate.
Pretty similar to the A+ content. if the A+ content of a competitor is bad or just not there. There are a lot of, for example, a lot of really old books that sell well that don't have an A+ content because four or five years ago, Amazon didn't had A+ content. So, this this functionality didn't exist for self-publishers and these books don't have an A+. And then if you come with a great A+ content, that's a point of attack for you. That's a gap that you can fill in this market to get um higher conversions than your competitors and long-term out compete them. So A+ content is also one point of attack. If your competitor of course has great A+ content, it's a defense mechanism for him that helps him to stay at the top of the niche. But then still you need um to also to able to compete with people who have great A+ you need to have at least good A+ content.
Then the 10th point of attack is branding. And now the piano example really comes into play. That's why I prepared it. If you're currently doing niche research and you try to find a niche to publish a book in, then branding is most of the time a defense mechanism for your competitors. So what you want to do is to look out for books that are not just books, but are books as part of a series. because to compete against this book on its own would be way easier to compete against all of these books at the same time. And that's why having a brand is a great defense mechanism and really hard to to attack because you don't need to to only win against one book, but in this case against at least five books. And I think if you look at his author profile um actually has more than just Yeah, he has a lot of books. So you need to compete in theory against all of his books plus his email list because most brands have a very powerful and big email list plus the that he's really established on Amazon and has so many reviews and so good ranking because Amazon also ranks books based on the KDP account in the background. Meaning if you publish the first piano book on your account, it's has a hard time finding ranking. But if you already have 20 piano books and you publish book 21, Amazon's algorithm knows this publisher already has 20 piano books that sell really well. So we will boost the 21th piano book because we have data that his readers like piano books. So that that happens to me a lot. If I when I now publish the fifth book of a series, it is way faster at the top ranking of the niche because Amazon knows that they already have other books published that are really successful with good reviews. So, they support the launch of a new book. So, building a brand is really a powerful thing long term. And also in in some niches where there isn't one big brand and that's what was the case in in my main niche for my main brands before I came there wasn't really a brand in this niche. I was the first big brands who who came and I published one book then two months later the second book then two months later the third book then one month later the fourth book. So I just published book after book after book and over time I was then the dominant force in this niche. So it can be a point of attack if there is no brand at all to start building a brand in this niche and maybe the first book isn't the winner and the second book is also not a winner but the third, fourth and fifth will result into your brand being a dominant force in this niche. So branding is also a very effective point of attack.
Then the third I think it's again the piano book. Yeah. The third point of attack is is external traffic. What this means is also combined with branding but not necessarily. So external traffic maybe I can describe it in more detail here. It has three layers. One is email list, one is social media and one is paid social media. Let's go through it step by step. Email list is what I already mentioned in terms of branding. Most brands collect emails in their books. Maybe they have bonus material or similar things and then people scan a QR code, enter their email and that's how a brand collects emails. I, for example, now after two years of self-publishing, I think I have around 13,000 emails collected. When I publish a new book, I just send out one email and 500 people will buy the book. And it's a huge benefit for the ranking if you get so many people to buy a book after it's just launched. So that's why um an email list is so powerful. But if you are publishing a new book, book without a brand or without an email list, then social media could be one angle to get external traffic. For example, Tik Tok is currently the most prominent um social media that publishers use, but also YouTube, also Instagram. So there are many um ways of getting external traffic from a social media brand. And then there's paid social media. That's what I do for most of my books. I run Facebook ads mainly. That means I create campaigns on Facebook and then link my book in the campaign and promote my book through this social media post or it's not just a social media post. It's a paid social media post. So, for example, I spend $20 a day because I pay Facebook. It shows my post in front of 5,000 people each day. Just an example number. And then they click on it. They then can buy the book on Amazon. And the reason all of these three are so powerful is because the Elm Amazon algorithm loves external traffic because Amazon is a business and if you are someone who brings people who are not on Amazon at the moment to their platform, Amazon wants to reward you for that. Because if someone buys through Amazon ads, the person already was on Amazon. Let's imagine it like this. Person goes to Amazon. They search something, learns how to play the piano, for example. They then find this book because of an ad and then they buy it. Then the person who already was on Amazon bought a book on Amazon. That's nice for Amazon, but not perfect. Now, let's imagine a person is on Facebook and they are watching videos on Facebook and they have no not at all in their mind that they want to buy something. But then your advertisement comes on Facebook and tells them, "Hey, buy this book." And then you are the reason why this person stops scrolling on Facebook, clicks on your ads, and then starts shopping on Amazon. That's exactly what Amazon wants because you spend money on Facebook to get customers who are not on Amazon at the moment on Amazon. And maybe they then buy your book, but maybe they also buy something else on Amazon. another product, something for their kids, something for for themselves that they never would have thought of if you weren't there to promote your book so they get from Facebook to Amazon to then buy something on Amazon. And Amazon of course knows that and rewards that. So if we bring people from Tik Tok, from Facebook, from our email list to Amazon and they then buy our books, Amazon rewards that by boosting our books in the algorithm. That means our organic ranking increases and people who are then searching our books on Amazon find it easier, which results of course into more sales for us. So that's why external traffic is actually great point of attack because if you are the only book in your niche that has external traffic, it's a huge competitive advantage. And on the other hand, if you have a big brand as your competitor or if you have a book that runs heavy Facebook ads or is great, very successful on Tik Tok, it's a great defense mechanisms for them and hard for you to compete with them because they have so much external traffic that it will be hard to outrank them organically because they got such a strong organic boost because they get the external traffic sales. So that's why external traffic is on one hand can be a point of attack but also a defense mechanism for your competitors.
And then the 12th part is authority. And again we can look at the piano book. Here we have him. I don't know him. I just know him from Amazon. Um, but he if you read his story he is a piano teacher for over 30 years. So he definitely has authority in the market. If someone wants to learn how to play the piano and they read this person teaches piano for 30 years, that's a big authority figure and that gives them trust that the book is are good. That gives them um some some certainty that if they buy the book they will have success. They will really learn how to play the piano in a effective way because this person knows what he's talking about because he's teaching it for 30 years. So authority is a point of attack. If you are in a niche where there is no authority figure at all, then maybe it makes sense to become an authority figure or to team up with an authority figure and publish a book together with an expert in your niche just to have the um authority level in this niche. And on the other hand, of course, it's a great defense mechanism for him because if you now want to launch a piano book, he has first of all a lot of reviews. He has his brand. He has himself who is an authority figure. So he have he has so many defense mechanisms that you can't really find any gaps on how to attack him. One attack point he has is the cover. So his covers aren't crazy optimized at all. They look some people would say they look really bad. Not to be disrespectful, but you you can make way better covers than what he has. but he doesn't need to because he has so much so many other defense mechanisms that you just don't need to focus on the cover. But if you would want to attack him, the only angle you have is maybe the concept if you're really creative, but mainly it's the covers, but it's still hard because everything else that he has, all the other points of attack are really strong defense mechanisms on his end. So, it's hard to attack a book like this. But still, based on the philosophy I just taught you in this video, you still find some gaps. And one gap, as I said, is the cover. Another gap maybe is a better positioning. And then you still could try to attack a book like this. It's It's incredibly hard, but it's not impossible because, as I said, he has points of attacks. You can even if his his castle mainly looks like this, he still has a few gaps where you can climb the wall and enter his his castle and get some share of the market.
These were the 12 points of attack. Now in practice when you do niche research you first want to find points of attacks and also you want to figure out what are the defense mechanisms so you know where you can't attack because of course it's important to know that you need to attack here. But it's also important that you don't need to waste energy to attack here because else you spend a lot of energy and focus to to try to get this front line. But the most effective way would be to to go to the other front line. And then as soon as you have published your first book or not your first book but publish your book in this niche and maybe you you have a lot of sales then it's important to build defense mechanisms yourself because as soon as you're successful if you have a book for example that has 20 reviews and is below 10,000 BSR that's amazing but that won't last long if you don't start building defense mechanisms because a lot of publishers will see okay there's a new publisher a new book in the market. It has 20 reviews. It has maybe a good cover, but it only has 20 reviews and does a lot of money. So maybe I will just copy his book or make a similar book, try to get a similar good cover and just get 200 reviews and then I can out compete him. And that's what unfortunately happens a lot of the times in KDP that you maybe got lucky, have a great success, a really successful book, but then other publishers see it and because you have too few defense mechanisms, they start to attack you and publish books that out compete you in terms of reviews, in terms of the cover, the concept, the length, the pricing, the description, the A+ the branding, external traffic and so on. So other publishers will use these attack points against you if you don't build defense mechanisms. So first of all you need to think about what I just showed you in terms of attack points because first of all you need to go into the market but as soon as you are part of the market and you have sales you get sales you then need to start thinking about okay how can I build up defense mechanisms so other publishers can't attack my books and that way I think the battlefield muffer is is best explained.
So now what's next? After we found demands and also some attack points, we need to find a positioning that uses these attack points. So based on all of these attack points, based on all of these defense mechanisms, we want to list them. We want to make sure we have an overview, maybe make an Excel sheet and track everything, every data point of our niche analysis and niche research. And then we need to decide, okay, how can we create a concept? Which angle can we take to make the best use of these 12 attack points? What concept can we create? How can we craft a concept that is maybe longer or more expensive or both has a different target audience because all of them are combined in a way. So the target audience, the length, the pricing, branding, and the authority are all part of the concept of the book because a longer book has a different concept in a shorter book. Another target audience changes the concept of the book. So everything goes back to the concept and the positioning of a book. And you now want to figure out a positioning that can compete with the current books in your market based on the analysis you just did and I explained in the last 40 minutes. So that's the next step. And our goal is to make the things the competition does badly as good as possible. So we want to do what they are weak at really really well. So we get the customers that won't buy their books because they don't like the weaknesses these books have.
And now you can do this manually and try to figure out your positioning on your own and try to craft a concept that can't compete or what you else can do is use a positioning tool like the one from Publish Flow, my software that helps you analyze um your competition and based on the analysis gives you in-depth reporting and three unique positionings are recommended to you and you can then choose one of them that has a big high likelihood. of you being able to compete against your competitors. So all what I just explained to you is trained into Publish Flow and what you can do inside Publish Flow is researching for your competitors. For example, if he's a competitor, copy the link um to his book, the URL to his book, give it to Publish Flow, and Publish Flow will do a competitor analysis. And we'll give you three concepts that have an angle that will use the points of attack we talked about in this video to be able to out compete him or to to have a unique concept that will appeal to a portion of the target audience that are currently not really interested in his book. If you want to figure out more, click on the first link in the description and there you will find out more about publish flow and how to use the niche and positioning tool but also all the other features of publish flow. It's mainly a book creation software. So based on the positioning that you figured out with publisher then can create the entire book inside publish flow. It can write the book, it can structure the entire book, it can format the entire book, it can proofread it. It can do everything from idea until finished published ready book on KDP.
But to summarize, as I said, first of all, when you do niche research, find demand. That's the fast part. That's the small part that takes a minute. And after that, your full focus should be competitor analysis. And as I said the battlefield Metafer it's not about winning against competition or that other publishers are competitors. It's more about looking at your niche as a battlefield. It gives you a frame of mind that helps you in finding the gaps more easily. Even if you're not really competitors on Amazon KDP as I said I think we're all a team as self-publishers. I'm in a lot of communities for self-publishers and don't see other publishers as competition, but still the the mental framework of a battlefield is very effective to do great niche analysis and that's the main point of this video. Now, if you like this video, leave a like, subscribe, and maybe check out Publish Flow. It will help you a lot in your future publishing journey.