I never would have bothered writing or blogging about publishing if it wasn’t for all of the numbers that can be mined from the Amazon catalog. Curse them for making me waste my time:-) I’m late this month publishing my KDP Select royalty series, and I’m procrastinating posting the second data series for my look at free SciFi promotions in order to present a few old-school numbers about Kindle genres.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that women’s romance is the top selling genre on Kindle. The top 100 romance books on Kindle account from anywhere between a third and a half of the top selling eBooks on Amazon, meaning there are times when all 100 of the top 100 romance books appear in the top 200 overall Kindle eBooks, and even during slack periods, they usually all fit into the top 300. By contrast, the top 100 biography and memoir books on Kindle don’t quite squeeze into the top 2,000 overall sellers.
On the free side, romance is just as dominant, if not more, while how-to type books make a strong showing. Subjects like biography and memoir fall away quickly on the free side as the majority of free books are out-of-print, rather than promotional. So while the 100th most popular biography and memoir title was almost top 2,000 this morning on the paid side, the 100th most popular free biography and memoir title wasn’t even top 20,000 on the free side.
Children’s eBooks have yet to score big on Kindle, whether free or paid, but the combination of old classics and new promo copies on the free side do about twice as well as the new releases on the paid side. Business and investing books do a little worse than children’s books, which was a bit of a surprise to me, especially on the free side where so many business promo books clutter the catalog. In an inversion of the biography and memoir category, paid cook books fair poorly on Kindle, but the top 100 free cook books almost squeeze into the top 2,000.
Craft and hobby books do poorly in both sides of the Kindle store, probably because crafters (and cooks) like to have a paper book open in front of them while working. As tablets get cheaper, the reluctance to get food or glue on them may change.
Literature and fiction is the strongest category, accounting for half of the top 100 paid Kindle books at any time, but it includes many double listed books, so most of the literature category is actually romance. After romance, the mystery and thriller category is the second most popular, which has been the case since Kindle was first introduced and reflects paper world reading habits. SciFi and fantasy is the third most popular Kindle genre, and like romance, is equally popular on both the paid and free side.
Of course, just knowing what’s selling isn’t a recipe for success. But if you’re in publishing as a business, it’s worth keeping an eye on the numbers. Speaking of publishing as a business, Aaron Shepard is no longer updating his collection of POD and Kindle formatting guides, so he has begun offering them all free as PDF downloads through his website:
