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Nate’s Big List of eBook Market Analytic Tools

Finding the right niche / genre / keywords to market your book, and then parsing the sales data once your ebook is on the market, can mean the difference between a best-seller book and one no one has ever heard of.

The following post details a couple lists of tools that authors can use to target their books through market research, and then track ebook sales once the books are for sale.

This list includes all the tools I could find in a thorough search, but if you know of a tool not listed please mention it in the comments.

Market Research

The first step in publishing a best-selling book is finding out what is selling, and the following tools can help you with that.  They can parse Kindle Store rankings and tell you which genres are selling how many copies, what the best-selling books have in their descriptions, and commonly used keywords.

Name Cost Review Details
KDP Analytics free to $30 per month n\a Analyzes books in the Kindle Store, and tells you what is selling and why. Can use current market data to predict your sales, royalties and profit.
Kindle Spy (KD Spy) $47 n\a See above, can also analyze your competitors.
K-lytics $37 per month to $497 per year The Creative Penn Less a tool than a source of market research reports, KD Spy sells reports and seminars that focus on specific niche genres (clean romance, vigilante justice, female detectives, etc). Individual reports cost $27 and up; the monthly cost is to access multiple reports.
KD Researcher $17 FreeStyle Author Desktop app that lets you compile reports using data from Kindle, print, or audiobook categories on Amazon. You can limit the reports by publication year, genre, and price range. Note: It doesn’t appear to do any analytics.
KDP Rocket $97 AMZ Prof Starting with a keyword, analyzes books in the Kindle Store, and tells you what is selling and why, and by how many sellers. It will also tell you how many times the keyword has been searched for in Google and Amazon.
Kindle Samurai $20  Kboards see KDP Rocket
Keyword Inspector $39 per month  n\a this is a more general Amazon keyword analytics tool. I could not find relevant info on how well it would work in the Kindle Store.

There are of course other tools that are designed to analyze Amazon generally rather than the book sections specifically. If you encounter one that is free to use, you should try it and let us know how well it worked.

Sales Reports

Once your ebooks start selling, you are going to want to start tracking your sales. A shift in sales is often your first clue that the market conditions have changed, and that you might want to change your prices or marketing strategy.

Here are four tools that you can use to track your sales across several retailers and distributors. Most will integrate sales data from Amazon and other retailers into a single interface, saving you the time of checking one retailer at a time. Some will even help you track book reviews left by customers.

NOTE: Several of these programs require that you give them your login credentials for KDP and elsewhere.

Name Cost Discussion Details
AKReport €8 to €16 per month  KBoards  Browser based, and only works with KDP. Offers a specialized view of KDP dashboard.
Book Report free to $19 per month  KBoards Similar in function to AKReport. Based on what I see online, Book Report is widely used.
BookTrakr varies, generally $1 to $19 per month  KBoards Collects your sales data from ebook retailers every night, and assembles them into one dashboard. Also tracks your reviews, rankings, and ratings.
Trackerbox $89  Kboards Takes all of the sales reports from Amazon, Apple, B&N, and a host of other distributors, and organizes them into a single, manageable set of reports.  Only available for Windows; a macOS app is expected by August 2018.
Readerlinks $19 per minth  Kboards This is an author services company, and one of the things it does is let you track sales per book, pages read, free downloads, etc.

 

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Comments


Robert Nagle May 15, 2018 um 5:57 pm

Wow, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine some sales reporting tools for ebooks. But something like Trackerbox sounds very handy (and for me, well worth the price).

Nate Hoffelder May 15, 2018 um 10:59 pm

glad I could help!


Dave Chesson May 16, 2018 um 9:30 pm

Great article and thanks for mentioning KDP Rocket. Also, if you want, you could use this as the review of those different sales tracking softwares. I wrote it to be a side by side comparison of the three major ones, and have my final choice as well: https://kindlepreneur.com/book-sales-tracker/

If you do end up adding that to the article above, let me know and I’ll be sure to promote it on my social media.


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Vivienne Sang June 8, 2018 um 12:09 pm

This is an amazingly useful post. I’m going to archive it for the future. I’ll definitely be looking into some of these tools.


Tim March 28, 2020 um 9:40 am

Just want to offer another option for Sales Reports – Authicist (https://authicist.com)

(full disclosure, I built the app)

Free to $15 / month

Tracks you rankings, ratings and reviews across all of Amazon’s site. Has a web app for charting the data over time and a mobile app for receiving notification when you book improves in the rankings.

Nate Hoffelder March 28, 2020 um 8:16 pm

Thanks for the heads up!


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