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Guide: Topic Research
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Written by IT Publishing
Updated this week

Topic Research enables you to discover profitable topic ideas and analyze competitor books with unmatched speed and precision.

In this Beta version of Topic Research, you can:

  1. Do competitor research on other books to see how many sales they make per month, their estimated monthly royalties, and their estimated BSR30.

  2. Run searches on ideas or keywords you're interested in to see similar books and use that as inspiration for potential topics to explore on Amazon and KDSpy.

Watch the video tutorial

Searching for books and topics

When you first open Topic Research, a search bar and filters will appear at the top of the page. You can search for books and topics using a combination of keywords or filters.

Search using a keyword and filters

  1. If you have a general idea, interest, or keyword in mind, type it into the search bar then click the magnifying glass icon to apply the search. Enter only one idea at a time.

    Examples

    container gardening

    cognitive behavioral therapy
    container gardening, cognitive behavioral therapy

    container gardening and cognitive behavioral therapy


  2. A list of relevant book results will appear.


  3. To refine your search, adjust the filters at the top. You can use the slider or type in the amounts in the text fields. Then click "Apply" to update the results.

An example of how the Estimated monthly royalties filter looks where there's a slider and text fields to input the filter ranges.

What the filters mean

Estimated monthly royalties: The estimated monthly earnings of a book in USD.

BSR30: The Amazon Best Sellers Rank of a book averaged over 30 days. This is a rolling average which means it updates daily.

Note: Estimated monthly royalties and BSR30 are mutually exclusive filters. This means you can only apply one or the other, not both at once.

For example, if you apply estimated monthly royalties, the BSR30 filter will be disabled and vice versa.

Number of reviews: How many reviews the book has on Amazon.com.

Book age: How long the book has been published in months. The filter is defaulted to start at 1 month because only books that have been published for at least 30 days are relevant when determining profitability.

Price: The list price of the book on Amazon.com in USD. The filter is set to a max of $40 by default because more expensive books are less relevant to the self-publishing market.

Search with only filters

  1. If you don't have a specific keyword or idea to search, you can apply only filters to get a list of books that meet your filter requirements. This applies the filters to all the books in the database rather than ones that only match specific search terms.

  2. You will then see a list of books.

Book search results

Once you've made a search, there will be a table listing individual books that match your search parameters. In each row, you’ll get information for a particular book.

The results here are an alternative to using Amazon.com and tools like KDSpy to find topics. To learn more about how to analyze the book results to find a profitable topic, refer to Publishing Accelerator's Module 2 - Choosing a Topic.

What the columns mean

Topic and Book: This column shows the book cover and book title.


Book title: Clicking on the book title will open the Amazon.com listing in a separate browser tab.

Estimated monthly royalty: How much money (USD) the book is estimated to make based on a 30-day rolling average.

Reviews: The total number of customer reviews on Amazon.com

Estimated monthly sales: The estimated number of purchases made for this book on a 30-day rolling average.

BSR30: The Best Sellers Rank of this book averaged over 30 days.

Price: The list price of the book on Amazon.com. This is the original price set by the seller, not the price it sells at when on sale or promotion.

Format: The book format such as paperback, hardcover, or Kindle (e-book).

Book age: How long the book has been published for.

Publisher: The name of the publisher. Books that are marked as “Independently published” are self-published. However, a book can have a publisher name and still be self-published.

Sorting the results

You can sort the table results by hovering your mouse to the right of the header of the following columns:

  • Estimated monthly royalties

  • Reviews

  • Estimated monthly sales

  • BSR30

  • Price

  • Age

An arrow will appear and with each click, you’ll be able to sort by:

Lowest to highest

Highest to lowest

And remove the sorting on the third click.

Where does the data come from?

The following data is pulled directly from the Amazon.com book listing:

  • Number of lifetime reviews

  • BSR30

  • Price

  • Format

  • Publisher

There are also figures calculated using our proprietary formulas. When compared against the data of real publishers, our figures outperform competitors.

  • Estimated monthly royalties

  • Estimated monthly sales

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