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Today, I want to share with you the top six niches to avoid when writing and publishing your first Kindle ebook.
Here is the list, it’s basically:
- Romance
- Diet and weight loss
- Self-help
- Cooking
- Travel and
- Kids books
These are the ones that I believe you should avoid first at the beginning when you’re just getting out and starting to write.
Can you jump into cooking? If this is your whole mantra, if this is what you’re focused on, if you love to cook, if you have a YouTube channel about it, and you’re looking to grow your business all around cooking – yes. You can still start with a cooking ebook that’s perfectly fine.
If you love writing and you want to create children’s books, that’s your passion, and that’s your dream and your desire – can you start there? Absolutely.
But these book categories, the whole goal to avoid them is because they are very competitive and challenging to create as kind of your first ebook.
If you go ahead and already written 5 or 10 books already, then you could go ahead and jump into these categories.
By all means, feel free to dabble in them. In the beginning, it’s a little bit difficult because there’s a lot of things you have to learn as a writer, as an online business owner, as a marketer, as a person just growing your business. There is a lot you have to learn about the industry itself to become successful in these categories because of the competition and only because of the way that things are structured.
The way you make a lot of money from these romance novels is maybe your first book is a dud. It’s not that great regarding sales, but you could go ahead and create a second book. Then a third book. So, you create a series around them, and then you go ahead, and you take that series. And now, you’ll create a second series around them, or it could be five-book series, whatever the case may be.
The competition is so heavy, so you need to be writing multiple books to hit that romance category.
There is a lot of competition out there with stories you have to have an excellent storyline created within that whole series to make it work.
A lot of work to be able to see the success with a lot of competition makes that category a little bit difficult.
There is a tremendous amount of money to be made from diet and weight loss.
It’s no secret or magic recipe to be able to lose weight. I mean, part of its genetics, part of its eating healthy, and part of it is exercise.
You know a lot of times what people are doing when they’re looking for a diet, and weight loss thing is they’re looking for a system to help them move through and stay on the path of being consistent.
This has such a significant competition, and it’s just so vast. It makes it very difficult to break into because what you have is within that large segment. You have different sections or categories.
You might have things like on the dieting – smoothie diet, raw food diet. You might get into now exercising. But here, you get into yoga, and then you get into machine or equipment or weight training, and then you get into running for weight loss.
All of these have their subniche. It’s a huge category to try and dominate right off the bat.
Just like with diet and weight loss, there are a lot of segments to it and becomes very competitive. I would say try to avoid that because there’s just so many self-help books out there.
There are a lot of segments and a lot of categories, and also it’s a category where people are not buying as heavily unless they already know you and build a relationship with you. What do I mean by that? Because it’s a category where the money spent is a little bit less. You typically make more money on advertising and products that are developed later on once you’re big.
That’s where you make money on cooking. But if as your first book, you’re not going to be making that much money on it, since you’re just getting started.
You have these different segments, and you’re creating a lot of videos. What people do is they go to YouTube and they look up a quick recipe, or they look up an article on recipes.com. They’re looking for a smart little recipe idea and then that’s it, and they’re done.
The issue is that there’s no real kind of upsell to growth until you become big.
Once you’re big in the cooking space – you’ve grown your channel, you’ve built your audience, you’ve grown your name, you could, of course, produce your videos. How to cook, how to cook with kids, how to cook for kids. You could create a lot of different things, and you can even create products that people could use in their cooking. But until that point, it makes it a little bit difficult as your first book to getting started out.
As a general person who lives in the USA, a lot of Americans or people that live in the USA do not travel that much. So, if you’re focused in the US market, which I believe you are if you’re watching this video because the majority of the audience is the US for me, the audience is just not traveling to different countries as much.
What do they do if they buy a travel book? They might buy one travel book or two travel books within five years but beyond that, what’s going to happen? Are they going to purchase and book your plane tickets from you? Yes, maybe, no but you’re not going to be able to do the flight and make money on that.
Instead, what’s going to end up happening is you might make a commission from an affiliate sale, but after that, that’s pretty much it.
You have a couple of opportunities to make sales – three or four sales, maybe in your lifetime from one person and then that’s it.
If you go with a European audience or people who travel a little bit more, they may make a bit of sense. If you’re hitting up different products through affiliates, that’s fine. But again very competitive, very specific to the region. And yet, you sell the book and then what’s coming next you have to think about what’s the next product that the same person is going to buy.
Again, very difficult to start out with. Can you do it? Absolutely, but to out with makes it a little bit tough.
Kids books have different age ranges. You might have a kid’s books that’s a cardboard book where if tiny toddlers are flipping through it, they don’t rip the pages. You have kids books from an age group of four to six, six to eight, eight to ten. There are so many different reading levels in the kid’s ages. It becomes a little more challenging to write a kid’s book.
To do the writing part is not that difficult because you don’t have to create this elaborate story as you do with the romance novels. You don’t have to get in as much detail because the kids may not notice that you’re here trying to sell and cater towards the parents. You’re selling to someone who’s not going to digest the book.
That makes it a little bit difficult, so you have to sell the parents. Then you have to go into your subcategory, which age bracket you want to dominate. The printing is a little more difficult because if you’re self-publishing, you can’t just do Amazon CreateSpace at the moment because what’s going to happen if you can’t create a thick cardboard based book for a kid through Amazon. Eventually, that may change, but you have to go and produce and manufacture that kind of on your own.
Then the other problem is the illustrations with kids books. You need a lot of pictures, a lot of illustrations and that becomes much more difficult than a cooking book. With cooking, yes you do need pictures and photos, that does help. Even a travel book, pictures do help, but you could go and take those pictures. With kids books, there are a lot of more drawing involved or illustrations involved. A lot of times you can’t do that on your own unless you are a personal illustrator.
So, this is why that industry is also a little more difficult because your marketing to the kid’s segment and you’re catering towards the parents.
These are my top six that I would try to avoid as your first Kindle eBook or your first book. Doesn’t mean you can’t go in these categories later on, but I would say as you’re breaking into these. It’s a lot more difficult and if you can start with somewhere else now. If you want to go into one of these, not a problem at all. You could do it, but the issue that’s going to happen is it just may take a little more time for you to pick things and accelerate your sales. It may take a bit of time to build your name out there. It may take a little more time to grow your business out there and figure things out.
So that’s why I would say be careful in these six niches or areas. There might be a few others that maybe you’re struggling with, but instead, the better approach is to dig deeper into a slot.
