The Best Ebook Selling Categories Are...

Before we start. Why do you want to know what the best ebook selling categories are in the first place?

I'm coming at this to help.

There are no real best or worse.

The best genres are actually the ones which your audience loves. Why? Because that is going to be an easy sell. However if you jump around from genre to genre then you are going to lose contact with people who bought from you in the past. This then creates more hard work for you- trying to convince newer people to buy.

The best category?

Any...within reason.

Content creation falls in between 2 lines:

tons of people searching for it
very few people searching for it

As long as your audience is willing to buy you can charge. However, if your audience is not willing to buy, regardless of content, they won't buy.

So now we have to add another point:

Our audience must be willing to buy. You can figure this out simply but checking:

Google Ads for example. If people are buying paid positioning for a product therefore they are finding that people are buying at some point when they click on the ad
Are there similar products out there? Most will be the same as each other
Are there magazines/ websites that house forums/ newsletters about the product theme?
Do you see similar products on TV or in certain magazines?
Are there products in shops that are similar?

The list is endless. But what you are looking for is the idea of the genre being "advertised". So if you wanted to create a play guitar ebook this would be the genre right? Music making through a guitar.

You will find tons. But that is not where the profitable area comes in. You need then to filter out what these products/ websites/ creators are doing right and doing wrong.

Go onto forums, see what people think about product XY or Z
are people actually being serviced by all these products, or is there a need that still isn't being met?
can you do something for free that is being charged for?
are they writing instead of using Youtube?
can you niche down? How about Flamenco guitar training?

Heres the example. Google search: Learn to play guitar. 916 million pages.

Google search: learn to play Flamenco guitar. 2.7 million pages.

But what if you really...like really really, want to write about guitar playing?

People will not love you because you are new. They will love you if you can solve their issue/ make them better and do it for free if possible.

Going direct into best selling ebook genres like guitar playing is not helpful. You can't crack into it that easily. So, you go around it and niche down.

Niche has always been the key to get into more prolific genres because you side step and then eventually go for the main genre.

I did this with my music site. I wrote about free music making software and how to make tunes. Then I started to get search engine love, organic links, people came to the website and my "authority" increased. I then started to write about more popular genres like MP3s, music downloads and marketing. I then started to make money from these pages. Had I gone straight into them I would not have succeeded.

Trust in a side niche then go for the main genre.

Before finding the best ebook selling categories, this is what you should do.

Figure out what you like writing about.

If you know the subject then that will show. You can add more to it than your competitors and then you can charge more. You can then "talk" to the genre celebrities, guest post etc.

It is also going to be a process. You can write and write, creating content (why should they buy your book if you have it all online?) gradually building up trust and authority. Or you can sell through Amazon/ Clickbank etc and people might buy. You could offer your product as an affiliate product and that might generate sales.

Time and time again you see this online. You focus on one topic that you enjoy or really love and then you create different ways to buff out that niche idea.

One person was interested in “wire art”. Hard to sell online right? Wrong. What they did was:

set up a council for small sculpture artists (pay per year with industry news)
set up a business selling wire art tools, which then increased to selling various different art tools
created an email list of many thousand loyal subscribers. He now charges for Ad space totalling $3k/ month
sells his own stuff online and set up a website for others to do the same.

Everyone is looking for evergreen

The evergreens.

Regardless of time, evergreen topics will always bring in the money. Romance/ Money/ Diet. Are tried and true topics that always sell. You can niche down really far in those genres, and people do.

The problem is that they are historically terrible to enter unless you have a subtopic niche or you invent your own.

But you will notice that most genres will have a season and most genres will have some sort of evergreen nature to it. You can figure out if the genre you are interested in has evergreen nature by looking at Google Trends. As a side note, if it is a trend it is already selling.

best ebook selling categories guitar trends

The above picture shows Google Trends for "learn to play guitar" vs "learn flamenco guitar". You can see the peaks and troughs of both and some of those being quite steep. But the genre doesnt disappear. Google will also tell you (further down the page) what people are also searching for. "Learn to play the guitar at home" was a good contender- sounds the same as "learn to play the guitar" but- just a little bit different.

So:

find the genre you like
can you make money from it?
does it have some evergreen nature to it?
are there too many people within the genre? If you niche further down with the intent to increase authority to that higher up niche. Dominate that smaller niche.
can you differentiate your smaller niche from everyone else? Can you use the higher up niche content creators to sell your product through an affiliate relationship?

For more info on eProduct selling, check out the Jasonera blog.