5 Essential Tools for Kindle Self-Publishing - Keyword Research, Outsourcing, Cover Design and More

About this video

Sean walks through five tools he considers essential for Kindle self-publishing. First is Publisher Rocket, which he calls the most important tool, priced at a one-time $97 at the time of recording. He demonstrates using it to generate hundreds of AMS keywords from a single seed keyword to build large campaigns, to find the full list of Amazon categories — including ones not shown during KDP upload — sorted by competitiveness so a book can rank in a relevant, less competitive category, and to research related keywords for KDP metadata and IngramSpark. Second is KD Spy, a Chrome extension he says costs $47 one-time, which displays the first page of results for a keyword in one view with titles, prices, reviews, and estimated revenue to judge profitability; he names DS Amazon Quick View as a free alternative. Third is Grammarly, which he mainly uses in its paid version as a plagiarism checker for content from Upwork freelancers, since it can check an entire book in Word. Fourth is Fiverr for cheap cover design, formatting, and other gigs. Fifth is Microsoft Word and Excel via an Office 365 subscription, which he says is needed to properly open, edit, and save the Word files the business runs on.

Key takeaways

• Publisher Rocket is presented as the must-have tool for AMS keyword research, full category discovery, and metadata keyword research
• Use large AMS keyword sets gathered with Rocket, then narrow to converting keywords; keep added categories relevant to the book and do not chase a bestseller badge in unrelated categories
• KD Spy gives an at-a-glance profitability view of a keyword’s first page; DS Amazon Quick View is the free alternative
• Grammarly’s paid plagiarism checker is used to verify originality of freelancer-written books by checking the whole manuscript in Word
• Fiverr covers low-cost cover design and formatting, and Microsoft Word/Excel is treated as basic infrastructure for handling book files

Episode details: published January 27, 2020 · 13:44 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Sean Dollwet’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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