To sell big on Amazon, you need to target genre.You need to write a novel that has an eager audience. But there's much more involved than that. The key to selling big is in understanding how Amazon's search engines work and how Amazon categorizes genres and populates best-seller lists.

Amazon is one of the biggest search engines in the world, and authors, hands down, sell more books on Amazon than on any other online site. It stands to reason, too, that the genres that sell best on Amazon are also selling best on other venues such as Nook, Kobo, and iBooks, so finding a niche genre to write in that sells well on Amazon will most likely carry over to sales on these other sites.

You can't just write a great book, publish it in the Kindle store, and expect it to sell well. Even if you write a novel that basically fits in one of the top-selling general categories, such as mystery, romance, or fantasy, that doesn't guarantee you'll be discovered. In fact, just the opposite. You're putting your novel up against hundreds of thousands of other books in those categories.

So in this section about hunting down genre, we're going to look at ways to target genre by first understanding how Amazon defines and organizes books, then see how to find big-selling niche genres that have much less competition than the general categories.

You'll then learn how to deconstruct novels in that niche genre you plan to write in so that your book will fit in and appeal to that target audience. It's all about homing in on a specific narrow target audience that is looking for a book just like yours. That doesn't mean your novel won't appeal to other audiences, but your best chance at success is to be specific in your aim, and then promote your book in a way similar to that of the best-selling authors in your niche genre. You'll learn step by step how to do this.

You may not have thought much about genre when coming up with ideas for your novels. But I hope that once you go through this course, you'll agree that the road to success lies in understanding and targeting genre before you sit down to write.

But for now, let's take a look at what genre is all about so you can soon get started on your hunt.

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