As the iconic Chris Grosser states, “Opportunities don’t happen. You create them”.

Being the eternal truth for all success, the quote acted as a beacon of hope when I started my first Amazon Kindle self-publishing venture a few months back.

Although I was hopeful and excited for the near future, I had to spend an endless amount of time searching for the ideal niches to write on. And that’s what I found to be the most daunting aspect of starting out in the eBook business.

And whatever I could manage for my first book, the job soon became a drudge when I had to do it all over again for another eBook.

Around this time a friend told me, who had been in the same business for a while, to look up keywords research and optimization software that’ll do all the hard work for me in a jiffy.

I used a variety of tools, including KDP Rocket to do the research, but it wasn’t until I discovered KDSpy that my life truly changed.

Should you give it a try as well? Find out in this Kindle Spy review.

What is Kindle Spy?

Kindle Spy or KDSpy is a Kindle Publishing Tool amongst many other such tools under the Kindle Publisher’s tool belt. This is also one of the first softwares for self-publishers for Amazon and has been a favorite for its numerous users since a substantial period of time.

Although the market has improved quite a bit with newer and more advanced softwares to throttle in the game besides it, KDSpy is still winning with some unparalleled features and advantages over the others.

My Experience with the software

When I had first started looking up keyword research tools I had my doubts regarding how much do these actually aid niche research and management. It goes without saying that the job comes with endless hours of data scrutiny and an enormous amount of statistical analysis, to put it rather simply.

The real deal, apart from the collection of data itself, is to manage the drudge-work that soon makes you lose all interest in the job. And this is precisely what had happened and what I realized after only a couple of weeks into my venture.

Since it took up so much time, my deadlines got greatly jeopardized in the process, which meant the reliability and delivery of the responsibilities on my part flaked and cracked under pressure.

And for me, it was not until I found KDSpy that I was actually able to manage all of this work. And boy, did it work well! I wrapped things up well within an hour compared to almost the entire day it previously took up.

Now, with all the sales analytics well on my screen in no time at all, I can handle my groundwork and deadlines way more efficiently. The best part? Give my family the time they had to sacrifice in order for me to start my business.

How does KDSpy work?

KDSpy downloads the sales data of the first 20 books for a particular keyword or category and opens up the keyword status to the user.

This way, you can see if the keyword is profitable or not. It scans the keyword and retrieves information on the Kindle books that include the number of pages, the price, estimated sales, monthly revenue, number of reviews and finally the sales rank.

The estimated sales, especially the sales rank is what you mainly want to look at when you’re in the Amazon Kindle business.

For instance, if a book has got a sales rank of around 100,000, it will get about 1 sale a day. If the book is priced at $2.99, it means that the author can make between $60 and $100 a month.

The lower the sales ranks get, the more money you’ll make. The monthly revenue rests on the estimated sales multiplied by the price.

KDSpy also evaluates whether it would be profitable for you to pursue your niche based on a traffic light system that shows its popularity, potential, and competition.

Features and Benefits of Using Kindle Spy

As I’ve previously mentioned, there have been several advanced options in recent years when it came to self-publishing tools. There are many that have improved on what Kindle Spy does.

Yet, there are some essential aspects to Kindle Spy that weren’t replicated and which presents numerous important functions for the users.

One of the main and exclusive features of Kindle Spy is that it allows you to see how well a Kindle ebook category is doing when compared to another.

Apart from this, you can also analyze the following using KDSpy:

Keyword Research



Upon entering a seed keyword, the tool will give you a list of related keywords and their competition.

From there, you can click on the “Analyze” button which will give you the following information on books that target your keyword:

Kindle book title

Page count

Price of the book

Estimated sales

Estimated monthly revenues

Amount of reviews per book

Its Amazon sales ranking

The traffic light system on the bottom right indicates that the keyword “golf confidence” isn’t very popular but it has some potential and a low competition level.

This feature simplifies the cumbersome and monotonous job of collecting the data so that you can quickly have all the required information show up on your screen within the blink of an eye!

It used to cost me hours to manually research one seed keyword, now it takes a few clicks.

Word Cloud

Another useful feature offered by this tool is that it reveals the most used related keywords surrounding the main keyword that you are analyzing. This helps you to get the keywords that you might’ve missed or never thought of.

It is one of the most basic ways in which any KDSpy user learns their way around the software. The option looks like a hyperlinked word, located on the top-right of the interface.

Follow Or “Spy” On Other Authors

KDSpy lets you see or spy on the progress of any author you want to keep a track on. It will filter their books by the lowest or best-selling ABSR to the highest or worst-selling ABSR. This is a very useful factor when it comes to dominating your niche.

It also allows you to see the keywords the author is using in their book titles.

It is an immensely useful tool that can give you numerous benefits for your keywords, depending on the status of the writer that you’re following.

Tracking Your Competitor’s Rankings (30 days)

And this is one of the most beneficial and an absolutely brilliant feature of Kindle Spy that no other softwares were able to replicate. It lets you keep a track of your competitor’s sales rank.

Simply click the “T” while you’re viewing a potential keyword or an author’s profile.

This will redirect you to a certain KDSpy page where you can check the “Track SaleRanks” option button. Once you click, it will start tracking your competitor’s book.

You can easily set it and forget about being on watch, as it will do that job for you. Even if a week has passed, you can view all the progress on the data graph by visiting your competitor’s Amazon sales page and clicking the KDSpy extension thereafter.

You’ll get your 7 days worth of data sitting there for you!

This has been a wonderful feature that helped me make the best use of all the precious data, which in turn benefitted my venture immensely.

Category Research

If you’re into the Kindle e-book business, no matter whichever way you deal with it, you should be absolutely thorough with the Amazon Kindle category research.

If you choose the categories just right, you may secure maximum exposure. And that will, in turn, lead to a high sales ranking, with Amazon bestowing their “bestseller” orange badge to promote your stuff themselves!

This orange badge will lead to higher clicks on the product and signal Amazon that your book should be ranked higher.

Amazon also rewards bestsellers with their own ad spend budget mainly by using two forms of marketing: email marketing and Facebook ads.

And since Amazon has a wide network of Facebook Pixels all over its site, they get to know when you’ve landed on a bestselling book’s page.

This is the reason why you can expect to see some form of a Facebook ad of that book soon on the sponsored area (side widget). So, to sum up, if you rank 1st in your category, then you’ll have Amazon itself in your very own game feeding you the sales.

How To Do Category Research With Kindle Spy?

The manual method of carrying out category research will take you forever even to reach the closest choice of an appropriate option.

But the good news is, you don’t really have to go down that path if you have KDSpy on your team.

This is because it will perform this very task for you!

Figure Out Your Opponents’ Categories

Use the software to figure out your competitor’s best Kindle categories. It makes the guesswork easy by providing you with all the probable hyperlink suggestions so that you can easily decode the most appropriate categories available.

This reveals all the parent links and child links of any given category for you to locate the ideal slot, thus hacking off the tiresome hours spent on the task.

Analyzing Category Pages With KDSpy

Kindle Spy will analyze the top 20 books in any category page and provide many variables that’ll help you select the 2 best categories for your books.

A best-selling book in a particular category will have a high supply rate. This can be determined by the Average Monthly Revenue, which the KDSpy software displays.

KDSpy calculates all of these tabs for all categories within just a few seconds! It will also indicate the amount of traffic, the strength of the overall competition and your chances of making to the very top of the list.

To sum up the procedure…

First, put an index on your competitor’s best categories.

See if their child categories are as far as you can get in a particular parent category and run KDSpy on those as well.

Run the software on your opponent’s category Amazon pages to check which ones are doing the best.

Select the perfect category for your book.

Notes And Tips

Remember that not all categories will be available to you when uploading a book to Kindle Direct Publishing, which is solely by design.

Amazon tends to hide a lot of available categories from publishers.

However, there’s little to worry about regarding this issue. All you have to do is select a temporary category instead of the one you want.

And then, once your book gets live, contact KDP to add the originally chosen category to your book.

I personally give my book’s ASIN in the email.

Thereafter, they’ll get back to you and your category will be added within a short while.

At times, you may find yourself comparing two categories which are both easy to rank. This is because the third bubble on the page is green.

In such situations, choose the category that has better average sales rankings to get the statistics in your favor.

KDSpy Vs. KDP Rocket: Who Wins?

While talking about KDSpy, we cannot possibly go without mentioning KDP Rocket, which is after all, its biggest rival.

Before I tried KDSpy, I was a frequent user of KDP Rocket. Although little did I have to complain about this software back then, I would honestly admit that I found KDSpy better due to several reasons.

Well, before I start with the factors that got me hooked on to KDSpy, let me tell you a bit about KDP Rocket.

KDP Rocket is a self-publishing software that mainly helps you to determine whether or not a book is viable for the market. It does so in the following ways:

Evaluating your competitors

Finding the ideal category for your book

Validating and discovering suitable book ideas

Helping to write better titles and book descriptions

However, for me, KDSpy wins over KDP Rocket because of a couple of factors that worked for me better than what KDP Rocket had to offer.

Better category research: I found KDSpy to be a superior software when it came to category research than KDP Rocket, as it uses a much simpler method to do the task, than the latter. KDSpy’s sales and earning spy feature is spot on for me as well as for other publishers on kboards.com, which is a Kindle forum.

Better refund policy: KDSpy offers its benefits for you at half the price of KDP Rocket with twice the refund period (60 days vs 30 days). So, in any case you don’t like it, you’ll get your money back.

To sum up, I’d just say that if you’re new to this business, you can safely go for KDSpy. It will give all the advantages of a good self-publishing software without making you spend a large sum in the initial days of the venture.

Although I still use KDP Rocket here and there because of its cool interface, I still turn to KDSpy for getting the majority of the work done without having to worry about other complications.

A Quick Look At The Benefits And Drawbacks Of KDSpy

Like everything ever, Kindle Spy also comes with its own share of demerits along with all the positives.

However, for me, the positives have outnumbered the disadvantages by a great margin and the software in itself has been a wonderful help all along!

Pros

All-in-one tool for niche, category, keyword research and competition analysis.

It saves a massive amount of time on the overall keyword and niche research with a few clicks.

Provides free updates for all Amazon algorithm changes.

It offers a 60-day unconditional guarantee and unbeatable 1-time payment price.

Can track your competitor’s book rankings for 30 days.

Top of the line category research feature, determines how a Kindle ebook category is doing compared to others.

Now work for paperback books.

Cons

Doesn’t display estimated Amazon searches per month.

Final Thoughts

More than the money, which KDSpy has helped me make, it has given me back the precious hours I lost during those endless research periods, looking at data and niches.

It has been the greatest guide and the most useful tool in my business. And, never has it failed to give me the desired results.

Even though you might get a more advanced software for this very purpose, when it comes to reliability and exclusivity, KDSpy is undeniably irreplaceable for me.

I suggest you check it out as well!