Publisher Rocket Review
Publisher Rocket is a powerful book marketing tool that can help to propel your published work from obscurity to widespread attention. It’s not a magic bullet and can’t make a bad book sell well, but it can reveal buying trends on Amazon. With information on what people are reading, how they are buying, how much money they are spending and what competing books are available on the market, it can help to direct your writing and marketing efforts for optimum effect.
With a 30-day money back guarantee, the creators of this Mac and Windows-compatible software certainly have faith in its effectiveness, as do about 22,000 authors, publishers and self-publishers. What it actually does is relatively simple, but those simple few features can give you the essential analytics you need to make profitable decisions and make self-publishing a viable career, side hustle or passive income stream.
Important features of Publisher Rocket
There are four core features of Publisher Rocket. These are:
- Keyword Search
- Competition Analyzer
- Category Search
- AMS Keyword Search
The first is pretty simple – the keyword search will tell you what keywords customers are looking for on Amazon’s book store. If you’ve already got a specific idea of what you want to write, it’ll show you how popular that theme is to give you an idea of the potential return on the amount of time you’re going to be investing. On the other hand, it could give you ideas for new titles. If you can provide a book that answers a specific question being asked by readers, you’re almost guaranteed sales.
Relatedly, the category search can help you to find underrepresented niches, which are a gold mine for those seeking passive income. It’s important to compare the results from the keyword search and the category search, however, to make sure that the niche you’re looking at is genuinely underrepresented and not just unpopular.
The competition analyser is the technical highlight of Publisher Rocket. It can reveal the daily and monthly sales figures of any book on Amazon. It does not show you what keywords that book targets, so you will have to do a little bit of data analysis and interpretation yourself, reading between the lines to see how one piece of information relates to others. However, this tool will clearly show you what is popular and with readers and what is not. You can then take inspiration from the winners, including how they use their book’s title, subtitle and description for optimum conversions.
The final tool – the AMS keyword search – is arguably the most important. It will help you to make the most effective and efficient campaign possible using Amazon Marketing Services by highlighting the best keywords for you to use. It massively simplifies the whole process, too, allowing you to focus on the writing without neglecting the essential marketing.
How does Publisher Rocket work?
Publisher Rocket is a standalone application, compatible with both Mac and Windows. Being a standalone instead of a plug-in, extension or widget makes it quicker and more powerful. It’s also independent of Amazon, which may help to assure you of the data’s honesty and impartiality.
Once you’ve installed Publisher Rocket, you can then start using those awesome tools. With the keyword search, you can reduce what could be hours of research time to a few seconds. Rather than manually entering keywords into Amazon and trying to interpret the results yourself, you can enter a single keyword and get a lot of clear information to work from.
You’ll need to select whether you want to search the results for eBooks or print books and then type in your keyword. Hit “Go Get Em Rocket” and you’ll be given a list that starts with the keyword you typed, followed by dozens of related search terms. For each item on the list, there will be a cell for the number of competitors, average monthly earnings, Google searches per month, estimated Amazon searches per month and a competitive score that gives a simple representation of all of that data.
Bizarrely, you’ll find all of the cells blank, to start with. This is probably due to the sheer amount of data required to fill all of these cells. Instead of crashing the service by asking for so much data from Amazon at once, you can select specific rows to show the results for, meaning your page is easier to read and only gives you the information you are interested in.
The ideal result for a writer seeking a good source of passive income is a keyword that gives high monthly earnings and a low competitive score, with good numbers of searches on Google and Amazon being a major bonus. What’s best of all is that all of this data is gathered and displayed in one place in a few seconds, rather than requiring several hours and accounts with a range of research tools.
While Publisher Rocket lists the competition analyser as the next tool, we’re going to jump right to to category search because it relates to the journey we’re taking, from finding an idea to write about to marketing the end result. Amazon has over 16,000 categories for books so getting the right one for your book is pretty important. As before, you enter a keyphrase – your approximate estimate of your book’s subject – and it’ll give you all the suggestions around that. Also as before, the table starts unpopulated and you can pick the ones you want the data for.
This time, the table shows the Amazon Best Seller Rank (ABSR) for the top book in this category and for the tenth book in the category. This gives you an idea of how popular the category is in the grand scheme of things. You’ll also get the number of sales for both the top and tenth book. Between these four columns, you should get an idea of exactly how popular and competitive each category is, helping you to decide where yours should go.
Next is the competition analyser – a genuinely powerful tool and essential for prospective authors. You can select any book available on Amazon, either as a print or eBook, and see its monthly sales, daily sales, the keywords in the title and subtitle, the age of the book and its ABSR. You can drill down further in your research by clicking the provided link to check out the book’s sales page, too. This way, you can see what you’re up against as well as how you can optimise your listing to increase sales. In terms of getting a real grasp of how publishing on Amazon works, what people are buying and what they aren’t, there’s no tool more useful.
The final tool is the AMS keyword search, which makes setting up a great marketing campaign for your newly written book a breeze. You can check out a series of tutorials by the creator of Publisher Rocket, Dave Cheeson, which will walk you through the process of selecting the best keywords to focus your marketing on – he can do it better than I can here, so it’s best if you check those out for yourself.
Publisher Rocket vs KD Spy
KD Spy is the only real competitor to Publisher Rocket and, to be fair to it, has one or two significant advantages, especially in terms of the number of markets that it will give you data for. While Rocket focuses mostly on the US market, with more promised in future updates, KD Spy can give you information from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Japan, France, Italy and Germany. The data is sometimes a little more detailed and can be presented in graphs. Finally, KD Spy’s returns policy is twice as long as Publisher Rocket’s and the cost is about half.
However, while you’re paying less for KD Spy, you are getting a lot less functionality, too. Rocket’s list of tools is significantly longer and its cleaner user interface makes the data much easier to read and interpret. It’s a whole toolbox in a single piece of software compared to one tool that does one job pretty well.
Some final thoughts on Publisher Rocket
As with anything, there are things about Publisher Rocket that could be improved on. For example, it doesn’t currently cover international markets. It would be nice to be able to filter results a little more, too. However, the software is in continuous development and it’s entirely possible that more features and markets will be available in a later update.
Even in its current form, it’s an extremely powerful piece of software and makes a massive difference for authors of any experience level, from raw beginners to the USA Today and New York Times bestselling authors that use it. A one-off payment of $97 is a very fair price for a solution that could spell the difference between months of hard work being a flop or a source of long-term passive income.