Step 1: Pick A Subcategory

This isn't a marriage decision, but it's an important commitment.

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Dear Fiction Writer,

In 2023, I did a podcast with entrepreneur Greg Isenberg (and my business partner, Dickie Bush) where we talked about startup ideas.

Two weeks prior, I had just caught up with an old client of mine. He’d hired my ghostwriting agency years ago to help him author thought leadership articles for his business, a small indie publishing house and storytelling consultancy. I’d always enjoyed our conversations, and it had been a while since we caught up, so I figured we were overdue for a conversation.

On the call, he was explaining how excited he was these days about a handful of emerging subcategories in fiction: Romantasy being the big one, followed by a little-known subcategory I’d never heard of.

“It’s called LitRPG,” he said. “It’s like reading a video game.”

When it comes to writing, I like studying everything. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Nobel prize-winning novel, a Grammy-nominated album, a short-story anthology, viral Reddit posts, or smut. If it’s successful at capturing people’s attention, I want to know why—regardless of whether or not I “like it” or “think it’s good.”

So, I spent the entire weekend reading about this new subcategory called LitRPG.

2 Tools For Category Research

There are 2 tools I use when researching subcategories in fiction.

• Publisher Rocket: This is a SaaS tool developed by Kindlepreneur that allows you to search through Amazon’s library of books. It shows everything from keywords to category rankings to book sales and more. Whenever I am researching subcategories (in both non-fiction and fiction), but also whenever I’m curious how well another author is selling, this is the first tool I use.

• K-Lytics: The second tool I use is a paid membership community called K-Lytics, which publishes monthly reports on high-growth fiction categories on Amazon. It’s a janky website, but the content is top-tier. Anything you want to know, about any individual subcategory on Amazon—from category TAM to growth rate to trending (up or down) keywords—you can find here.

Now, a little context:

One of the most important statistics you need to be aware of in the world of fiction is that “women account for nearly 80 percent of fiction sales in the US, UK, and Canada.”

The other stat you need to know is that the single largest fiction category is Romance. More than Fantasy, more than Science Fiction, and more than Crime/Thrillers. And within the Romance category, 80% of readers are female.

So, out the gate, if you want to be a successful fiction writer, it’s worth recognizing that “the majority” of readers are a) women, and b) who want romance somewhere in the story.

For example, authors like James Patterson have clocked on to this phenomenon and, instead of shying away from it, leaned in full force. Patterson has said these statistics were the inspiration behind his Women's Murder Club book series—recognizing the majority of his readers are not only female, but also book club enthusiasts. And what better way to hijack this community than write a book series specifically for that type of reader?

So when researching categories, this is always the first thing I keep top of mind.

Which is what made the LitRPG subcategory so unique.

According to my research, LitRPG is one of the only subcategories I have ever found where the majority of readers are male.

(Not that a pre-requisite for me was “I have to write for men, not women.” But in a disappearing world of men in literature, I am interested in how to help more young men feel excited to read again.)

Other things I look for (and found, that made me excited about the subcategory):

• Publisher %: In Publisher Rocket, you can research insights at the subcategory level. And an important metric is the density of large publishers in a given category or subcategory. If you search huge categories like Romance, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Thriller, etc., you’ll find these are dominated by large publishers (80-90%+). Lower-competition subcategories are ones that are still “indie” and less publisher-dominant—like LitRPG here (screenshot above) showing 42% of titles belonging to large publishing houses.

• Sales To #10: Another metric I look at is how many copies you have to sell in a 24-hour period to reach the Top 10 for that day. Again, in large categories, this number might be thousands, or tens of thousands of copies. Very competitive! But the more specific (and “still indie”) the subcategory, the more likely you are to crack the Top 10 with a reasonable number of sales.

• KU %: On Amazon, there are 2 games you can play. You can either “go wide,” meaning you publish on Amazon as well as all other major distribution platforms: Apple Books, Kobo, Google Books, etc. Or, you can “go exclusive” and publish within Amazon’s ecosystem, Kindle Unlimited. This is their “Spotify for books” option, where you get paid based on pages read from subscribers—the same way Spotify pays music artists per stream. In Publisher Rocket, you can see the KU % of any subcategory, which tells you “which game” you need to play. In the case of LitRPG, 94% of books published in this subcategory have gone exclusive to Kindle Unlimited—and there’s probably a reason for that. A lot of readers in this subcategory are probably KU subscribers who binge multiple books per month. So if you want to write/publish LitRPG (for example), it would be smart to recognize this is the game you’re playing and lean into it.

• Home-Run Sales Volume: The last thing I look for is where the ceiling is. Who is absolutely crushing it in this subcategory? What does hitting a home run look like?

By a wide margin, the biggest success story I could find in the LitRPG world was a series called Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. Now, I’ve heard the sales numbers inside Publisher Rocket can be inflated, but even if they’re off by ~30%, the math is still shocking.

Just take a look for yourself:

By my estimation, the Dungeon Crawler Carl series is doing $3,000,000 - $5,000,000 a month in top-line revenue across eBook, print, and audio. That means that single series could be generating $36,000,000+ per year.

For a small category, that’s insane! And a great signal of high-potential in this subcategory.

A couple other things I noticed that got me excited: