Vol. 1 · No. 1• Free · Every TuesdayEst. 2025

This Week inSelf-Publishing

We track Amazon, Reddit, and search trends all week. Every Tuesday you get the highlights: niches worth writing in, categories to avoid, weird keywords nobody’s targeting yet, and what readers are actually buying.

Published Tuesday mornings · 7 minute read
This Tuesday · a preview

What’s in this week’s edition.

Three stories pulled from the ~33,000 data points we scraped over the last seven days. Here’s what this week’s edition looks like.

Lead story · Underserved

A retired mayor is holding #1 in westerns with book 151. Here’s what that means for you.

The westerns top-10 has a book with 7 reviews sitting at #1. Seven. The category is wide open — low review counts, thin competition, and readers who devour series faster than any other genre we track. If you can write a ranch and a sunset, nobody’s stopping you.

Top-10 review count · westerns
0–49 reviews
6
50–99
2
100–499
1
500+
1
7
Reviews at #1
Wide open category
Keyword alert

“Cozy mystery series” is the cheapest traffic in book advertising.

Monthly searches went from 2,400 to 9,900 in 11 months — 312% growth. CPC is $0.05. Five cents. If you’re running Amazon Ads in the cozy space and you’re not bidding on this phrase, you’re overpaying for every click.

312%
Search growth
$0.05 CPC
Reader pipeline

A pirate video game is about to send readers to Amazon.

A pirate game just sold 1 million copies in 6 days. Pirate mentions hit 7 across book subreddits this week — the highest single-genre keyword count we’ve tracked. The gaming-to-reading pipeline takes 2–3 weeks to show up on Amazon. That window is open right now.

1M
Copies sold
Pipeline: 2–3 weeks
Four kinds of signal

Writing tips are everywhere. Demand signals aren’t.

Most publishing newsletters tell you how to write better. We tell you what’s worth writing — and what’s a trap. Every edition includes all four of these.

i

Underserved niches

Categories where readers are hungry but the shelves are thin. High page-reads, low competition, weak top-50 review counts. These are the openings.

This week
Ghosts & Haunted Houses: #1 book has 2 reviews. $478K/month in category revenue. 90% KU. Nearly half a million dollars flowing through a category where the top book is brand new.
ii

Overserved categories

Niches flooded with new releases and entrenched bestsellers. We call them out so you don’t spend three months writing into a wall.

This week
Romantasy score dropped to 40 and trending down — one author holds 16 of the top 20 slots. Unless you can out-publish Sarah J. Maas, pick a different shelf.
iii

Keywords picking up steam

Search phrases whose usage in top-100 subtitles is climbing faster than anyone’s noticed. Low competition, rising demand. First movers clean up.

This week
“Cozy mystery series” went from 2,400 monthly searches to 9,900 in 11 months — 312% growth. CPC is $0.05. The cheapest traffic in book advertising right now.
iv

Where readers are headed

Reddit buzz, Google Trends, and TikTok signals cross-referenced with what’s actually selling on Amazon. See demand before it hits the charts.

This week
Pirate mentions hit 7 across book subreddits this week — highest single-genre keyword count. A pirate game just sold 1 million copies in 6 days. The gaming-to-reading pipeline is 2–3 weeks from hitting Amazon.
33,000+
Data points / week
We scrape Amazon every day so you don’t have to
77
Kindle categories
Pricing, competition, KU saturation, rank velocity
Every Tue
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Issue #1 — this week

Here’s what the first edition actually covers.

No paywall, no “premium tier,” no upsell. Every subscriber gets every issue, forever.

Vol. 1 · No. 1
April 2026

A pirate video game is building a reading pipeline, a retired mayor holds #1 in westerns with 7 reviews, and Elsie Silver just showed everyone how series velocity actually works.

Underserved nichesKeyword trendsKU data
We scraped 33,000+ books across 77 Kindle categories this week. These are the three stories that matter — and the numbers behind them.
Most publishing newsletters tell you how to write better. Nobody was telling authors what’s actually worth writing. So we built that.
The Book to Blurb teamScraping Amazon daily since 2025

One email. Every Tuesday. The good stuff.

Free forever. No fluff, no paywall, no “premium tier.” Just the data that helps you pick your next book smarter.