Publisher Rocket is a book marketing software that helps authors (both fiction & non-fiction) find Amazon keywords for your book, AMS keywords, optimize books with Amazon SEO, optimize categories, improve Amazon ads, get book ideas and overall sell more books.
You know that sinking feeling when you’ve invested time and effort in writing a book that leaves you with little to nothing to show for your investment?
When your book is on Amazon, but your target readers are not finding it… That’s how I felt before I started using the Publisher Rocket software.
Self publishing books on Amazon can be hard, but it doesn’t have to be. Let me explain.
Publisher Rocket gave me insight into the right words to use in my titles, subtitles, book descriptions, and more. It’s how I started getting more readers to buy my books. It made me realize getting more readers from Amazon is about choosing the right profitable keywords for your book, which, in turn, helps my books rank higher.
Most self published authors overlook keywords (aka. search terms) and think of terms they think are fitting for their book’s title & subtitles. Some couldn’t be bothered and rather focus their marketing efforts on book cover design, social media, and just doing things their way.
This is understandable, but what about marketing your book(s) through Amazon’s search engine? How do you get the bots to put your book(s) in front of your target audience?
Publishers have figured it out. It is about placing target keywords relevant to your market in the strategic places of your KDP book settings – more on this soon.
Some self published authors realize that selling more books involves playing the Amazon keywords game (aside from building an email list). They understand that keywords (and categories to an extent) and specific KDP optimizing play one of the biggest roles in driving Amazon traffic to their books.
A few years back, I found Publisher Rocket (formerly known as KDP Rocket) and put off getting it. I learned about the tool from researching the self-publishing space on YouTube and reading about Dave Chesson (the creator of the product) on his Kindlepreneur blog.
At the time, another Amazon tool with a fancy keyword feature that claims it can help authors was the last thing on my mind as I was still learning from self publishing courses and writing each day to hit my daily word count for a long-time book project.
When I was done writing, I started to explore Amazon Kindle Publishing software, which could give me a competitive advantage over the authors in my niche(s). Publisher Rocket got my attention.
I Finally Gave It A Shot
After judging a book by its cover for too long, I gave Publisher Rocket a shot (it had a 30-day money-back guarantee then and still does today) and use it to this day because it helps my Amazon book marketing campaigns.
The video below is my Publisher Rocket review & tutorial. I cover the software’s 4 main tools, including the keyword Rocket feature and pros and cons! Want to see why it can give e-books & print books a competitive edge over other authors and help you sell more? Watch the video!
Editor’s Note: Originally, this was a KDP Rocket review (now a Publisher Rocket review). The name change occurred in 2019. The new website is: https://publisherrocket.com.
Table of Contents
- What Is Publisher Rocket?
- Publisher Rocket Features
- Feature #1: Keyword Analysis with Publisher Rocket
- Feature #2: Competition Breakdown at a Glance
- Feature #3: Choosing the Best Book Categories
- Feature #4: Launching AMS Ads Effectively
- What I Didn’t Like About Publisher Rocket
- Will Publisher Rocket Work For You?
- Publisher Rocket Review – Final Verdict
What Is Publisher Rocket?
Publisher Rocket is a standalone software (not a Google Chrome extension) for PC or Mac users. Both fiction and non-fiction authors alike use it for keyword and category analysis.
The tool’s beauty is that it reveals how people are searching for your type of book, how people are making buying decisions on Amazon, and how your competitors are getting in front of those people.
Publisher Rocket Features
It accomplishes getting more readers to your books through its 4 easy to use research features:
- Keyword Search: this keyword finder search feature helps you find keywords for on-page optimization so your book can get ranked higher in the Amazon book market.
- Competitor Analyzer: gives you competitor information at a glance so you can see how well their book is (or isn’t) doing in the market – including monthly sales per book. This will give you an idea of how competitive things can get in said market.
- Category Search: this new feature is BIG because it helps you decide on the best categories for your book and in doing so, increases your chance of being a bestseller in your market (this highly increases your book’s Click-Through-Rate).
- AMS Keyword Search: if you do or are planning on running AMS advertising, Rocket helps you build your advertising campaigns more effectively and efficiently with its AMS keyword feature. AMS campaigns can be a tricky business, but this AMS feature helps!
Publisher Rocket continuously improves and updates the features above and adds new features to its product every year.
Feature #1: Keyword Analysis with Publisher Rocket
Let’s say you’re an author and have a book idea in mind but want to know the possible keywords you can use for your book’s title. Choosing the right title can help you rank better because Amazon is a search engine that follows its A9 algorithm.
Without Publisher Rocket, you would have to manually type in keyword search phrases in Amazon and spot out keywords woven in subtitles of existing book titles for hints of query variations.
With Publisher Rocket, you can see a lot of data behind your keyword plus all of its variations, along with each Amazon’s keyword monthly search data (other research tools don’t show this – more on this in the next sections) for your target market.
Sure, you could manually do this, but think of the time you’re wasting. The time that could be used to write the next bestseller! The keyword analyzer alone can save you hours of work.
Discover Keywords and Variations
Here’s how to start this book research process. Click on the Keyword Search feature on the Publisher Rocket dashboard and enter a target keyword for eBook or book data.
Let’s take the topic of “honey bees” and enter it in the search bar for this example. We’ll choose E-Book and click on Go Get Em Rocket! (Being able to choose only Book is a new Publisher Rocket feature!).
The search bar lets you choose between e-book or book data!
The keyword target will load up the Searches Tab Dashboard.
On the Search results page, you can see the following based on the seed keyword:
- List of Keywords
- Number of Competitors (# of authors) in the Amazon results
- Average Earnings: the amount of money books are making that rank for that specific term
- Google Searches/Month
- Amazon Searches per Month (very helpful)
- Competition Score: how competitive it is to rank for that term from a 0-100 range (100 being the most difficult).
Note: Data will not display until you click the orange Analyze button on the respective row.
As with most software that has a competitive score metric, remember that it’s just there for guidance. This is my favorite feature because it is an easy process that provides an incredible amount of relevant information based on a seed phrase.
Amazon Searches Per Month Revealed
Ever wonder about the profit potential of a keyword on Amazon? I know I did. Moreover, I wanted numbers to back up my book ideas (keyword ideas) to feel confident it would return a positive ROI on Amazon.
Here’s the bad news. Amazon doesn’t release its average monthly Search Volume for any of its listed books. The good news:
Publisher Rocket Shows Estimated Amazon Search Volume Of Any Keyword… Giving You Confidence In Your Book, Title, And It’s Ability To Make Book Sales!
This is truly where Rocket shines. It helps give you confidence in self-publishing books before you spend time writing or outsourcing your next book.
Feature #2: Competition Breakdown at a Glance
Before Publisher Rocket’s competition analyzer, competitor analysis was inefficient.
I’d waste so much time analyzing the Amazon search results for: competitors keywords, Amazon Bestseller Rank (ABSR), Amazon Kindle store categories, and more by opening their book sales pages separately.
Those days are gone.
The second tab in the dashboard is the Competition Analyzer tab.
The Competition Analyzer gives you everything you need to know about your competition on the first page of results. It gives you information like the:
- Book title & subtitle & book covers
- Author name
- How long a competitor’s book has been published on Amazon (book age)
- Current ABSR
- Keyword in title (Y/N)
- Keyword in sub-title (Y/N)
- Estimated daily sales (DY Sales)
- Estimated monthly sales
- Provides a link to a specific Amazon competitor with a click of a button
- Sadly, it doesn’t include the terms the competition is ranking well for (Amazon doesn’t release this info, and thus Rocket can’t retrieve that data)
While the competition analysis screen is up, I have Amazon fired up on my browser when I’m using Publisher Rocket.
The competition feature is useful when I think I’ve found a winner through both the Amazon Searches and the Competition Searches tabs.
Publisher Rocket’ competition analyzer has links that lead directly to the book’s sales page on Amazon for this very reason – to double check.
Feature #3: Choosing the Best Book Categories
Selecting the right Amazon categories for your book is helpful because it can help you sell more books by becoming an Amazon bestseller.
Publisher Rocket can help you optimize your book categories to increase your chances of becoming a bestseller on Amazon (you need to be #1 in your categories in order to be a best seller).
If you achieve this status, Amazon will reward you with an orange Best Seller badge (some call it a bestseller ribbon or bestseller tag) next to your book:
This will make your book stand out among the rest (not to mention boost your social proof). Ultimately, this increases your book’s click-through rate, which increases the overall traffic to your book’s page, which increases your conversions, which makes you more money!
A quick note: you used to be able to manually go to a competitor’s page and see what category strings they had. Amazon no longer shows the complete category string, BUT Publisher Rocket does show this category data.
Using the category feature is simple. You just enter your seed category phrase and select if you want book data, eBook data, or both.
Publisher Rocket then fetches all the categories related to the initial category. It lets you know exactly how many books you’d need to sell to be #1 in said category. And how many books you’d need to sell to get to #10.
The best categories are the ones that require the least amount of sales in a day (pay attention to the “SALES to #1” column for this).
The category feature will help you easily spot the best and most relevant categories because as you can filter columns! It also links you directly from Publisher Rocket to any specific category page.
You can pick up to 3 categories, but you can also contact Amazon to get up to 10 Amazon categories listed for your book. I’ve included a tutorial on how to do this in my bonus.
Being able to select 10 categories instead of 3 categories greatly improves your chances of achieving best seller status.
Feature #4: Launching AMS Ads Effectively
Paid advertising is more of an intermediate to an advanced topic for self-publishers & authors. However, it can immensely boost your book(s) ROI if your ad campaign is set up correctly and with the best keywords.
The AMS search feature requires you to input a phrase. It’ll then draw KW variation data from all corners of Amazon, including Amazon suggestions, A to Z suggestions, ASIN numbers, competitors, and more, to produce long keyword lists.
That said, AMS Ads should be done properly. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to write a guide on this quite yet, but Dave Chesson has created a free AMS Ads course with a series of lessons and tutorials.
This is the same course I took to learn how to sell my books through Amazon advertising, and it helped me launch my first ever successful AMS ads campaign.
In the course, Dave Chesson teaches everything from what qualifies a good AMS keyword to split testing your AMS ads. You can get started in no time. If you want to see the lessons and the AMS keyword search feature in action, click here.
As more people start using book ads and more new features are added to AMS campaigns, I can see the Publisher Rocket cost going up or switching pricing models (don’t quote me on that).
For now, it’s a one-time payment and worth the money, in my opinion, because it helps optimize books with the best keywords available and is always coming out with new features.
Take a look at Dave’s AMS course and Publisher Rocket to help you sell more copies of your book!
What I Didn’t Like About Publisher Rocket
I like being upfront with you guys, so I’m going to address what I didn’t like about the tool.
No Ability to Filter or Sort Columns
I’m one of those writers who loves analyzing data. So, not everyone will share this con with me. I would like Publisher Rocket’s team to work on letting us filter columns. It would make the tool even better.
At least it allows you to export your data in a CSV file where you can change the columns as you wish.
You’re not able to filter data columns in the Rocket software EXCEPT in the Category tool. For some reason, you’re able to here:
Will Publisher Rocket Work For You?
I can’t guarantee Rocket will help you sell more books, but what I can say after struggling to become a successful self published author is: Publisher Rocket will work for you if and only IF:
1) You have an existing book
When I first got KDP Rocket, I updated my existing books. I started optimizing the following list of meta data elements in my KDP account for all my books:
- book title
- book subtitle
- book description
- 7 extra KDP keywords section (don’t skip adding the right keywords)
Optimizing your book listing is the #1 thing you should do once you get Publisher Rocket. You’ll know exactly what to update.
2) You want to check the supply vs demand of your book idea
It’s frustrating, right? Not knowing if a book or book topic will sell well… No one likes to waste time or money on a risky book idea and/or writing projects.
Why spend endless hours writing a book or spend hundreds/thousands of dollars outsourcing a book to a ghostwriter on a gut feeling when you can know the number of people who are actually searching for your keyword a month.
Publisher Rocket Review – Final Verdict
I use Publisher Rocket, but is Publisher Rocket worth it for you?
I recommend Publisher Rocket. It’s my go-to paid keyword research tool I recommend for fiction and non-fiction authors who want to sell more books, save time, and increase their ROI per book.
Keyword research matters for any book business these days. And we should never forget that self-publishing is a business. All authors can feel more confident, no matter the genre, with the market research that Publisher Rocket unveils.
As far as Publisher Rocket cons go, the only one I could pinpoint is that they don’t have a Facebook user group for their book marketing tool. I think an online community could help in many ways.
The bottom line is ebook & book sales matter. Rocket can help authors if they’re willing to apply real data collected from Amazon to their books.
As a Rocket user, I’ve optimized my books and book ads (the information in Dave’s course helped set up my first effective advertising campaign – the AMS keyword feature was excellent).
Publisher Rocket helps your book(s) rank higher on Amazon for relevant keywords readers search for in the Amazon search bar.
I also know that some of my un-optimized books were saved from page 2 because of my KDP optimization.
I saw almost every book come back from the dead (page 2) after I took the time to add the 7 best keywords in KDP I could find. It was great starting to sell more book copies again. This alone made this investment worth it.
That said, don’t expect the changes you implemented to make a difference right away. For some keywords, it can take days, weeks, and sometimes months. Remember this after you start updating your ebooks & books in KDP.
Anywho, I’ve got some keyword book research to do now that I’m done writing this article!
Hopefully, my Publisher Rocket review helped you decide to put Dave’s tool into action before writing your next book. Or improve your current book listing(s).
P.S.
Publisher Rocket makes a terrific gift for aspiring writers or authors in your life.
If you have your own Publisher Rocket review or know its user experience, new features, etc., feel free to leave a comment or share them with me.
To your writing and self-publishing platform success!
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