3 Easy Steps To Finding A Profitable Children’s Picture Book Niche On Amazon KDP

The children’s book market in the US is huge. A lot of people are buying children’s books, especially on Amazon. It’s a great market to get into if you want to create passive income from home.

Creating a children’s picture book is not only fun, but it’s rewarding as well. Knowing that you are making a difference in the life of children really is a good feeling. I have recently decided to break into the Children’s Book market, and took an extremely informative home course on how to self publish and illustrate a children’s book for Amazon that showed me a surprisingly easy and quick way to choose a niche, create a book, illustrate the book, and self publish it.

One of the things I learned from the course was how to go about choosing my niche, or genre, to make sure it won’t flop. Choosing the right niche could mean the difference between working hard and getting good results and working hard and getting no results. You want to get this right, right out of the gates, or your children’s book experience will leave you disgruntled and frustrated.

So let’s jump right in…..

3 Easy Steps To Find A Children’s Picture Book Niche That Will Sell

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Step 1: Find Children’s Books YOU Like

When you are out and about, peruse the children’s book sections at your local stores. Stores like Walmart, Target, Sam’s Club, and Costco have a lot of books to browse. You’ll want to do this at an actual store, where you can look inside the books. While you can technically look inside books on Amazon, you’ll only be able to see a few pages of each book, so to get the full experience, you’ll want to go to stores where they are actually selling.

Take note of any books you feel you would be able to create, or that touch your heart strings. If any catch your eye, take some photos from your phone so you won’t forget the titles. You will need to know them for the next step.

I recently did this at Costco, where they had a big table full of kid’s books. I spent some time looking around and found a really cute one called “Why Not You” by Ciara and Russel Wilson.

Step 2: Check Best Seller Ranks of Those Books on Amazon

The next step is to go onto Amazon, and look up the books that caught your eye while you were out. You will be checking each book’s BSR to see if the book gets consistent sales or not. The lower the BSR, the more sales the book makes.

You will also be checking the book’s sales page to find similar books in the genre to research whether or not the genre does well in general.

When I got home from Costco, I went onto Amazon and searched the book. To my delight, I found it here: Why Not You. It is such a cute book, I enjoyed reading it as an adult!

I went to the listing and scrolled down to the details and checked the BSR. (Best Seller’s Ranking) At the time of this writing, the BSR was 1,184,264, which is not great, but BSRs do fluctuate daily depending on sales, so I may check back again if this is a niche I would like to pursue.

I then scrolled to the section of the listing where it says “explore similar books” and took a look at some of the BSRs of books that are in the same genre. When I look at a book’s BSR, I am looking to see, in general, how books in this particular topic are performing. If every book I come across in this genre is in the millions, I may want to entertain writing something in a different genre.

When I find ones with low BSRs (low BSR numbers indicate high sellers on Amazon), I go ahead and click on it to study it.

Step 3: Study The Books

The next step is to study the book the best I can on Amazon. Like I said, most times, with children’s picture books, you’ll only be able to see a few pages, but you can at least see what kind of illustrations and wording they are using.

I will study the book to see how complicated it is. Are the images ones that I can find in ready made image sites like Creative Fabrica or Canva? Is the story simple? Do I think I could come up with a storyline similar? If I think I could possibly create a book similar to one with a good BSR, I may have a go at creating something similar in the same genre.

**A quick note about creating similar books – always use your research as inspiration, never to plagiarize or copy. And always be sure, before using any ready made images, to know and understand the licensing details, so you are not unknowingly infringing on any copyrights. **

Some of the concepts in best selling children’s books are so very simple, you will wonder how you didn’t discover this side gig before! The only thing that has held me back from creating a children’s book in the past is the fact that I can’t draw! Fortunately, the Children’s Book Creator course solved that problem for me.

How To Illustrate Your Children’s Book, Even If You Can’t Draw

As many of you already know, I started out designing and publishing low-content books like journals and notebooks on Amazon. I have always wanted to venture out into the children’s book market, but the one thing that held me back was the fact that I don’t know how to illustrate.

I can draw on paper, somewhat, but it takes me a long time to draw any thing that looks good, so I can’t fathom drawing pictures for an entire children’s book. It would take me ages.

One thing I never thought of was using premade images. I always thought it would be next to impossible to find different images of the same character, or images that would work well within the same story. Turns out, it’s a lot easier than I thought!

I won’t get too far into it in this post, but just to give you a quick example of how you could use premade images, here are the search results when I typed in “character bundle” on Creative Fabrica that you could potentially use to creative different poses of the same character to tell a story.

As you can see, there are sellers who sell bundles of the same character in different poses. I will be writing a post on how to find these premade images soon, so be sure to follow me on Pinterest so you don’t miss that post!

If you are a total beginner, and have never written or illustrated a children’s book before, and would like to follow a step-by-step tutorial on how to find a profitable topic, research the right keywords, find premade images, structure the storyline and layout of your book, and self-publish it on Amazon KDP, check out the Children’s Book Creator home course and become a published children’s book author!