Complete Market Research Guide for E-Book Creators

Most e-books are researched after they are written. The author picks a topic they know well, spends months on the manuscript, publishes it and only then reads the reviews to find out what readers wanted. By that point, the important decisions about the topic, the level, the depth and the promise on the cover have already been made.

Those decisions can be made with evidence much earlier. For almost any nonfiction topic, there are already books on Amazon with hundreds of reviews, and those reviews are unusually honest. Readers say what they hoped to learn, which chapters helped, which parts felt like filler, whether the book was too basic or too advanced and what they still could not find. Read together, the reviews of the existing books in a topic describe the book that readers are still waiting for, before you have written a single page.

This guide shows how an independent author, educator or subject expert can turn that feedback into real market research about their own book, the books and courses they compete with and the readers in their topic.

Key Research Questions

Research starts with the questions it has to answer. For an e-book creator, they fall into three groups: questions about your own book and readers, questions about the books, courses and free content readers already use, and questions about how demand in your topic is changing.

Your E-Book

If your book is not written yet, the first questions are about the reader you are writing for. Who are they, what level are they at and what do they want to be able to do after reading? What would make them recommend the book, and what would make them stop halfway? If the book is already published, the same questions apply to your reviews and reader messages: which chapters do readers mention, what do they say was missing and does the book deliver what the title and description promised?

The second set is about format and form. Do readers in your topic want a short, practical guide or a comprehensive reference? Do they value worked examples, templates and exercises, or clear explanations? These questions decide the length, the structure and the price of the book, and readers of similar books have usually answered them already.

Your Competitors

Your competitors are the other books on the same topic, but also online courses, YouTube channels, newsletters, blogs and free guides that teach the same thing. What do readers praise in those alternatives? What do they complain about? Readers often explain in a review why a book was better or worse than a course they took, or why they bought a book after free videos left gaps. Those comparisons show where a book has an advantage and where it has to work harder.

The E-Book Market

The third group is about demand. Which subtopics are readers asking about, and which ones are already well covered? Are there groups of readers, such as complete beginners or practitioners who need an advanced book, whom the existing books serve poorly? Is the topic changing fast enough that older books are criticized for being out of date? These questions are hard to answer from sales rankings alone, because rankings show what sold, while the reasons sit in what readers write.

Sources of Evidence

Evidence about a book topic comes from several places, and none of them has to come first. You can analyze reviews of existing books without running a survey, and you can study the competing courses before you have spoken to a single reader. The strongest research combines what your own readers tell you, what readers write in public about the books and courses in your topic, and what you learn by asking.

Your Own Reader Feedback

Emails from readers, replies to your newsletter, questions after a talk or a workshop, comments from beta readers and your own reviews are the most direct feedback an author has. Beta reader notes are especially useful, because they show where a draft confuses people while it can still be changed. Collected in one spreadsheet with columns for the date, the source, the chapter and the reader's level, they become the start of a customer feedback analysis practice.

Book and Course Reviews

Amazon reviews of the books in your topic are the richest source for an e-book creator, because readers describe exactly what they expected and what they received. Reviews of online courses on Udemy show how learners judge the same topic taught in another format, and they often mention books, or the lack of a good one. Reddit discussions show which resources people recommend to each other and why, and comments under YouTube videos show which questions remain after free content.

Surveys and Interviews

Traditional methods still have a place. A short survey of your newsletter subscribers can ask what they struggle with in the topic and what they have already tried. A conversation with a few people from your intended audience shows how they describe their problem in their own words, which is valuable for the title and description. Notes from these conversations are qualitative research, and they need the same structured analysis as reviews to become more than a set of impressions.

Researching E-Book Topics with Kimola

Kimola is an AI platform that turns customer feedback into enterprise-grade market research. For an e-book creator, that means taking reviews of the existing books in your topic, together with reviews of competing courses and your own reader feedback, and turning them into a structured study of what readers want from a book on the subject, where existing books disappoint them and how your book can be positioned before and after it is written. The steps below follow the order a researcher would work in, and you can start with a free account, without a credit card.

Building the Dataset

After signing up, go to the Create your report area on the Home screen and paste the link to an Amazon product page of a book in your topic. With the Add Multiple option you can paste several links, one per line, and Kimola collects the reviews from all of them into a single dataset. A practical first report includes the five to ten most reviewed books on your topic, ideally a mix of highly rated and poorly rated ones, because the criticism of weaker books often shows what readers value most. The support article on creating a report by adding links walks through each screen.

For Udemy course pages, Reddit threads and YouTube videos, Kimola's browser extension, Airset Generator, collects the feedback from a page and sends it to your account as an Airset, which you can turn into a report. Your own feedback can be uploaded as an .xls, .xlsx, .csv or .tsv file. If the file has columns such as source, chapter, reader level or date, Kimola reads them, and you can filter and compare the results by those values.

By default, Kimola finds the themes in the data itself, which matters for book research, where the topics readers raise depend entirely on the subject of the book.

Choosing Dimensions

Dimensions are the research questions Kimola asks of every piece of feedback. You choose them when you create the report or add them later, and the guide to Dimensions explains each one. For an e-book creator, five are especially useful.

Unmet Needs asks what readers looked for and did not find, which is the most direct evidence of a gap a new book can fill: a missing chapter, a step that was skipped, an example from a different industry or an updated method. Pain Points asks what goes wrong, which in book reviews often covers too much theory, too little practical guidance, repetition, outdated content, poor formatting on e-readers and a book that does not match its description. Motivations asks why readers picked up a book on the topic at all, such as a new job, a personal project, an exam or curiosity, and that answer shapes the examples and the promise of your book.

Personas groups readers by who they are, which for most nonfiction topics separates beginners, intermediate readers and advanced practitioners. A beginner who calls a book overwhelming and an expert who calls the same book shallow are both telling you something about level, and Personas keeps those two views apart. Substitutions shows what readers compare books with: online courses, videos, free articles or another book on the same topic.

Reading the Report

The Overview shows the main themes in the feedback and how sentiment is distributed. Kimola finds those themes in the data itself instead of sorting comments into a fixed list of categories, so a review can be tagged with something as specific as missing exercises at the end of chapters or code examples that no longer work.

Each review can mention several themes, and each theme gets its own sentiment. A reader who loved the clear explanations but was disappointed that the second half repeated the first contributes a positive mention of clarity and a negative mention of repetition. A single star rating would hide that the writing and the structure are being judged separately.

The Performance screen ranks themes with a Satisfaction Score and a Dissatisfaction Score. These scores account for how many reviews mention a theme as well as the percentage, so a theme backed by five reviews does not outrank one backed by fifty. This protects against the most common mistake in small-scale research, which is planning a whole book around a handful of strong opinions.

Signals

Signals are findings that have passed a statistical test. Kimola crosses every theme and Dimension with the columns in your dataset, such as book, platform, star rating or date, and checks whether a topic is discussed more often or more negatively in one group than in the others (Differences) or more often recently than before (Trends). Only significant results become Signals, and they are ranked so the most important ones come first. The explanation of how Signals are tested covers the method in more detail.

For book research, the book column is especially revealing. A Difference might show that complaints about outdated content are concentrated in older books, or that beginners praise one book far more often than the others. A Trends Signal can show that reviews asking about a newer method or tool have grown recently, which suggests a subtopic the existing books do not yet cover. Signals need enough feedback and at least some selected Dimensions. When the data does not contain a pattern strong enough to report, the report shows none, which is an honest result.

Compare

Compare puts segments of a report side by side: different books, different platforms, or one-star and five-star reviews. Up to five can be compared at once, without using extra queries. In a report built with Add Multiple, the most valuable use is placing the leading books in your topic next to each other and seeing the volume of feedback, the sentiment, the themes they share and the themes that appear for only one book. Comparing books with courses on the same topic shows what learners get from one format and miss in the other. If readers keep praising one book for its exercises and criticizing every other book for being all theory, that is a decision waiting to be made.

Action Plans

Action Plans turn the findings into steps. You start by choosing or creating a Profile that describes you, your book and the readers you write for, then select a perspective: Our own offering, A rival or Our market. These match the three groups of questions at the beginning of this guide. Before the book is written, a plan with Our market and the Product Development goal focuses on what the topic is missing and what a new book should contain. A plan with A rival examines a leading book in detail. Once your own book is published, Our own offering with the Positioning goal focuses on how the title, description and promise of the book should change.

Kimola builds hypotheses from the report, tests each one against the feedback and drops the actions the evidence does not support. Each remaining action comes with a confidence level and explains why it matters, who it is for, when and where to act, the risk involved and how to see that it worked, along with the evidence behind it. A plan contains up to 12 actions. Plans work best when the report already has Signals, as the support article on how actions are built explains. Kimola's published research on a newsletter platform and on a creator membership platform shows what this kind of analysis looks like when it is applied to the platforms independent writers use.

From Findings to Decisions

Research is only useful if it changes a decision. For an e-book creator the decisions are concrete, and each one connects to a specific part of the report.

Topic and Niche

The broadest decision is what to write about, and how narrowly. Unmet Needs shows which subtopics readers keep asking for, and Personas shows which readers the existing books serve poorly. A crowded topic can still have room for a book aimed at one group, such as beginners in a field where every existing book assumes experience. A topic where every book receives the same complaints is an opportunity, while a topic where readers are already satisfied needs a clearer reason for another book.

Depth and Format

Readers judge a book by whether its depth matches their need. Pain Points and Personas show whether readers in your topic complain more about books that are too basic or too dense, and whether they ask for exercises, templates, case studies or shorter chapters. Comments about formatting on e-readers, such as tables, images and code that do not display well, are practical evidence for how to build the e-book itself.

Title and Description

The title and description are a promise, and many negative reviews come from a book that did not keep it. Reviews show which words readers use to describe their problem, and those words often make a clearer title than the author's own language. Pain Points shows where readers felt misled by a description, such as a book sold as practical that turned out to be mostly theory, which tells you what not to promise.

Pricing

Readers rarely complain about price alone. They complain when a book feels too short, too general or too similar to free content for what it costs. Substitutions shows what readers compare books with, and Pain Points shows when value becomes an issue. A book that clearly offers what free videos and articles do not, such as a structured path or a complete set of examples, gives readers a reason to pay for it.

Sales Channels

Where you sell decides how readers find the book and what else they compare it with. Reviews on Amazon describe readers who found the book through search, while discussions on Reddit and comments on YouTube describe readers who are recommended resources by people they trust. Substitutions shows whether your readers think of books alongside courses and newsletters, which matters if you sell the e-book directly, bundle it with a course or offer it to newsletter subscribers.

Ongoing Research

A single report gives you a snapshot, and a topic changes as new books, tools and methods appear. Repeating the research before a new edition, after publishing or before starting a second book shows whether the gaps you saw are still open and how readers respond to the books published since. Comparing your own reviews over time shows whether an updated edition fixed what readers criticized.

On paid plans, Feeds keep the research running continuously. A Feed collects public mentions from social media, news sites, blogs, forums, YouTube and review sites, based on the keywords and links you define. Alerts email you when something important happens, and Mailings send a regular summary. Over time, Trends Signals show which topics are rising and which are fading.

Publishers and Course Creators

Publishers, education companies and creators with a catalog of books and courses face the same questions across many titles, topics and formats. On the Enterprise plan, each source of feedback, such as a series, a topic, a course catalog or a reader survey, can become a Space, a continuously growing source of feedback classified with the same Funnel, which is a shared set of custom models and Dimensions. Because every source is analyzed the same way, results stay comparable over time and between titles. Spaces also calculate an NPS from what readers write, on a scale from -100 to 100. It is derived from the positive and negative share of written feedback, so it is not the same as a Net Promoter Score from a 0 to 10 survey, and NPS targets can be set for each series or topic.

When a finding needs action, Tasks assign it to the right team, such as editorial, production or marketing, with the underlying feedback attached as evidence, and Tasks can be sent to Jira. After a Task is closed, Kimola measures feedback on the same topic again two and four weeks later, so a change can be checked against what readers say afterwards. Executive summary screens give leadership a single view of what readers are saying across the catalog. Enterprise accounts are set up together with a dedicated Account Manager, and you can request a demo to discuss your setup.

Frequently Asked Questions

A few practical questions come up when an e-book creator starts researching with customer feedback for the first time.

Can I research a topic before writing anything?

Yes, and that is often the most valuable time to do it. Reviews of the existing books on Amazon, together with course reviews and discussions, show what readers want from the topic before you commit to an outline.

Which books should I include in the first report?

Start with the most reviewed books in your topic and include a mix of highly rated and poorly rated ones. If the topic is broad, a second report focused on books for one level of reader usually gives clearer results.

How many reviews do I need before the findings mean anything?

There is no fixed threshold, and the ranking on the Performance screen is designed to protect you from small samples by weighing how many reviews support each theme. Adding more books from the same topic to the report is the easiest way to reach a dataset large enough for Signals.

Getting Started

The readers of every book in your topic have already written down much of what you need to know about the book they still want to read. Create a free Kimola account, add the leading books in your topic to a single report, and see what readers keep asking for. The market research guides for bookstores selling on Amazon and Amazon affiliates apply the same approach to neighboring fields, and the market research guide for small businesses covers the method for any industry.