KD Suite – a brief overview
David Sieg, the Publishing Mentor on the Experienced People forum, recommended KD Suite. The fact that David recommended the product was good enough for me to want to try it. He knows his stuff about publishing!
When I first became interested in publishing on Kindle, I wrote a series of blog posts to document my progress. One of the biggest problems I found at that time was trying to ascertain the demand for Kindle books. It was very difficult.
Fast forward from all that, a year ago, and now there’s KD Suite. It does what Kindle publishers have been wanting for some time now. The price when I bought it was $47 (an early bird offer) and I agreed with David that it was well worth the money. I highly recommend it. That’s quite rare as I seem to have got myself a reputation for being very sceptical of most products which are intended to help people to make money online. The price has since gone up to $97 (although the sales page still mentions the $47 offer, the shopping cart asks for $97 – this is confusing), but even at $97 it’s probably still worth it because it’s an essential tool if you want to publish and sell books on Kindle and in any case they have a 30-day money back guarantee. I very much doubt if you’ll need to claim your refund. By the way, ignore their horrible hyped-up sales page. This is a good product and doesn’t need the hype. There are also a couple of upsells, which I didn’t buy.
So, what is KD Suite and what does it do? More importantly, does it work? Let’s have a closer look.
What is KD Suite?
It’s a suite of three research and marketing software programmes for Kindle. It consists of:
- KD Best Seller Analyzer
- KD Search Analyzer
- KD eBook Marketer
KD Best Seller Analyzer
This is the perfect tool for providing us with the information we were so badly needing, and which wasn’t available before. It enables you to analyse best sellers in any category and estimate how much sales revenue they make each month. Thus, if you discover that even the best seller in your proposed niche only makes diddley squat, then it’s probably not worth writing your book in the first place – if your intention is to make money. This tool also enables you to predict monthly sales for your proposed book. Plus it has some handy functions for competitor analysis. We ran our own books through the KD Best Seller Analyzer and the results were surprisingly, but pleasingly, accurate. This tool alone was worth the money we paid for the suite of tools.
KD Search Analyzer
Prior to the launch of KD Suite, if you wanted to do keyword research for selling on Amazon the usual advice was to use the Google Keyword Tool. This was clearly a very inaccurate and inappropriate way of measuring potential demand on Amazon. As James J Jones said, “that’s like trying to travel in Australia with a map of America. You can only go the wrong direction. You see… the Google searcher is quite different from the Amazon buyer.” This tool helps you to find the money keywords on Kindle.
KD eBook Marketer
This is about finding the top reviewers in your category and their contact details. Plus there’s the “accelerator”, which seems to be a way to game Amazon’s algos. I’ve not used this tool yet so I can’t really comment. Perhaps I’ll try it later, but I’m not sure I’ll feel comfortable about contacting strangers out of the blue via KD Suite’s “Review Sniper”.
Conclusion
That’s a brief overview of how the suite of tools works – there’s more information on the KD Suite sales page. So far I’m very impressed even though I’ve not yet used the suite to its full extent. Perhaps I’ll give a more in-depth review of each component later.
If you’d like to give it a go, please let me know how you get on with it. Comments (below) are welcome.
2 Responses to “KD Suite – a brief overview”
Kay are you still using this and what do you think of it? Do you still give it the thumbs up?
Hi Bill,
Thanks for your comment. I guess I should have posted an update before now. Sorry for being so tardy. Meanwhile, yes, I am still using it. However, I mostly use their estimator tool which estimates the amount of money a book is making. Say you spot a book on Kindle and you wonder how much money the author is making from the sale of it, you simply add the book’s details into the tool and it tells you the estimated monthly number of sales and revenue for that book.
I’ve tested this with my own books, as have some of my friends tested with theirs. So far, we’re all pretty much in agreement that the tool is fairly accurate. AFAIK, it’s still currently the best in the market.
Perhaps one of these days, I’ll get around to doing an updated review of the other parts of KDSuite, but for now I’m not actively using them.
The biggest criticism I have of this product is that they bombard you with upsells. I haven’t bought any of them.
If you buy/try it, please do come back and let me know what you think of it.