Using YASIV to understand your market and improve your marketing

YASIV is a free tool that allows you to look at the popularity of and connections between books based on reader purchases on Amazon.

YASIV stands for “Yet Another Similar Items Visualization.”

What exactly does this tool do?

Here’s a screenshot to help illustrate why this is so cool. I searched for The Faerie Summer, a bundle I curated. This image shows all of the products that are related to this book – also-boughts (other titles a reader purchased in addition to this one) and titles they bought that are related to the also-boughts. If you click on this image you can see the live version of the same search.

It is a little hard to make out any of the covers in that screenshot, but here are some interesting things that I can see at first glance.

• All five of the bundles I’ve curated are linked to one another, as are two of the other bundles I’ve been in, and the witch-themed novelette I published last year.
• The third bundle I’ve participated in so far does not show up as linked. I drilled down and found it’s only connected to one other title.
• My first novel links to zero other titles. 🙂
• A lot of the links are to titles by authors who’ve had stories in these bundles.

That’s all cool, if unsurprising. But there’s quite a bit more that jumps out at a closer look.

• A lot of the titles The Faerie Summer links to are box sets.
• The Haunted bundle links to a cluster of spooky/horror stories.
• Drilling down on the Beneath the Waves bundle, it turns out to link to part of that same cluster.

I stopped at that point because I could easily spend hours looking up books, but that should give you a feel for what the tool does.

How to look up a title

Go to YASIV, then enter either the name or the ASIN of the book you want to look up.

Note that I have ‘Book’ selected as the category. You can also select ‘Kindle Store’ or any other category used by Amazon. (I looked up the elephant-shaped funnel I bought recently, and discovered a lot of people who bought it also bought squeeze bottles.)

Ways you can use YASIV to improve your own marketing

Research the books connected to your book, and look up bestselling books in your genre, or books that are similar to what you’re writing.

• Are there things that stand out?
• Do the covers have a common look and feel?
• Is the average price point drastically different from your book’s price?
• Does looking at these titles change your mind about how your book should be marketed?
• Can you use the other titles, text from their sales copy, etc. as keywords for your own books?
• How does your sales copy sound next to that of the other titles?
• What categories are these titles in, and should you modify your own categories?

There’s a lot you can do with this tool – these are just a few suggestions to get you started.

References

• YASIV Blog