K-lytics, love it or leave it?

[The Masked Scrivener]

K-lytics released its Publishing Trends for February 2020. It looks like interesting information, but is it that useful? Any K-lytics members that have used their information to boost your business? Any members that feel it wasted their time and money?

I've thought about subscribing to the service. Being a big-data analytical, their service intrigues me. $500 for a year of service is a lot of money for me. Before I commit I was hoping to hear from both sides of the debate on this one.

It does worry me that their Youtube channel only has 727 subscribers. I would think if their info was really useful they would have 1,000 times or more that many subscribers, considering how large the publishing community is.

I'll leave it there for now and wait to see what you all think on this topic.

February 2020:

[LindsayBuroker]

You can buy the one-off reports for the genres you're interested in if you don't want to do a subscription (the subscription, which covers data from the whole Amazon Kindle store every month, is probably more of interest to publishers or authors publishing a lot of books and in a lot of genres).

You can also search for podcast interviews with Alex Newton if you want to hear more from him before deciding. We had him on the SF&F Marketing Podcast a couple of times, and I'm sure we'll invite him on to our new podcast too. Other than interviews, he doesn't do much on YouTube except post some of the free monthly updates. The reports you can buy usually have about a half hour of content and also downloadable slides. I snagged the urban fantasy one last summer and was like, yup, I'm putting "magic" in the title of my Book 1, lol. (He does a word cloud of popular words used in the Top 100 book titles for the genre.)

[Joe Vasicek]

Several years ago, I got into a heated debate on KBoards with another author who used K-lytics to estimate my writing income and throw that in my face, publicly. He was off by an order of magnitude.

K-lytics' methods have probably improved since then, but I'd take it all with a grain of salt. As for KBoards, there's a reason why I don't post over there anymore.

[Crystal]

I've bought a few "genre reports" and I haven't found them very useful. They're good if you want someone to take the top 100 and compile it for you, in a handy pamphlet. Otherwise, they don't add much value IMO. You could take a look at the top 100 yourself and get the same info for free.