niche-scout

A research skill for judging whether a topic could be a profitable Amazon KDP niche. KDP is Amazon's service for publishing and selling books.

In plain words
What is it for?
Researching book niches, validating publishing ideas, and comparing market opportunities.
Why use it?
It replaces guesswork with keyword demand, book-sales-rank, and competition checks when evaluating publishing ideas.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cdeistopened/skill-stack/niche-scout
Any agent
npx skills add cdeistopened/skill-stack --skill niche-scout
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cdeistopened/skill-stack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,348 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00038 $0.01348
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00674
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00270
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00135

Measured 3d ago against content hash db1a3ca7db3e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

niche-scout scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

public/skills/niche-scout/SKILL.md · 136 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 136 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Niche Scout

Evaluate whether a keyword/topic is a profitable KDP publishing niche. Based on the 3-step validation framework from Sean Dollwet, Dale Roberts, and Dave Chesson (175 episodes distilled in Kings of Kindle).

Usage

/niche-scout beekeeping for beginners
/niche-scout "anxiety management"
/niche-scout claude code AI coding assistant

Workflow

Step 1: Amazon Keyword Volume (DataForSEO)

Run the keyword volume script to get Amazon search volume and related keywords:

python3 ~/.claude/skills/niche-scout/scripts/keyword-volume.py "$ARGUMENTS"

This returns:

  • Amazon search volume for the seed keyword + 9 variations
  • Related keywords with volume (up to 20)
  • Use these to assess demand and identify series potential (10-keyword strategy)

Demand threshold: Seed keyword should have 200+ monthly Amazon searches. Related keywords reveal series opportunities.

Step 2: BSR Analysis (Apify Amazon Scraper)

Run the BSR scraper to get Best Seller Rank for top books:

python3 ~/.claude/skills/niche-scout/scripts/bsr-scraper.py "$ARGUMENTS"

This runs two Apify calls:

  1. Search results — gets titles, prices, ratings, ASINs for top 20 books
  2. Product details — gets BSR, publisher, categories for top 10

Wait for both to complete (typically 30-90 seconds each).

Step 3: Score the Niche

Apply Sean Dollwet's BSR benchmarks to the scraped data:

Metric Target Scoring
Books under 5,000 BSR No more than 5 of top 20 >5 = too competitive
Books under 30,000 BSR Most or all of top 20 Sweet spot for new publishers
Books under 100,000 BSR At least 7 of 10 Minimum viable demand
Self-published on page 1 At least 2-3 Proves indie can compete
Search results count Under 3,000 Lower = easier to rank

Self-published detection signals:

  • Publisher = "Independently published" or "Independently Published"
  • Price $2.99-$4.99 range
  • Keyword-heavy title (exact match of search term)
  • Stock/template cover design

Read the full file on GitHub · 136 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 136 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A db1a3ca7db3e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

niche-scout is a skill published in the GitHub repository cdeistopened/skill-stack (27 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 1,348 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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