I miss the alsobot. That was the nickname given to the “People who bought also bought” display on several on-line book-sales platforms. Not just because I found a few neat things there that I would have otherwise missed (obscure academic books tend to be obscure), but because as an author it revealed surprises in markets without my having to purchase the software or log into other sites.
Ah, the arcane world of getting interested eyes on your book. Once I was amazingly lucky. Once. Someone who enjoyed Nathan Lowell’s trading ships in space series (Quarter Share) told other fans of that series, “Hey, this is really close, but with some magic sort of,” and I got a lot of cross-over sales. Why? I’d accidentally hit the same beats, and someone recognized it and liked it enough to ignore the differences and to tell friends. I’d heard of such happening before, at a Con, where a professional book marketer described the surprise of a client’s book accidentally hitting the same beats as … Amish romance. With a book that was very, very different from Amish Romance.
How do you know without the distributor telling you, or someone from the other fandom contacting you and telling you? There are ways. How do you seek out those groups? Ooooooh boy, that’s the hard part. Should you? Throwing yourself into a fan-forum to hawk your book might … not go as well as you hope. Your potential audience might suddenly become more selective, to paraphrase the line from This is Spinal Tap!
Below are some resources, both here at MGC and elsewhere.
https://madgeniusclub.com/2014/06/06/book-launch-check-list-dorothy-grant/
https://madgeniusclub.com/2023/03/25/how-to-author-central/
Below are some software options, and reviews of sales trackers, that might be useful to give you a sense of what’s out there. I do not endorse any of these, but I’ve not heard terrible things about the ones listed here, either. YMMV.
The one below is one of the best for seeing what other books link to yours, no matter the genre.
Mad Genius Club 
4 responses to “Audiences, Readers, and Needles in Haystacks – Finding Of”
I’m going to have to look up the story beats of Amish Romance, just because now I’m curious.
Alsobot is a hilarious name. Now I have to find a way to work it into a story. “Hi, I’m Chatbot! This is my little sister, Alsobot.”
“The Loneliness of the Right-Sized Alsobot”
Often, if scroll down below the reviews on a book page, you can still find the alsobot. Although interestingly, they’ve been sticking “sponsored” books into it, too, so don’t take it as pure data unless you check.