Using Google Trends to Track Book and Author Popularity
Google Trends is free and lets you see how search interest for any term changes over time. If you work in publishing, marketing, or just want to know when certain books or authors are trending, this tool can give you a rough picture of what people are actually searching for. It is not a sales tracker. It does not tell you how many copies were sold. It tells you how many people searched for something relative to other searches on Google. I spent a few years doing informal trend analysis for a small indie press. We would check Google Trends every quarter to see which genres were gaining traction before they showed up in bestseller lists. It saved us from chasing trends that were already dead. Here is how the process works in practice and where it breaks down.
Popular Literature On Google Trends
To get started, go to trends.google.com. The interface is straightforward. Type a book title, author name, or genre into the search bar. The default view covers the past 90 days globally, which is usually not long enough to see meaningful patterns for literature. Change the time range to at least five years so you can spot seasonal spikes like holiday romance surges or back-to-school nonfiction searches. Set the category to Arts & Humanities or Books and then narrow by your target geography. If you are tracking a UK author, do not leave the location as world. You will drown in US data and miss the signal you actually care about. One thing most people miss: use the related queries section at the bottom. That is where you find actual signal. For example, when I was tracking YA fantasy around 2021, the main keyword "fantasy books" was flat. But the related rising queries showed "books like fourth wing" spiking at 5,000 percent. That was useful. That told me a specific book was driving the genre's interest before anything else reflected it.
Here is a practical workflow I used that cut our research time from about two hours per genre review down to roughly fifteen minutes. I created a saved tab group with four to five author or genre terms. I ran them all at once, set the same time range and region, and pulled the related rising queries for each. Within fifteen minutes I had a shortlist of what was moving. The rest was reading through the raw numbers to see if anything looked like a durable trend or just a one-week news cycle. There are several limitations you need to accept before relying on this data. Google Trends only covers Google search volume. It does not include Amazon searches, Goodreads, TikTok book communities, or bookstore POS data. A book can be flying off shelves in Canada and show zero trend activity if nobody is searching for it on Google. This is especially true for genres like romance and paranormal where readers buy impulsively without looking anything up. Another issue is normalization. Google Trends scales all results between zero and one hundred based on the time range and region you select. A score of fifty in one timeframe does not mean the same absolute volume as fifty in another timeframe. I learned this the hard way when a client asked why two books with identical trend scores had vastly different book sales. One of them was competing against a massively popular term in its category, which depressed its relative score.
Get the Full Details
If you need actual sales data, Google Trends will not give it to you. Use paid services like NPD BookScan or Amazon's own advertising dashboards instead. But if you need a free, fast way to see what literary terms are gaining or losing search attention, this method works fine for early signals. A common mistake is checking too many keywords at once. The interface lets you compare up to five terms. People often pack in five different authors and wonder why the chart looks useless. Keep comparisons tight. Compare authors in the same genre or the same book title across regions. Do not compare a horror author to a cookbook writer and expect a meaningful chart. You can also export the data as CSV if you need to overlay it with other spreadsheets. I did this once for a quarterly genre report and merged the trend scores with our internal email list growth data. The correlation was messy but enough to justify shifting marketing spend toward a couple of underperforming genres that were quietly climbing in search interest.
If you are tracking book releases specifically, set the time range to the week of the launch and compare it against the five-year average for that author. This shows you whether the launch day search volume is above or below their normal baseline. It is a quick way to gauge organic interest before professional reviews and algorithmic recommendations kick in. The tool itself does not require any installation. Just bookmark trends.google.com and save your common searches as browser tabs so you can rerun them quickly when new data becomes available. Data updates daily but lags by about two days, so do not treat it as real-time. A spike today probably happened two or three days ago.
