Many people hesitate to write their books for fear of “wasting time” writing a book that never sells.
But how do you know in advance if there is an audience for your book? How do you know what people want to buy?
Fortunately, Amazon.com has solved this problem for us.
Before you decide to go hog-wild writing your book, you should do some research before you begin to get a feel for how well your book may be received by the public.
A good way to do this is to let the world’s largest book seller “tell” you what people are interested in reading. Not by some mysterious “poll” of readers, but by the only number that counts…dollars spent.
Amazon.com has a neat little search feature many are not aware of. But you are about to be one of the few in-the-know. You’ll kick yourself once you see how simple this can be.
Go to Amazon.com and in the search bar type in the topic of your book. As an example, because it’s springtime, I typed in “Gardening”. As you type in your topic, a drop-down box opens underneath making suggestions for you. You would like to select the option that includes your topic and some form of “books”.
Once selected, Amazon.com will display all sorts of books on your topic. However, this is not good enough for our research. We don’t want to know ALL the books there are on “Gardening” we only want to know what books are popular and selling.
Over to the right of the search input field, you will see another box labeled “SORT BY”. Here you want to select “New and Popular”. Now Amazon will display the most recent titles under the topic you chose AND the one’s that have sold the most. The most popular titles.
THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE HAVE SAID THEY WANT TO BUY! They voted with real dollars spent and Amazon.com was keeping track for YOU! Wasn’t that nice of them?
Now if my topic was Gardening, I could see that people are very interested in how to create a garden in a very small space. I would “look inside” at the table of contents and see what this successful author has written about. I would also think most about what he missed.
That’s the book I would write now if I wrote about gardening. People will ALWAYS be interested in gardening in small spaces, so if I could come up with 15 ideas that this author missed, chances are very good that my new book would be the best ranking (best selling) new and popular book in the gardening category.
Try this yourself now. Go to Amazon.com and search your field of interest or expertise.
Think about how you can improve on or create a better version of something that is already selling well.
Remember…you DON’T want to be a pioneer, writing about some “new thing” because you fear competition. Competition is GOOD. It means people are buying stuff. You are only redirecting their sales dollars to your account. You don’t want to have to create a whole new channel, and inspire them to try something different.
People will buy more of what they already are buying. Especially information.
That’s what you want to sell. More.
That said, there are no guarantees in business or life. So many factors go into the making of success and failures. We’ll cover more about this in future articles.
But if you will concentrate your efforts on researching what is already selling well and how you can create a better version of that, you will save time and have a much greater chance of succeeding than if you just took a shot in the dark and hoped you would be writing about something somebody would want to read.
by Bob Schwarztrauber
