Before you run headlong in writing your book, it's always a good idea to research your market and see if there is a demand for your subject matter. For example, you may be a die-hard Mars fan, studying everything about the planet, collecting photos and research about missions to Mars. But how many other people are enthralled with Mars? How many people will want to buy a book about the planet? Are there enough Mars fans to support the time and effort necessary to write a book about it?
I don't know; there may be lots of Mars fans. But you would definitely want to research it first. You'd also want to research how to reach these fans of the red planet. Do they join specific organizations, groups, or clubs? Do they subscribe to certain magazines or newsletters? Do they watch specific television shows?
There are a few ways to determine demand for your book's subject. One is to log into Facebook.com and go through the process of placing an ad. You don't have to actually run the ad, but going through their ad placement process will let you select age, gender, special interests, affiliations and other demographics that would describe your audience. As you're describing the characteristics of the people you want to reach, Facebook will tell you how many people on their site fit that demographic. This is a great way to see if there are enough people online to support a book on your subject.
Another way to measure demand for your topic is to look on Amazon and see how many books have been written on the subject. In the case of Mars, there are actually several books written about the planet including "Destination Mars" published by Harper Collins, a well-known publishing house.
This shows there is some demand. Now you need to find a unique angle about Mars that these books aren't covering.
If there are no books on your subject, that could be an indication that there is little interest in it. Or it could be that no one has written a book on it yet, but you'd definitely want to make sure there is a market for it.
The next step you'd take would be to go to Google's Keyword Search tool (search for Google keyword tool) and see how many searches were performed on the subject in the last month. What keywords and phrases are people typing into Google to look up your subject? Use the "exact search" function to make sure you're seeing specifically what people are typing into the search engine.
Seeing what people are searching for could help you craft your title and the unique angle you'll take with your book.
For example, in our Mars book, there were one million searches performed last month for the word "Mars" alone. That's all the people typed into the search blank – "Mars." My guess is that a lot of these were students doing research projects.
Then, if you look more specifically, there were the following numbers of searches for these Mars-related phrases:
mars rover – 40,500
mission to mars – 33,100
mars mission – 12,100
mars rovers – 9,900
mars moons – 9,900
mars surface – 8,100
mars atmosphere – 5,400
mars photos – 5,400
mars video – 5,400
mission mars – 4,400
man on mars – 3,600
and so forth.
Let's say you were an engineer who knew a lot about Mars rovers. A book related to Mars rovers could be a good match for you. This seems to be one of the top searches performed about Mars. Other phrases would also dovetail perfectly with Mars rovers – any of the ones that relate to mission to mars, mars surface, mars atmosphere, and videos and photos of Mars rovers would fit these search phrases nicely.
These phrases give you clues about how to position your book and also how to market it after the fact. You can create articles, blogs, audios and videos that are optimized with these keyword phrases to promote your book.
This is an excerpt from "Insider Secrets to Self-Publishing Your Masterpiece"
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