How to Produce a Bestseller: Know Your Market

This is the second post in a three-part series.

To write, or blog, a bestselling book, you must successfully target your market. That means, first, you have to become acquainted with your potential readers and, second, you must discern their questions, problems, pains, interests, and desires. Then, you can craft a book idea that satisfies the wants and needs of those in your target market.

Do these things, and your book will sell an above-average amount of copies, likely climbing to the Amazon Top 100 List, or onto some other bestseller list, easily and effortlessly. Why? Because that’s the formula for a bestselling book.

Conduct a Market Analysis

Any type of bestseller provides value to a specific group of people—usually a large group of people. If you want to produce a book that sells seemingly on its own, determine how to give you potential readers the benefits they seek. Appeal to whatever concerns them or is at the top of their mind.

Ask yourself: What do my potential readers search for most often on the Internet? If you know this, you’ve got a viable book idea.

Why has my new e-book, Authorpreneur: How to Build a Business Around Your Book, done so well? It addresses a need in the marketplace. Authors don’t make a ton of money from their books. Therefore, they seek ways to earn a living as authors. The one thing they don’t want is to give up their dreams of a writing career only because they couldn’t pay their bills with the income from their writing. Thus, they want to find ways to continue writing books but to make more money in the process. They can do this by building a business around their books.

Look at the vast amount of Amazon bestsellers on the topic of how to lose weight, become successful or find and keep a mate. There are so many books on these topics, all of which have sold well, because these are pain points for huge numbers of people. Any new book that offers unique and valuable benefit to the people in these target markets quickly will climb the charts. This is especially true if the book fills a gap in the category.

Fill a Gap

Take my book, How to Blog a Book, for example. When I wrote it, there were no other books on the topic. None. Today you might find one or two that are similar, but it remains the only book that discusses how to write, publish and promote a book on a blog, or how to turn blog content into a book. It’s no wonder it became an Amazon bestseller almost immediately and has remained on two or three Amazon Top 100 Lists since its release in the Spring of 2012.

When you study your target market, take the information you discover and  also study the category in which you think you might place you book. Explore what has already been published on the topic, and see if you can find a hole to fill. Is there a space not the bookstore shelf waiting for a book your potential readers seek? What content would that book contain?

4 Tips for Putting This Strategy to Use

To put this strategy to use:

1. Create a profile of your ideal reader. Some call this an “avatar.” Provide details on this person’s problems, needs and desires.
2. Describe your target market. Use numbers to determine how many of your ideal readers exist in the United States or in the world. Find these statistics by conducting research online.
3. Brainstorm book ideas that provide value to potential readers in your target market. Make sure it answers their questions, solves their problems, eases their pain, addresses their interests, and fulfills their desires.
4. Check related categories, such as on Amazon.com, for bestselling books on your topic. These are called “competitive titles.” Compared to these books, your idea must be innovative, unique, and valuable, and it should provides those who read such books with a book filled with information missing from any other books currently in the category.

If your idea meets the criteria described in #2 and #3 above, you substantially increase your chances of writing, or blogging, a bestselling book.

Check my next post for part 3 in this series. Read part 1 here.

Photo courtesy of ivelin | stockfresh.com