How Do I Research My Market? - article

If you have written a book or are considering it, one of the first things you need to do is research the competition. Ideally this should be done before you start the book or in the early days of writing it. But if you didn’t research at that time, do it now. It’s important no matter when you do it.

Go out into the world, or virtual world, and check out the competition. Once you’re familiar with the competition, you’ll be prepared to compete. You don’t want to release your book to the world blindly, overpriced and under desired. This will only leave you discouraged and frustrated. To avoid such a dreadful scenario, conduct your own research. You need to consider pricing, topic and genre trends, other authors, and the best possible distribution channels.

Price research involves looking for books similar to yours and noting their prices. You will be able to determine an average threshold of what the consumer is willing to pay for your product. To make your research more useful, you also should note page counts, cover design, and the notoriety of the author, so that you can gauge your findings accordingly.

Next, you need to do a basic topic search for top titles and top authors in your specific genre. You can do this a few ways. First you can Google specific terms, such as “top authors in the zombie genre”, “Average sales for vampire books”, or “top selling genre for books.”

You can also go through the bestsellers lists put out regularly by USA Today, The New York Times, or even the Amazon list that is updated hourly. These lists will give you some perspective and show you the state of your intended genre. You can determine if that sector is growing or shrinking and what topics are truly popular.

When researching where to sell your book, the best answer is anywhere you can, and, at the very least, eBook and paperback formats. You should set your book up on Amazon’s Kindle page, Smashwords distribution page, and Barnes and Noble, among others. Get it up on sites, such as Scribd, Lulu, Create Space, and Good Reads. Make sure to create a FaceBook page and Twitter account for your book, so you can promote it on these sites as well.

Finally, a great source for finding agents is AgentQuery.com. It claims to be the most trusted source for literary agents, and the site is extremely easy to use. Simply find the heading, “Writers” and click, “Submitting to Agents” and follow the prompts. You might also benefit from reading the other information the site provides on everything from scammers to query letters.

Conducting research will make you more competitive and that’s what it takes to make it in the writing world.

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