Are you ready to start planning your bestseller?
You’ve got a great idea.
Your idea for your bestseller is buzzing around in your head. You’ve got a wonderful idea for your book. Best seller, fast seller, prize winner, money maker. You’re thinking about them all.
Well, it’s worth pausing and thinking about the process that leads from inspiration, and a fantastic book idea, to money in the bank, recognition and success as a writer.
Or rather, it’s worth thinking about the very first step in the planning process and a very important question.
Has my book got the potential to become a bestseller?
It’s a good question, but it’s not a question about the quality of that book you haven’t written yet.
There’s no point in continuing to work on your idea if there isn’t a market for your book. You want to write a bestseller, so that means you want thousands of people to buy your book.
As you think about your answer you need to be able to create pictures of real people who will buy. In marketing terms this is called customer profiling. It’s very important because you will shape your book to fit your understanding of the requirements of the audience you define.
This makes your first supplementary question easy.
What are the key characteristics of my audience?
If you want to sell lots of books, and make money from your writing, then you need to find the right audience for your work.
First of all, there must be enough people in your target group for you to be able to make sales.
Assume you’ll only ever sell to one per cent of the market in your own country. Assume you’ll sell even less in the global marketplace.
Do the sums? Is there the potential for a bestseller here?
Pass this test and you’re ready to move on to your next supplementary question.
Which of the problems or issues facing my audience will my book address?
You must work out why your book is needed.
You must work out why your target audience will want to buy a book on this subject.
You must work out why your book is better than anything else on the market.
If you know the answers, now’s the time to look at little more broadly.
Does my potential audience buy books?
Note I don’t talk about reading books. A lot of books are bought and never read. From the point of view of an author looking for a bestseller, think about the sales first.
These days it’s important to ask if the people in your target audience actually buy books. There may be more and more books around, but lots of books don’t make any money.
What’s more, people who do buy books are buying them in a variety of formats. E-books are making a lot of progress. Print publishers are losing market share to the e-book world.
You need to be sure that the audience you are targeting not only buys books, but buys books in the format your book will be presented in.
This leads you to your next question.
Does my audience have the money to buy my books?
This is a fairly obvious question to ask, but it’s often forgotten. There’s no point in producing something for people who don’t have the money to buy – at least if your aim is to write a bestseller.
If you write for a market that doesn’t have much money, you’ll be forever discounting and bundling offers – or your publisher will. Either way, you won’t be making a great deal from your writing.
When you’ve worked through these issues there’s another important question to ask yourself.
Do I still want to write a book for this audience?
Now that you’ve considered quite a few of the business and marketing issues surrounding your idea for your book, do you still want to write that bestseller?
Are you still interested in writing for this audience?
If you are, then it’s time to make a start on the real planning.
See also:
Getting published is not your goal – a reminder to all writers
About Margaret Adams
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