By You have written a book. You have proofread it and edited it. You even managed to find a great publishing service like Amazon or Bookish Fellow where you can publish an eBook in just a few simple steps. However, it’s not a time to sit back and relax just yet. If you fail to conduct a good market research for your eBook, no matter how great and marvelously written it is, there is a strong possibility that it might pass unnoticed and be regarded as a flop with poor sales performance.
Since most authors who take the self-publishing route are not well acquainted with market research, we are here to help and present a few tips on what they should do before publishing their book in order to ensure its success.
The first thing you need to do is construct a list of best-selling books in your genre, and the best place to do this is at Amazon, your best friend from now on. Once you are there, you’ll have two ways of doing this: find a specific genre through keyword search or browse the bestsellers list.
Keywords
If you’ve chosen this route, simply type in keywords related to your genre like “Vampire romance” or “Ghost stories” in Amazon’s search bar and look at the ones with the best rank by selecting “Avg. Customer Review” at the top-right corner.
Once you click on a specific book, scroll down to Amazon Best Sellers Rank.
The higher the rank, the higher the popularity of a certain book. If a book is ranked within the top 50,000 ones on Amazon, that is regarded as a success. Draw up a list of such books and take a closer and better look at them in order to see how you can improve your work.
Bestseller list
The method that we recommend is browsing the Amazon’s bestsellers list.
After clicking on “Best Sellers”, along the left side of the website you will see a list of bestselling books according to each genre. This is also a great way to see what is hot right now and what readers like the most.
Once you have compiled this list, focus on the following elements in order to get a better understanding of what is currently popular in your book’s genre.
Book Cover
Your cover should be something that will catch the reader’s eye and stand out from the crowd. Just imagine an average reader strolling through some bookstore. An interesting and intriguing book cover is sure to lure them in. Plain and unimaginative ones are left to collect dust on the shelves.
Book Description
A great book cover will surely attract readers. However, it will all be useless without an amazing description to seal the deal. The same thing applies the other way around. You might come up with an out of this world book description, but without a captivating cover to direct readers’ attention towards your book, rarely will anyone get a chance to read it and buy it.
Do not make your book description too complex, too revealing and too long. Keep it under 150 words and mention only the main plot. Have a good sentence flow with a number of emotional power words written in third person.
Book Title
Different authors have different strategies when it comes to coming up with a title for their work.
Your safest bet would be to avoid clichéd nouns like “adventure” or “tale”. Also, don’t be afraid to experiment. Try writing a really short one. Or maybe an extremely, really, very, extra, fairly, quite, rather long one.
But most importantly, be ORIGINAL.
Pricing
You can write an enchanting book with a strong title and alluring cover and still doom it by setting an extremely high price. Too expensive a book, especially if it is your first, will just turn readers away from it.
Don’t be lazy. Take the time to browse the web and check out the competition, as we have already suggested. See how much are they going for and then come up with the right price for your work. A little research never killed nobody!
Reviews
A great way to put finishing touches to your book is to read the reviews of the most popular books in your genre on Amazon. They are an excellent source of quality information and opinions which may point out things that you have overlooked while writing and editing. They may open up a whole new way of looking at your work.
Value the reader. Find out what they like and want because he/her is the one who will buy your book.
Take the time to go read a number of different reviews and Bookish Fellow guarantee that it will pay off.
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