Friday Five

1 Finding the gap in your market

When writing, you need to know your market very well. Whether it’s non-fiction (business, self-help, etc.) or fiction (romance, fantasy, crime, children, etc.), who buys the book is important. I want to point to business and children for this post expressly.

Children’s books. Most people believe they are selling a book to the child. Understand you are selling the book to the parent. Children do not have money. They cannot go to the book store and buy your book. While you write the book for the child, you target your sales to the parent. 

Know the patterns of parents as they buy for their child. What do they want to teach their child? Go to the places these parents are and build relationships with these parents. Understand what hits them and compels them to buy a book for their child. Once you understand that, you have found that gap in the market, and you can sell your book and continue to sell. 

Business books. First and foremost, if you are going to write a business book, you need to know what you are talking about. You can write a book on a whim or by doing research, but if you want to sell it and be good at selling it and continue to be good at selling it, you need to understand your market and be inside that market.

When you are deep in that market and in the places where your market is, you will sell the book. If you are someone within the engineering career field and have written a book, you should be where engineers are. Groups, forums, businesses. You have to understand why someone would want to read your book. 

Are you solving a problem? What does your book offer them? Is it career advancement? Does your book increase their knowledge within their particular field? Are you talking at conferences in this field? You have to become a part of the solution within the area that they seek out. Once you do that, you have found the gap in the market, and you can sell and continue to sell your book.

2 Amazon Keywords

When adding keywords in KDP, think about how you would search for something on Amazon. Think about the search patterns. First, start with searching for something yourself and see what pops up. 

This is basically what is going to pop up when another person searches as well. While you can’t put random stuff in there, but what relates to your book. 

I was writing a book that had a ballerina in it, so I put ballerina. If you are writing a book that has a college student in it, you can put college. 

Basically, the keywords are indicators of how people will search for items and then be directed to your book. 

Need more help?

https://blog.reedsy.com/guide/kdp/amazon-keywords/.

3 Something nice to do for authors

I saw this feed on Reddit, and I thought it would be nice to share here. What can you do for your author friend? I loved the comments. You can buy a book and leave a review, or better yet, if you have a good following, or family and friends, you can buy a book and give it as a gift. If you have a YouTube channel, you can host a giveaway, so many people enter, which helps you get more views and likes, and the person getting it will leave a review. 

It gets more eyes on you and the author. 

Either way, just showing you care and support is an excellent thing you can do for an author. Did you know that unless a book has at least 50 reviews on Amazon, it gets buried in the Amazon algorithm, which means it’s almost impossible to search for unless you know the book name and author name, and then sometimes the author must send you a direct link to find it? Ouch, that makes their books hard to find and basically invisible. GET THOSE REVIEWS IN PEOPLE.

4 Burnout

So you’ve been at this writing, authoring, publishing gig for a while, and you feel like your running through the mud with no destination insight? Burnout is a real thing. Not to mention with the pandemic and everyone stuck inside now, you are glued to your computer, and everyone expects that you can crank out books like nobody’s business. 

Take a break if you need to, but don’t give up on your passion. I talked to a fabulous author the other day on The Authors Porch Live Cast Melissa Sercia. 

And we both agreed. If you write for a passion, you feel a compelling need to register. You will get burned out if you write because it’s a business, and you have no desire for it. Basically, if you feel burnt out, you have lost your passion for it, and at some point, you have made it become business only.

Take a moment and find your passion again. 

Step back from the business side for a moment so you can get your spark back. Find what lights your fire so you can create your masterpieces.

5. ………

There is no 5; I’m taking a break to find my spark (see what I did here)