Sunday, May 16, 2010

For Book Marketing Research, Authors Can Use a Nifty New Tool called TitleZ

By Scott Lorenz

Effective book marketing begins long before the book is actually written and the more diligence paid to pre-publishing efforts the better the author’s chance of success. Before hiring a book publicist to garner book publicity for you, get a cup of coffee and get ready for a little online research on book marketing.
A key strategy in any marketing program is to know your competition and successful authors will research competitors before investing time in writing, editing, re-writing, and publishing. How many others have written on the same topic? How have those topics sold? What similar books have done the best? And what made these books successful?

This may sound like a daunting task but it is now as easy as sipping iced tea on a hot, humid day, thanks to a new website called TitleZ – www.titlez.com. TitleZ allows users to instantly retrieve historic and current Amazon rankings on competitors’ books and create reports with 7-, 30-,90- day and lifetime averages. More importantly, you can use this tool to research your next book or create a marketing plan using the information furnished.

By visiting TitleZ you can compile a list of related books, comparing and contrasting sales figures and rankings. You will want to hurry and check it out now while it’s free in its beta testing stage. After the beta testing period expires the service will be available by paying a monthly subscription fee.

As a book marketing specialist, I have found TitleZ to be very useful in offering book marketing advice to my clients. Authors will find this tool helpful in coming up with book publicity and book publishing strategies.

Visit www.titlez.com to learn how a specific book or a group of books has performed over time relative to other books on the market. All you have to do is enter a book title, a subject, author or publisher and TitleZ within seconds comes up with a comprehensive list of books from Amazon.com plus historical sales ranking data. This information allows authors to see how topics and specific books perform over time and to appreciate what’s hot and what’s not.

Among the advantages TitleZ cites when using its tool are:

  • Identify trends with book-buying consumers beyond the top ten lists to see within a given topic which books are gaining in interest and which are declining.

  • Quickly and easily uncover best-selling and up-and-coming authors on a specific topic.

  • Review renderings of book covers, along with sales ranking data, to see what design features are working in the current marketplace.

  • By examining prices of competitors’ books you can make a better informed decision on what to charge for your book. 

  • Find out how effective promotional appearances, tours, book signings, and marketing activities are in driving sales.
If you aren’t totally convinced yet that TitleZ is worth a cup of coffee’s time to try out, than just visit the site, point and click two or three times, enter just one subject, and examine the data returned. You’ll then become convinced. For more information about book marketing visit: http://www.book-marketing-expert.com

Scott Lorenz is President of Westwind Communications, a public relations and marketing firm that has a special knack for working with individuals and entrepreneurs to help them get all the publicity they deserve and more. Lorenz has handled public relations and marketing for numerous authors, doctors, lawyers, inventors and entrepreneurs. As a book marketing expert Lorenz is called upon by top execs and bestselling authors to promote their books. Learn more about Westwind Communications’ book marketing approach at www.westwindcos.com/book or contact Lorenz at scottlorenz@westwindcos.com or by phone at 734-667-2090.

Bookmark and Share

2 comments:

VS Grenier said...

Thanks for sharing this information with us. This was a great article.

The Writing Mama
http://thewritingmama.blogger.com

VN said...

This looks like a fantastic technology. Thanks for sharing.

Vikram Narayan
www.bookbuzzr.com