Creating Bestselling Book Ideas That Amazon Will Love

It’s one thing to write a book; it’s quite another to write a book that will sell. We all want to follow our passion, write our dream and dance creatively with our muse, but wouldn't it be fantastic if, amidst all of this creation, we also managed to produce a bestselling book? That is, after all, the dream.

Specifically we’d all like a high ranking on Amazon and though I've addressed that and reviews in other pieces, I thought it might be a good idea to take a step back to the beginning.

Finding Bestselling Book Ideas

I know this gal who fraternizes with a lot of SEO people; for those of you not familiar with the term, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. These are the folks who spend their life trying to get on the first page of Google. One day several years back, she and I were talking about how to create ideas that sell. She told me that many of her SEO buddies would write books literally just based on keywords. It had nothing to do with their passion or what they really wanted to write about; instead, they focused on saleable terms, meaning phrases that were getting a huge bounce in Google. Now this may not be how you would ever consider writing a book, but there are merits to this methodology:

• Book focus: Where will you focus your book? Don’t get too caught up in a set plan. Leave some room for flexibility and consider what’s “hot” to write about right now. What is an immediate need? You may still stick with your original plan, but slant it a bit more towards seeing what’s hot in search or in the media. Keep in mind that the speed of book production often allows us to jump on a trend or hot topic so take advantage of that when you can.

• Book title: If you have identified your best keywords for this market, then you can and should use them here. Keywords in a title can really help to boost your exposure, not just on Amazon but on Google as well.

• Book subtitle: If you already have your title set in stone, consider using keywords in your subtitle to help boost your exposure in search.

• Book topic: Let’s say you know your market, but you aren't sure what to write about. Sure, you could align this with “book focus", but consider that you’re an expert in consumer finance and want to write a book on this topic. Knowing what consumers are searching on (as it relates to finance) could be a great way to address the immediate needs of your reader. This is where keywords come into play but the research I share further in this article will help with this, too.

The other element here is to create a topic that’s narrower. Instead of focusing on one broad area, focus in more granularly. For example, I recently taught a class about this very topic and we brainstormed ideas on creating segmented topics within one broader umbrella. Consider the real estate gal who has a book on buying or selling your first home. I suggested that instead of trying to reach a big, broad and cluttered market, that she instead focus on isolated industries.

The ideas we brainstormed were: Buying Your First Home for Singles, Buying Your First Home for Seniors, Buying Your First Home for Domestic Partners. You get the idea, right? Create a series of books that sits under a broader market. This will net you better sales. Consumers like specialized topics that help solve a specific problem. And the books don’t have to be long, but we’ll cover that in more depth later. Once you find this market or niche, you’ll want to publish regularly to it. Amazon and the associated algorithms tend to trigger quicker when an author has multiple titles so consider that as well.

So, let’s assume that you've done some keyword research or are at least familiar with the keywords in your market. Let’s see how these searches relate to popular topics on Amazon.

Step-by-step, here is what you’ll need to do:

• On the Amazon page, search in the Kindle store tab. I want you to isolate your searches there for now.

• Plug in your search term and see what comes up. You’ll generally get 5-10 suggestions. Click on one of them.

• Look at the books that come up in search and click on the “customers also bought” section.

• Your focus should be on books that have a low sales rank. Depending on the category, it could be as low as 20,000 or as high as 50,000.

• You want to make sure there’s a variety of books in this segment, preferably more than five and they should all have this range of sales volume. If it’s lower than 20,000 that’s great, but when you get into the super saturated or unpopular categories, neither of those will help you.

• Some Amazon experts say that a 20,000 rank indicates that the book is selling five copies a day, but I find this hard to prove either way. Just know that given Amazon’s volume, it’s definitely not languishing. Regardless, this research will really help to expose hot topics and market segments within your area of expertise that are selling well.

Staying on the Short and Narrow

While full-length books will never go away, there’s a surge towards shorter, niche books—books that “own” a narrow market segment. When I first published How to Sell Books by the Truckload on Amazon, I was surprised at how the sales out-paced my other books. While I know the title had a lot to do with this, it was also the fact that the book was shorter and focused on one particular area.

If you decide to do this (write shorter books), I wouldn't suggest just keeping the book short. While short is the new long, there’s still plenty of room for full-length books, too. So, in other words, if you can mix it up, that’s the best track for success. How short can short be? Ten thousand to seventeen thousand words is generally acceptable. Keep in mind that if you do short, you don’t have room for fluff. You’ll want to be as crystal clear as you can be on specific instructions, maybe even include step-by-step instructions or checklists, which readers love.

Other Ways to Develop Book Ideas

There’s an element of research that goes into every book you create, and I’m not just talking about the topic research, but content, too. When you’re developing your book idea and trying to decide what to include and exclude from the book, consider spending a bit of time doing a comparison with other, similar books in your market. Take a look at their book pages on Amazon, read through their reviews. In particular, the negative reviews that give constructive feedback about what the reader thought was missing, or things they wished had been expanded upon, will be particularly helpful. Readers will tell you what they want, and they’ll often do it in a review.

One Final Note on Shorter Books

On Amazon there is the “look inside the book” feature. This covers just a short section of your book, so be cautious when you’re preparing your final content. If your book is too short, the “look inside” feature will reveal most of the book, or enough of it that readers may glean what they want and not buy it. You want to fill the book with sufficient content so that you don’t end up with this problem. If you've finished the book and it seems a bit too short, consider adding things like checklists, free resources or bonus chapters from other books you've written that relate to this topic.

Keep in mind that this isn't meant to pump up your book page count just for the sake of doing that, but if the book looks too much like a white paper or report instead of a book, you may end up with a lot of window-shoppers who don’t end up buying. How short is too short? Anything under 50 pages is too short. Generally I’d recommend that you sit somewhere over 55 pages, ideally 65 pages to be safe. And again, don’t stuff your book with useless content. Make sure that if you need to add pages, you are adding helpful, useful information.

Doing some book research is not just a great idea to help develop some high-selling product, but a great idea overall. We invest so much of our time and effort into our books that the more we can make sure we’re on target, the less time we’ll spend languishing in obscurity. Given that there are 3,500 books published every day in the US, whatever you can do to stand out above the crowd can make all the difference.

Reprinted from "The Book Marketing Expert newsletter," a free ezine offering book promotion and publicity tips and techniques. http://www.amarketingexpert.com

Join Us on the TWIST OF FATE Blog Tour

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Welcome to the first stop on the Twist of Fate blog  tour! A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Shawna C. Smith on our podcast, and I thought our readers could benefit from learning more about her writing process.   

My Writing Process

By Shawna C. Jones

I like to start a story by writing with paper and pen. When I hold a pen and jot down words in a notebook, my creativity opens up. It’s a freeing experience to be able to write something down, and eventually get into a flow with it. At times it seems to be an altered experience. Words start flowing, and sometimes after reading, I wonder if I actually wrote it, or if it came from somewhere else.

At any time, if I’m not sure what I want to say, I just start writing, and eventually the pen glides easily over the paper. At least for me, this seems to help “prime the pump.” Then later, finding a different way of saying something, or adding more to the picture, can give me an “aha” moment. I was once told in a writing class to not cross anything out while writing a first draft. They also advised us not to write longer than two hours, because you need to process the information you’ve written and let it percolate. Ideas for improvements could show up later that day, or in the following days.

It took several tries for me to write Twist of Fate. It started out as a memoir, but that didn’t work. Because I had so much travel in it, I felt like I was giving readers a tour. And that’s not my story, although journeying to foreign countries was an important part of it. So I decided to focus the story on the characters, and go into less detail about the landscape. I realize this way of writing doesn’t appeal to everyone. And that’s okay. It’s my story.

While reviewing my second try with the memoir style, an editor told me that certain events had to happen before this and that. She said it was a great story, but needed refining. By this time, I’d written over one hundred pages (twice), and I decided to rethink the whole process, and approach it from a different angle. I took out a lot of the travel, or used it as backstory. I removed several characters that didn’t add to the story, and weren’t really necessary. Who needs all those extras?

This new approach took another two tries by long hand before I was happy with it. Then I went to the computer and started typing. Now as I typed, other ways of making a sentence better would appear. Sometimes I would continue typing it as it was, and other times I would stop and use long hand again. Since this book is a memoir, I didn’t want to change a lot of it, but I had two separate journeys going on at the same time. I didn’t know if I could reconcile them without the story appearing disjointed. Somehow, I managed to pull it off, but don’t ask me how I did it. I just went with my soul. In fact, I would say my soul wrote a lot of this book. And sometimes in writing that’s all that’s supposed to happen.

When we get too caught up in the words, we miss something. Too much detail, for me, is distracting. I know some people prefer to have every little detail, rather than using their imagination. I’m not one of those. It will either bore me or put me to sleep.

So all in all, I wrote out my book at least four times. I had it edited three times, and proofread twice, by some terrific people. It took longer than I thought it would take: about ten months. All I know is everyone’s writing is going to be different because we’re all different. We come from various backgrounds and experiences. And guess what? It’s okay. My advice for aspiring writers is to not stop writing. Write even when you don’t feel like it. Write even if the only thing you write is about is the weather, or nonsense stuff. Deep inside you is a story dying to get out. And millions of us want to read it.

Best of luck to all of you writing. Please don’t quit.

Shawna will be awarding the winner's choice of a  $50 Amazon GC, a $50 Starbucks GC, or a crystal from Middle Earth Store in Mt. Shasta  to a randomly drawn commenter during this tour and a $25 Amazon  or  Starbucks GC to a randomly drawn host.

Enter to win a $50 Amazon GC, a $50 Starbucks GC, or a crystal from Middle Earth Store in Mt. Shasta. They will dowse for the right one for you. Value up to $60.00.(winner's choice)—a Rafflecopter giveaway)

Thinking of Revising Your Self-Published Book? Read This First!

It’s no secret that first-time authors have an incredible learning curve, and that curve gets a lot steeper when they choose to self-publish.  After pouring their blood, sweat and tears into their book, they realize that all that effort was just the beginning. They now have to be willing to tirelessly promote their work and carve a presence for themselves in the endless sea of books flooding the market today. While self-publishing has done much to equalize the playing field, it has also placed a tremendous responsibility squarely on the author’s shoulders. Authors can publish their book without having to jump through hoops for agents and publishers; they also retain complete control over the finished product. However this control means that the author is accountable for errors in grammar, character development and storyline.  Like anything else in life, this process gets easier with experience, but there is one thing about that first book that may come back to haunt you.  

Let’s say that a few years ago you wrote your first book and “threw it up” on Amazon.  Perhaps you did not have it edited, or you didn’t know how to properly market it. In any case, it didn’t do much in the way of sales.  But undeterred, you stuck with your writing, and now you have improved your skills, you’ve found an editor that you work well with, and you have become a self-promotion expert.   Armed with this knowledge and perhaps a few books under your belt, you decide to go back and revise that first book—your baby.  When you’re done, you have a masterpiece! Beaming with pride, you make it available for sale, only to receive a slew of negative reviews, citing all its errors.  WHAAAT?! After careful investigation, you learn that the original version of your book is still available online, and that’s what readers and reviewers are getting their hands on.  

This is an all too common problem, and one of the topics on last week’s Aspects of Writing Radio Show. I spoke with James Kelly, the show's host and a published novelist; Janet Coursey, author of The Secrets of Time, and PR guru Travis Shortt about what authors can do to remedy this issue.  Here are a few takeaways from that discussion:

• If you are in the process of readying an original manuscript for self-publishing, the answer is obvious: don’t rush to publish! Get that editor, make sure your book is properly formatted, and have a marketing plan ready.
• If you have already published a first edition and are writing a revision, contact the publisher and tell them you would like them to take down that original version. Be persistent; email and/or call them and try to get a definitive answer as to when it will come down.
• Then, before publishing the revision, do an Internet search to find out if the original book is still available anywhere else.  Please note that it is not always possible to remove old versions. If this is the case, you must make it clear to your potential readers that there is a new version available.  Provide identifying information--such as a new cover, ISBN number, publisher, publication date, etc.—in all of your marketing materials.    

To hear a replay of that show, click here. For more advice on writing, publishing and book marketing, tune into Aspects of Writing every other Tuesday on KLAV radio. The next live show is Tuesday, March 25 at 2pm Pacific/ 3pm Central / 5pm Eastern.