Find Your Niche & Follow It - Part 1Written by Rob Taylor
In this series of articles I'm going to show you how to find out if there's a hungry crowd for your information product BEFORE you write a single word. Mark Twain once said: “Find out where people are going and get there first”. With advent of internet you can certainly find out what folks are wanting. Being first at front of line to bill them might not be quite so easy. But there are ways to find out if there's an existing hungry crowd for your information product, and more importantly a crowd with pockets bulging with cash to give you. In this article I'm going to share some tips that will save you much heartache from chasing after wrong market. Firstly I believe that it is very important that what you sell interests you, otherwise you sign up for a life of struggle and worse... Boredom! Motivating yourself to sell something you have no interest or belief in is soul-destroying at best of times, so don't do it. Just because *rubber cat suits* is your thing doesn't mean rest of planet digs them at all. I mean that's a pretty small niche with less than 560 searches performed a month. Yes I did actually go and check out stats for it. One of things I've found in this marketing-malarkey is that I am able to explore interests that I simply don't have time or inclination to actively get involved in. Take archery, I can twang a bow as well as next man, and have done for past couple of years. But idea of traipsing off to all those shows every weekend, predominantly talking a load of rubbish just doesn't do it for me. BUT sell this bunch of Robin Hood wannabees an infoprod, and I'm game. Seriously though, I love archery, it's one of few sports British government hasn't actually tried to ban... yet! And that brings me to my point... What do you have an interest in that also has a large number of people willing to do what I call *the wallet flip*. You need to be looking for markets where folk won't even blink at spending $100 a year on products you will be selling.
| | The New Way to PublishWritten by Penny C. Sansevieri
These days, there are several ways to get your book published. You can get an agent and go traditional route, you can self-publish, or you can take advantage of a new form of publishing called "print-on-demand" or POD. What exactly is print-on-demand publishing? Think of it as self-publishing with a twist. It used to be, if you wanted to circumvent traditional publishing houses, you had to tackle everything from printers to cover designers, ISBNs (International Standard Book Number) to distribution. Feeling dizzy yet? Sure, there were also self-publishing houses called vanity presses. They churned out about 6,000 titles per year and author paid anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 to publish his or her book. Cost alone was usually enough to discourage anyone who had not spent a great deal of time in industry. Options were pretty limited, until Internet explosion occurred. Enter on-demand publisher. Now, for a minimal fee (usually from $159 to $1,500), you can see your book in print. Essentially, what you're doing is hiring a publisher to publish your book. They take care of cover, book interior, ISBN, and distribution. They are compensated for this by receiving a portion of profits every time you sell a book. You are compensated through royalties and while these do vary, they typically fall somewhere in 18-20 percent range per book. The great part about POD publishing is that "on-demand" part enables them to print books as they are needed, meaning that someone (probably you) won't get stuck with a garage full of books you can't get rid of. If you only sell 100 books, that's what they'll print. There are no minimum orders, and your book will always stay in print. To give you an idea of scope of on-demand publishing industry, consider this: typical big New York publisher prints about eight hundred new titles a year. At last count, some of print-on-demand publishers were doing five hundred a month. Early estimates indicate that POD publishers printed around half a million books in 2001. This year, there are indications that this industry will hit $78 billion market. These indicators tell us that POD industry is growing at a pace no one anticipated. Why? Because traditional publishing field is narrowing. Only one percent of books published each year are by unpublished authors. Does this low number tell us that there are fewer new authors out there? Absolutely not. What it tells us is that publishing houses are cutting back, merging and no longer willing to take chances on untested material. The challenge with this industry is that you can't get published unless you're published it's a cycle from which we all aspire to escape. Now, we can. If you publish your book through a POD press, you are no longer considered a first-time published author. That is, if you sell book. You still have to market your book. But take heart. With shrinking publishing budgets, you have to market your own book, no matter who publishes you. The hefty marketing budgets that used to accompany new releases are dwindling quickly. So, let's say you publish your book through a POD publisher and you market it. You market it so well that you begin to garner interest from bigger publishing houses. How many books you need to sell is anyone's guess. Traditionally, range has been between 5,000 and 8,000. Recently, however, Kensington Books (an imprint of Citadel Press) formed an alliance with POD giant iUniverse (www.iuniverse.com) to consider any book that sold over five hundred copies. By "consider," they mean they will consider publishing it. At five hundred copies, this levels playing field considerably. If you've written a good book and you market it effectively, you'll sell five hundred copies in blink of an eye. Publishers I've spoken to at some of biggest houses in industry (Time Warner, Simon & Schuster) readily admit they watch these books very carefully to see what's selling. By picking a book that is selling moderately well, publisher knows two things: book has found an audience, and author knows how to market it. Even if you don't get picked up traditionally, there's still hope. If you sell a reasonable amount of books and you still aspire to a bigger publishing house, you can include this first publishing experience in your query letter. How do you find these on-demand publishers? A list of some I've worked with follows this article, but who you pick will depend entirely on you and needs of your book. For some, it’s turnaround time; for others, it’s whether or not they can print in hardcover. Generally, though, final product should be your first consideration; distribution or shipping time should be second. Once you've narrowed your publishers down to two or three, a good idea would be to order a book from each of them. This will tell you two things. First, you'll get a sense for their ordering process and how quickly they ship book to you, and second, you'll get a firsthand look at quality of their books.
|
