Guest Post by Brian Meeks: Picking Your Niche Can Be Kind of Squirrelly

Today I have a very special treat for you. My dear writer friend, Brian Meeks, a.k.a. The Vagabond Novelist, has written a special guest post about identifying a non-fiction book topic in your area of expertise that will sell. Enjoy!

 

You’ve been thinking about writing a book. You’ve had a lifetime of experiences, been good at quite a few things, and even learned from the mistakes (we won’t mention his name), and most importantly you enjoy writing.
There are many good reasons to become a self-published author. Having a book lends credibility to speakers, it helps build a brand, and can even impress that annoying aunt who won’t quit asking you when you’re going to get married and start having children.
The first logical step is to see if your idea has been taken by someone else. You get on Amazon and find that the niche is greatly underserved. In fact, you don’t really find anyone who has covered your area of expertise in much detail.
So, it’s time to start writing, right?
Well, maybe. But there are still some questions to ask. The first one is “who is your book for?”
If you answer “Everyone,” then you’re not ready. In the book business, we refer to an avatar when discussing the market. That’s shorthand for the ideal person that would want to read your book and would pay to do so. You might think that hydroponic gardening is the best thing in the world and everybody should do it, but the hardcore video game crowd (as just one example) aren’t going to be interested. Neither are the traveling circus folks with a propensity for knitting. Who has time to garden when there are tents to set up and sweaters to make?
One needs to really consider an audience before spending the time and money to go through the entire book process. It’s a lot of hours to invest only to find out that your book, Squirrel Training for the Professional Glockenspiel Enthusiasts, isn’t the runaway bestseller you imagined.
The first thing to do is to get in the habit of asking questions. The first one might be “How many professional musicians are there in the United States?” (No, you’re not ready to start thinking about foreign rights deals.)
At any given time there are 64,000 musical groups and artists in the U.S. according to one site on the Internet. Another puts the number at 240,000 professional singers. Even if we add those two together, we still get only 304,000 people, give or take, and how many of those play the Glockenspiel?
We don’t need to know exactly how many play the Glockenspiel because we do know that some percentage play the guitar, others play the trombone, while others play the drums. Now, the latter group might also dabble in the glockenspiel, but certainly not all of them.
We might next ask, “How many musicians play percussion instruments?”
Let’s say we make the assumption that 10% of the musicians play a percussion instrument and that 100% of those people are either professional glockenspiel players or secretly want to be; that still leaves only 30,400 potential readers.
Now, 53% of all adults in the U.S. never read a book after they finish school regardless of whether they drop out of high school or get a Ph.D.  That means that our group of potential readers, which we’ve made some widely optimistic assumptions about, has just been narrowed to 14,288.
How many of those people want to learn how to train squirrels?
Again, because I’m feeling generous, let’s assume 97%, because squirrels are freaking adorable. That’s roughly 13,859 people.
If you sold your book to all of them at $4.99, on Amazon, as a Kindle book, you’d make about $3.45 per sale and rake in $47,814 dollars.
That would be great, but here’s the rub. We’ve been generous in our assessment of the audience, and it probably isn’t a fraction of what we’ve come up with. Secondly, even if divine intervention had led to an accurate audience number, how are you going to find them all?
Bottom line, you’re going to sell twelve copies of your squirrel training book to friends and family members, and it’s going to leave a bad taste in your mouth.
This isn’t the end of the road, though, and this is the good news.
Once you’ve realized that the dream book you’d like to write doesn’t make financial sense, you can ask if there are other reasons to write it. Keynote speakers can make $5,000 – $25,000 for a single speech, and maybe you have a sense of humor and can parlay your love of squirrel training via classical glockenspiel music into your own niche that could lead to other streams of income.
Also, maybe you go another route and instead of trying to teach glockenspiel players to trains squirrels, you write a book for women who want to train squirrels. There are lots of women in the United States.
The point is one can quickly determine if a book idea makes sense with a few searches on The Google and the asking of the right questions.
Now, get out there and figure out what sort of rodent-related book you’d like to write. I know you can do it.

 

 

One More Thing…
~To Learn: Jesse Krieger (bestselling author and founder/publisher of Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press) is offering a FREE Book, Business & Brand Summit . I was thrilled to interview with Jesse last week, and my interview is going live today! You can sign up and check it out here.

 

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