Editor Tips: Understanding the market

Following up on my conversation with an editor acquaintance, I wanted to dig a little deeper on what they meant by understanding the market, especially from a self-publishing perspective. Here are three tips specifically for self-publishing authors. 

Conduct Market Research: Before you finalize your book, conduct thorough market research to identify the demand for your genre or niche. Look at bestseller lists, analyze successful self-published books in your category, and understand what readers are looking for. This research can guide your decision-making process, from cover design to pricing strategy.Build a Targeted Author Platform: As a self-published author, your online presence is crucial for reaching your target audience. Build a strong author platform through a professional website, active social media profiles, and engagement in relevant online communities. Understand where your potential readers spend their time online, and focus your efforts on those platforms.Utilize Data Analytics: Take advantage of data analytics tools available to self-published authors. Platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and other self-publishing services provide insights into sales, reader behavior, and marketing effectiveness. Analyzing this data can help you make informed decisions about pricing, marketing strategies, and even the timing of book promotions.

“Remember that successful self-publishing often involves a combination of writing a quality book and effective marketing. Stay informed about industry changes, be adaptable in your approach, and seek feedback from readers to continually improve your work and marketing strategies. Building a supportive network within the self-publishing community can also provide valuable insights and advice.”

I have done market research in my full-time professional life, so tips one and three seem straight-forward to me. However, applying general product marketing research approaches to writing, especially niche market writing, is daunting. There are several resources I’ve started using to look at the overall market and my particular niche. Here are a few I’ve found useful:

Amazon (www.amazon.com). Most modern authors are present on the Amazon Kindle or books section of Amazon. It can be useful to identifying top selling content within your niche market. However, it can also be difficult narrowing your search to get meaningful data. For example, searching in Kindle and Amazon books for Sci-fi returns over 60,000 titles. The good news is you can filter and sort to help refine your results. Looking at title published in the last 30 days, and sorting by “Best Sellers”, you can quickly see what is finding commercial success in your niche.GoodReads (www.goodreads.com).  Goodreads is the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations. Our mission is to help readers discover books they love and get more out of reading. Goodreads launched in January 2007. You can use GoodReads to export genres, find authors in your genre, and generally get a good sense of what types of stories users of the platform are reading and enjoy.Reddit (www.reddit.com). Reddit has multiple subreddits for different genres. For example, the Sci-Fi reddit has 4.2 million members and is in the top 1% of boards on reddit based on size.  The downside of Reddit is the signal to noise ratio. Since it is an open platform with community-based moderators, it can be hard to find market data for your selected niche.

Let’s make this real for a new author by going deeper on Amazon as an example.  I’m going to focus on my own niche (sci-fi, romance/erotica) but the process can be applied to any genre.

Start with the Kindle Books page.Put in the category search (“science fiction kindle books romance erotic”)Sort by “Best Sellers”Filter by “Last 90 Days”

This reduced my search results from 20,000 plus titles to 42 titles.  I can now look at these 42 results and see what is selling currently to identify themes or trends that I can either target in my writing, or avoid if I think it is getting over-saturated.  

One thing that jumps out at me is the recent top sellers are books within a series (14 of the top 16 best sellers), most appear to deal with alien relationships (8 of top 16), and bondage/submission are highly represented (4 of the top 16). There also does not appear to be a high correlation between reader reviews and best sellers, at least in the first 90 days, which bodes well for my books with my first title appearing at #24 of 42 in the list, with 6 reviews. Pricing appears to be a factor, with top sellers full book copies tending to be priced between $9.99 and $0.99 in the US. 

Other data you can pull from the site include page count, availability on KindleUnlimited, other formats and languages the title is available in and more. 

Follow me on Amazon to get information about book releases.