To find
out, you must check Amazon.com or take a trip to a couple of bookstores
to find out what’s already been published about your subject.
Agent
Djana Pearson Morris says, “Take a serious look at the competition– if
someone’s already done it well, or if there’s a glut of books on the
subject, this may not be a book that will be able to stand out in the
market, hence it will be of little interest to publishers, regardless of
its attributes.”
Pay no
mind to the out-of-print books, vanity-published titles, or e-books,
because traditional publishers won’t consider them competition and
general readers are unlikely to have read them. But do pay close
attention to anything that’s on bookstore shelves today.
Ask
yourself if there’s a need and a demand for more information on the
topic. For example, even if you have great insights to add, the world
probably doesn’t need more than one book about how to properly water a
fern. Sure, I’m using an absurd example, but if your book has a limited
potential audience, how hungry is this audience for new information?
Would anyone buy two books about how to water a fern?
If not—and
bookstores already stock one—stores will be unlikely to stock a second
one. “We already have a fern book,” they’ll tell the sales rep. “What
else have you got?”
Some
topics, however, have dedicated audiences who will happily buy more than
one book, provided the books each offer something the others don’t.
Take my latest book as an example — Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer.
I knew there were already plenty of books about freelance writing. And
just the fact that I was going to write a book on the topic in my own
style would not be good enough. Just the fact that I could use some
personal examples that the others hadn’t was not enough, either.
Publishers
knew it was a crowded market, but they also knew that writers don’t
need just one book about freelance writing; it’s likely that they’ll
read a handful of books on the topic, and it’s worthwhile for them to do
so. There are plenty of ways to be successful as a freelance writer,
and different perspectives on how to break in or to stay successful.
So my job
was to convince a publisher (and readers) that my book would offer
something substantively different from what the other books offered, or
that I would take over where other books left off.
There
would be some required overlap, of course—you can’t write a book about
magazine writing without ever explaining what a query letter is or what
types of rights a publication may buy, so you’ll probably find that in
every book for magazine writers. But the key to selling my book was
figuring out what I could add to the already-vast mounds of literature
on the topic.
I realized
that I found my success as a writer somewhat differently from the other
authors I’d read. I had broken most of the rules in the other books for
writers, and I had bent the rest of them. And I realized that, at the
time I proposed it, no other book for freelance writers had current
information about the way magazines “really” worked since the Internet
came along. No one else was discussing e-mail queries or how to figure
out an editor’s e-mail address. No one was addressing the issue of how
to send out clips electronically, or what sites to visit to find
interviewees and experts for articles.
On top of
that, nearly all of the books were meant for beginners. I couldn’t find
books that reliably showed me how to go from getting my first few
credits to moving on and actually making a career at it—becoming a
columnist or a contributing editor at a major magazine, for instance.
So in my
proposal, I stressed the things I would add: a more timely perspective,
an alternative to the rules other books laid out, and a slant toward the
intermediate writer rather than the beginner.
As an
author, you don’t just do these things because it’ll help you sell a
proposal to a publisher; you also do it for the reader. I’ve been mighty
frustrated when I’ve spent hard-earned money on a book, only to find
that it regurgitates the same information I’ve found in other books,
magazines, or online. Your obligation as an author is to cherish your
readers, and to make them happy with their decision to buy your books.
Otherwise, don’t expect them to follow you to the next book, and don’t
expect to build any word-of-mouth buzz.
A few
chapters of new information in a book that’s otherwise filled with
information easily available elsewhere just isn’t enough to justify the
cover price of books today. So, aside from your (certainly engaging)
writing style and personal anecdotes, how will you add to a reader’s
knowledge in a way that justifies the hard work he put in to earn the
money to buy your book?
Here are some possibilities:
- Can you
slant it for a specific group of people within the category’s market
that the others haven’t? For example, while there were plenty of books
for screenwriters on the market, there weren’t any geared toward young
people—so Christina Hamlett wrote ScreenTEENwriters just for them.
- Can you talk to people who disagree with what “experts” have said on the topic?
- Can you find out recent developments that have changed the accuracy of information in other books?
- Can you offer a significantly different perspective on the topic?
- Can you expand on a little-known or little-written-about aspect of the topic?
- Can you perform real-life experiments that show the results of theoretical discussions in other books?
- Can you
make it interesting and relevant to a group of people who wouldn’t
normally pick up a book on the topic? (Adding humor to a book about
punctuation, for example, helped Eats, Shoots and Leaves
author Lynn Truss pique the interest of more than a million people who
never would have thought of buying a book about punctuation before.)
What makes
your book different is what makes it important. Ask yourself what you
can add, and you may just have yourself a bestseller in the making.