In self-publishing your non-fiction book, you need to find a market that will help you on getting high sales out of it. Check this out, let me tell you about the 3 elements of a marketable non-fiction book.
Today's topic has three points and you're going to want to stick around. Because the third point is a secret as the number one way to make your non-fiction book marketable. So the topic we're discussing today is the 3 elements of a marketable non-fiction book.
By the end of this article, you're going to know what it is, that makes a book marketable when it comes to non-fiction. You're going to have the easy concrete steps necessary to adjust your book. And you're going to feel great.
Knowing that you're setting your book up to sell when it comes to posting it on Amazon. So let's get into it. Grab a copy of my free Self-Publishing Checklist that contains the secrets to help you get your book self-published and selling.
Let's get into it. From my own story, I started without even considering whether there was a market for the books that I was writing on. I was writing books on the subjects of achieving your goals habits things that I'm very excited about.
Even today to share with many of my coaching students. I'm going through the steps that are necessary to build up the things that will be required if you're going to succeed when it comes to self-publishing. But when I first started I had no idea, is there a market?
Isn't there a market? I thought why don't I just write a book on the topics that I find exciting and then we'll see what happens later. I discovered that was a huge role with regards to the books aren't going to sell themselves.
Unless you're driving paid traffic that's like buying Amazon ads. Or you're using keywords where your book itself is targeting the keywords people are searching for. Things just like they do on Google.
And your keywords are optimized so that they will find your book, not other people's books. But your book is on page one of Amazon and even possibly google. The other thing that you would that I discovered the important role was of author platform.
And that would be the idea that people know who you are. You've been in this genre for a while so when your name shows up with a new book people can't wait to buy it. This is one of the reasons why a lot of people are so disappointed.
When you're going to put your very first book on the market you assume you don't need any of these three. We don't need the organic reach within the keywords. We don't need to have paid traffic to help people find our book.
We assume that if they don't know who we are they'll still buy our book. All because our book is such a quality book worth reading and then it gets on the market. And we discover that it never plays out the way that we would hope that our book would when it hits the market.
And that can be quite of a disappointment and that's one of the reasons we focus on the 3 elements of a marketable non-fiction book. The thing is in my own experience, I had a limited budget and no platform.
Who knew me? nobody knew me, I wasn't associated all with the keywords that I was targeting. I didn't even know what keywords were at the time. The thing was is my keywords were completely off.
Again, I didn't have the tools, I didn't know keywords were something that would even be important. I wasn't sure how people would find the book. I thought maybe they'd search for it or maybe it would show up somewhere.
Building Up An Audience
I would try on social media to put blogs out, there were lots of strategies I was using. But how are people going to find me if I wasn't using the right keywords? So I started fixing one thing at a time to get the increase in sales.
So which area do I target? Well, the answer is I targeted all three with the keywords. The paid ads and then targeting the writing blogs and such. So I could bring traffic over building a name around what I was riding on and seeing.
The thing was is with more sales I suddenly had a bigger budget to run back into Amazon. To generate even more sales as we're building up an audience to date. I've run about a little over 103 million times.
My ads have been shown to people on Amazon. So I am continually testing out what are the best strategies and raising the budgets as more money comes in. Where you're able just to reinvest the money that's coming in to drive bigger and better sales.
And also to put more books on the market. So the 3 elements of a marketable non-fiction book, the first one is we always target an existing market. We are not trying to create like a fidget spinner or something that's never existed before.
We want to give people something that they're already buying but how would we know who's buying? Well, the answer is it's the rankings on Amazon. We can see based upon the rankings how many books. If you see a lot of for example in the non-fiction area this also works with the fiction.
But within the non-fiction paleo diet books or keto diet or whatever it might be. We see a lot of sales going on. We know there's a market because somebody is buying those books, if it's in the top 100,000 books on Amazon for the basic sales rank what's going to happen?
There is that we're going to see that those books are selling at least a copy a day. As we move closer to the number one spot it's going to sell way more than one copy a day. But if we're looking at books or targeting keywords that are outside of this hundred thousand range the problem is there isn't an audience.
We're not going to be able to make a full-time living off of our books if we're going from that route. So the second point is also very important, we need a shortage of books in the market that we're targeting. We want to make sure there aren't that many.
Check out this related article: TRADITIONAL VS SELF PUBLISHING
But remember, if there are zero books, well how do we know that there is a market for it? I mean there are lots of books that you could be writing. For example, sometimes would be areas like people buy magazines like fashion magazines.
But fashion books maybe not so much just like. So you would be looking at these sorts of categories. We want to make sure we're not shooting for a market that doesn't exist. Now some people tell me "oh no! I want to be you know a starving artist".
And I'm going to come out with these books regardless of whether there's a market, regardless of whether there's a shortage of books. I'm just going to ignore that and the answer is well that is completely acceptable. You just have to understand.
You're going to get a lot fewer people reading your book. So if your book is about providing value to the world giving your story a chance to breathe or in this non-fiction case helping people solve unique problems they have. With regards to puppy training or dieting or maybe fixing their car or woodwork or vertical gardening.
Use The Tool KDSpy
Whatever the case might be we want to make sure that they're going to have the tools they need. But they're not going to be reading your book and getting their problem solved if they're not even seeing your book.
Because you're blowing off a lot of the important things. Maybe you'll be dead by the time your book becomes popular and I don't know if that's a positive thing. Because then your chances are even lower of being discovered.
Especially based upon the number of books that are hitting the market regularly. So you're going to want to make sure that you have a market. And two that market is very hungry so that is to say there are not that many books on the market.
Tip number three is how do we pull this together? Well, I pull it together with a tool known as KDSpy you can check out my affiliate link below in the description of all of my YouTube videos. It's an amazing tool that gives you the ability to find these hungry readers within these hungry markets.
What we're talking about is finding specifically those golden zones of keywords. Where our book has a title and those keywords are in the title. For example, the top 20 results inside of for that keyword and checking how many of those books are in the top hundred thousand.
So that gives us our very first number and then we're going to look and see how many books exist using that keyword on Amazon already. Then when we divide those together, the total number of books is divided by the number of books in the top 100,000 in the results of the 20 that we get from KDSpy.
It's going to tell us exactly what we need to know to see that our book is going to sell. And when we target these particular keywords in that golden zone. For me it's a ratio of about 30 or less then what happens is you're going to see that your books are hitting a market that's starting to buy books.
But so few books that they don't need, the author's platform in other words. And then people would say "well what does the covenant look like or the description?" We're just looking at the books that are already selling.
And say we want our cover designer to match this one. Now, can see below in my affiliate link of all of my YouTube videos for the cover designer that I use on Fiverr to do my books. For I think it's 15 or 18, it's so unbelievably cheap.
We're able to get those covers quickly produced. And I say I need a cover that looks just like these top bestseller covers and then my description is very similar as well. When we pull it all together we're able to quickly identify what it is that's going to get our books to sell.
Then we can bundle those books together and put them out onto the market. It's amazing, I'm still blown away by seeing these books daily I put out years ago continuing to sell. They fund my entire business a lot of these books.
So, it's a fantastic thing that you're definitely not going to want to ignore. That's why KDSpy is my secret tip of the day. So my question for you is what do you need to fix on your non-fiction book? What are the key things on marketing that you have failed to do that you're going to want to fix?
I want to know from you because it will help me better understand where you're coming from and produce better articles. Check out my other articles and videos for more answers to your self-publishing questions.