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Readers of nonfiction, be it articles or books, don’t often read them for the entertainment value. They read nonfiction for the information. Specifically, they read it because they have a problem and are looking for a solution. It can be something trivial, like the desire to make unusual holiday gifts, or a more serious problem such as dealing with an eating disorder. Every single one of these readers is looking for a writer to fill their need.
Every writer wants to create a book that sells well and that reaches a large number of people. Nonfiction writers have a distinct advantage in this. If you’re a professional and have added books to your writing arsenal, you’re probably planning to write a number of books. The key to maximizing your profits is to choose the right topics.
Veteran content writers know about SEO, or search engine optimization. Stripped to the barest basic concepts, SEO is the practice of finding out what topics readers are searching for online, and emphasizing those topics in writing. Readers then naturally search for those topics, search engines pick up the articles with the emphasis, and the readers are shown the articles. Emphasizing the correct phrases in your article can mean the difference between thousands of people finding your article and no one seeing it at all.
The same concept holds true for nonfiction books. Instead of simply writing a book you think people will like, it makes more economic sense to find a topic that people like, and then write a book about it. By doing the right kind of research, you can increase the odds dramatically that interested readers will look for and buy your books.
Begin your search with the largest search engine, Google. Google has a useful tool, the Adwords Keyword Tool. It’s free to use, although Google is planning to make having a free Adwords account a prerequisite for using the site. This tool will not only tell you how many people searched for a phrase in the past month, it also gives you up to 100 different alternatives of the phrase, with their statistics. Type in a topic you’re considering writing about and you’ll get the most popular versions of that topic.
Turn your search next to the selling source itself, Amazon. Type some of the best phrases from Google into the Amazon search box. As soon as you start to write the phrase, you’ll get a dropdown menu with the most popular variations. It won’t show numbers, but you’ll get an idea of the most common search terms for eBook purchasers. Do a complete Amazon search for those terms, and find out how strong the competition may be.
Do searches for variations on your topic until you find one that pops up most often. As long as the competing books in this topic aren’t on the bestseller lists, you’ve got a good shot at this being a successful title that sells well to its fans.