Selling your Book to the Right Market
There are a lot of romance novels out on the shelves and so little time to read them all; which one to begin? A classic where one of five sisters finds her ‘Mr Darcy’ through their humility and sins? A coincidence meetup between two lovers in a New York cafe who then settle their differences and marry at the end? How about a tale where one party crasher finds their true love on the balcony, who happens to be from a rival family? With so many choices, it’s hard to pick which one. But once when you read through a bunch of them, you get bored with the same old story, where opposites attract, go out on a date, fix their issues and become the best couple.
But there’s a story out there, where a teenage girl meets a boy in a rural village, who turns out to be a vampire? Yeah, that’s ‘Twilight’, Stephenie Meyer’s debut novel responsible for a love story between a human girl and a ‘beautiful’ vampire. That one was developed into a book series and turned into film adaptations. Some have the hots for Edward Cullen, and others lambasted on the whole series. The book even received praise for its dreamy way of writing, whilst being dismissed as an overrated classic. Despite the controversies though, it had sold millions of copies and entered the New York Times bestseller list. All it took was a romance with a vampire, whose skin glittered like diamonds under intense sunlight.
Marketing research is one of the various ways to ensure the success of your books, but it is very powerful in the name of business
That success then led others to write books, including ‘The Hunger Games’ and ‘Divergent’, which includes romantic plots with fantastical themes. The former story, where Katniss plays a game of survival and goes against the government, then created a new trend of kids fighting against dystopian societies, which becomes a cliche in recent literature. Not to mention the original is a less gory take on the film ‘Battle Royale’, which followed the similar premise. After all, that’s the power of breaking the market!
Marketing research is one of the various ways to ensure the success of your books, but it is very powerful in the name of business. It recognises the needs of customers and what they want from the current market. By doing a lot of research into marketing trends, and what publishers would like to see more of in terms of books, you’ll have a fair idea of what makes the next bestseller.
There are templates out there that can help identify the current needs for the next best book, including the Value Proposition Canvas. It looks like it’s a better fit for a service, or rather an app idea for your iPhone, but this applies to books too! Just take any genre or market and map down what customers like or hate about it on the customer segment, as well as what they would expect to find from there. This would result in potential solutions that focus on their likes and away from their ‘pains’ from that segment.
Of course, that would be quite excessive for planning your next book. For Meyer, she had an idea for Twilight from a dream she had of a girl dating a vampire. Maybe it’s just easy to take an idea from your head and write it down. Why need rocket science, or even litter your study room with plans for your new gadget, if it means to just jot it down? How about a better question; will it actually enter the saturated market of other books with matching themes, or does it only serve the niche that’s likely to be ignored by the publishers? Why not both?
Another technique of finding a great idea for the market lies in the Adoption Life Cycle. It shows the segments of a market, ranging from people who want innovative ideas to those who are missing out and set in their ways. The bigger segment lies the majority, where a lot of people check out the latest trends. In other words in book terms, lots of books released that compete with the likes of Harry Potter, or some other period drama set in a seaside cottage. Now ask yourself: where does your book fall onto this curve? Would it be the next Harry Potter, or does it happen to be completely different, in hopes that it would be completely original?
If your answer lies in finding the most original idea ever, well, you won’t. Chances are you’ll be writing a book about an android who finds magical powers and ends up in a utopian society filled with nothing but mini games to complete. Then readers would point out its literally crystal maze with Harry Potter in it. If I read it though, I would say that’s a clever idea. A simple way to say this would be that your idea is still very creative, and here’s why:
Creativity is not about finding an original idea, it is about finding a pre-existing idea and twisting it into a new shape.
You do not have to ‘invent’ a book to become a bestseller. Making it too unique would end up staying away from the mass market, and publishers would skip over it in favour for a novel with wizarding elements in it. But it can work if you take the trends from a particular genre and combine with fresh themes to make it slightly unique. For example, you could take an archer like Katness, and transport them to roman times and fight in a gladiator match. They might even join the celts to take on the Romans. The character would still shoot arrows and stand against the government, except it’s in the past and not in the post-apocalyptic future. That right here is a good example of creativity at work. That is ‘crossing the chasm’.
Crossing the chasm is when your idea would fall between the ‘Early Majority’ and ‘Early Adopter’ segments, the two critical areas of marketing. It would need to have a few selling points to attract people who are in for new experiences, along with elements that people are familiar with from the saturated market.
The idea is, while rudimentary, that books would not only have to be original but also feature similar themes. It’ll help the readers adapt to it and have good expectations of what it is about. Publishers would easily accept books of say, romances with vampires, robots, whatever, just as long they feature twists to provide a different experience.
Subversions can work too. You can make readers expect similar themes and twist them along the way. You could have a medieval-style fantasy world where a hero goes on the quest to slay the dragon before they befriend a princess, who happens to be half-dragon; they would have to look after her as they integrate into society. True, it is another twilight-like story, but from another perspective, it could be still be interesting to readers who read the series before.
That’s literally the tip of the iceberg here. There’s a lot of advice and guidance to fit your book into the market, which is crammed with others to compete with. It’s tough, but with the right themes and ideas, your book will make it to the top, provided you write it properly. Even the best ideas turn into rubbish novels and that’s another problem for next time. Point is, that stories are the strongest when they have a strong base to stand on.