What’s your reason?
Everyone has a reason to write a book. Sometimes we have a story to tell or something we feel compelled to write. I know this feeling. I’ve had this book idea rolling around in my head for quite awhile and now it’s time to finally put pen to paper and share it with others.
We’ve reached the next stage of our book process. Now it’s time to determine why someone would want to buy our book. Will our book bring value to the reader? What will convince them that they not only need to buy this book, but they WANT to buy it? We could spend months writing out all this great content, working out the proper layout and creating engaging graphics but if no one wants to read our book, then we’ve just wasted an awful lot of time.
Time to check out the competition
The big fancy word for this is doing a competitive analysis. Just like you research your businesses competitors, you need to research the other books out there who are marketing to the same readers. We started with a Google search using our specific key words of ‘social media books for small business’ and we created a list of the books we found.
Next we checked out Amazon where we found more books and added them to our competition list. To narrow down the list, we used our main key words of ‘social media books for small business’ again.
To further define our competitive analysis, we added the following information for each book:
- The cost of the book
- What was listed in the table of contents?
- Was this book different or the same idea as ours?
- What is the author’s background?
- And the biggest factor for us is WHEN was the book published?
We knew there were a ton of books published to help people with their social media strategy. After doing the competitive analysis, we saw the full picture of just how many book options there were and when they were published.
This idea of WHEN is a huge point of interest for us. Social media is constantly changing so a book written in 2008 would not be up to date with the different social programs and how to use the new or revised features as something written in 2013.
Is this a book that has not been written?
Our research confirmed our idea to develop our book into a downloadable ebook. With an ebook, our book will always be able to stay up to date. People who buy our book will be able to download the updates when Facebook makes another change to the news feed or a new scheduling program gets launched.
Our research showed that most of the social media books published were not written with updated information. And most of the books were directed towards a social media manager or marketing director. Where was the book to help the small business owner understand how to use social media marketing?
It was good to learn what was out in the marketplace for our readers. If anything, doing the research has helped to make our book idea even better. We’ve fine-tuned our content of creating a guideline to help small business owners take that ‘overwhelming feeling’ out of using social media marketing. This ebook will show the small business owner how they can find time in their already crazy busy day to stay on top of social media and to make it work for their business.
Stay tuned as we keep moving through this book development process and you’ll see how it all comes together.
Photo credit: Book Shelf
