Corner Building

I’ve shared a little marketing info with you, and I will share much more, but I haven’t really gone into the usefulness of getting a market analysis of your precious brainchild, your book.  Please believe that this, your editorial analysis and your edit are every bit as important as writing your book.

A market analysis will save you time, effort, money and tears.  A good one does many things.  It gives you five or six comparable books and tells you how they’re selling, how many copies sold, how long on the shelf.  This helps you to know what your competition is and what you’re going to have to do to measure up or beat it.  A good analysis will astonish you with the books it compares yours to, but delve into it and you’ll find they’re usually right.

You’ll get a long — or maybe a short — listing of the people likely to be interested in and to buy your book.  This is something you really need because there are likely to be audiences you hadn’t thought about.  People who do these analyses have tools that aren’t available to you as a novice and the best ones are really good at what they do.

Extremely important also is that a market analysis gives you a listing of places that will — and will not — carry your book.  If this isn’t worth its weight in gold, I don’t know what is.  Let them do it for you with their expertise, and save yourself time, money and shoe leather.

A good market analysis will run you about $200, cheap at the price.  Two places I know of do them best: Wheatmark.com. and Writersinthesky.com.  I’m publishing my book with Wheatmark, so I can vouch for their excellence, and I’ve heard good things about Writers In The Sky.

I pray you take this message to heart and you’ll be far ahead on your road to marketting a successful book.

Self-Publishing: A Market Analysis originally appeared on Francine Craft on February 26, 2010.