Market Research for Writers

You’re a writer, not a business analyst. You don’t need market research. Right?

Your heart races as you meld into the shadows and wait for the guard to pass. His flashlight beam swings your way and you catch your breath. It swings away, and the guard heads in the other direction.

Why Market Research is Important for Writers

The point of market research is to identify trends and understand your competition, so you can make better decisions, unlike the writer depicted in the story above.

Instead of breaking into bookstores to get your story in front of readers, let’s work on improving your book’s visibility via marketing decisions.

So how do you find the “right” answers for your book’s marketing? Yup, you guess it. Market research.

Market Research Can Increase Your Books’s Discoverability

In a crowded marketplace, we can look at successful books to gain insight into how to position our own stories. The first step is to look at the top selling books in your genre.

• What is the average price of the top selling books?
• How are the book descriptions for the top selling books written?
• Do the book covers have common design themes including colors, titles, or cover art?

Now compare what you’ve learned with your book.

How well does your cover fit with what is selling well right now? Don’t get distracted by whether you like or dislike the covers of the best-selling books.

The covers worked, because readers bought those books.

Does your book’s description fit with what is selling? Have you written your book description with the same point of view? The same tense? Do you convey the tone of your book like the best-selling books do?

Is your pricing strategy in line with the top selling books? Before you modify your price up or down, remember, price has a lot to do with the publisher. They typically sell traditionally published books at a higher price point because the traditional publisher’s overhead costs are huge relative to an independently published author. This is an advantage to the small press and independently published books which can be offered  at lower prices.

And of course, the most important questions of them all:

Do you have the time to do all of this research??

Good news, overwhelmed writer! Alex Newton and the team at K-lytics has pulled market research together for you.

Why I love the K-lytics Market Research Reports

The market intelligence pulled together by K-lytics provides genre-specific insight into what is selling now, what’s changed over the past 6 to 18 months, and how publishers have positioned the top selling books. K-lytics updates the information regularly which, given the recent upheavals to the world’s retail markets, is important.

Over the past several years (yes, this book has taken me forever), I’ve watched changes in reader trends via the market intelligence delivered in the K-lytics basic reports. This has informed how I plan to market my book.

K-lytics Reports are Easy to Consume

Don’t worry if data intimidates you. The folks at K-lytics process the data, graph the market trends, and compile the information into easily consumed reports. For example, the bestseller list shows the Book Title, Author, a flag if it’s been in the top 100 over 6 months, Publish Date, Average Amazon Sales Rank, Kindle Edition Price, Sales or Downloads per Day, Print Length, Number of Reviews, Average Review, Percent of Bad Reviews, and the ranking in the book’s top 3 categories.

When you purchase a report, you receive a video that walks you through the report, and a pdf report with hyperlinks. This isn’t a canned video; each is specific to the data in the accompanying report and covers what’s changed over the past 6 months.

Alex Newton, the CEO and founder of K-lytics, narrates the videos. I find the videos entertaining and informative, and Alex’s accent charming. Granted, I like data.

I typically watch the overview video first, then dig into the pdf. The basic reports include the following genres (bold text) and sub genres:

Note, the links for the SciFi and Fantasy and Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian reports are affiliate links available to me because I’ve purchased these reports in the past. Please consider supporting me via purchases through these links!

K-lytics Reports Guides My Market Understanding

Another reason I love the K-lytics reports is they have helped me understand what I should pay attention to. This has been useful in informing the metadata for my book, and will aid in improving my book’s visibility.

Specifically, I’ve used the market research reports from K-lytics to help me decide on pricing, cover design, keywords to investigate, and the subcategories I should consider for my book. I also read the book descriptions for the top 100 books while crafting my book description.

K-lytics Reports Save Me Time

Overall, the market research reports from K-lytics have saved me time. I have a better understanding of market trends, the hot publishers and authors in my genre, which subgenres to avoid, and a starting list of popular keywords to investigate.

Could I have combed the Amazon pages and compiled the report myself? Sure. But would producing this work every six months be a good use of my time? No.

So why not use market research to develop a better understanding of reader desires and expectations? After all, marketing a book is about finding the right readers for your story. Although I’ve only used the basic reports so far, K-lytics offers membership programs where you can drill even further into the category-specific data and create custom reports.

Do you have a strategy for market research? What tactics do you use to help position your books so readers can find your work?

Header Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash