Publishing Help

Writing "To Market" Books

This is a tough topic for me because I've just started trying to write to market and so far I'm not great at it...I mean, my sales haven't improved, so I'm doing something wrong. However, I know the concepts of writing to market, so I feel I can share them here without feeling like a fraud.

Writing "to market" simply means that you have fully researched the market for your genre and you know what is selling and what people want to read. Then, you write a book based on what is selling. It's not just about the book itself, though. Your cover, blurb, and description have to be to market as well.

If you do a Google search for "top-selling (insert genre) books on Amazon" the first (or one of the first) things to come up should be from Amazon. Clicking this should take you to a top 100 list of books in your chosen genre. Pay attention to the titles of these books. Maybe read a few blurbs and descriptions. Look at the covers. Do they have anything in common?

Grab a notebook and jot down any popular tropes that you see. I just did a search for "Clean and wholesome romance books on Amazon" and these are the popular tropes that I picked out from the search results:

Irish
Ocean/beach
ranchers/cowboys
billionaire
second chance
western
fake relationship/marriage
mail order brides
BBW (Big Beautiful Women)
Boss romances

Because the clean and wholesome romance category is so broad, a lot of different types of books come up. That's great because it allows me to see the wide variety of books in this category that are selling. That means I can still write to market AND write what I love to write.

So, if I wanted to write a clean and wholesome romance book to market, I could pick from this list of tropes (it helps if you choose more than one...mix and match and make it interesting), then do some research on what readers expect from these tropes. You should also be reading similar books to help you understand the genre and tropes better. If you write a book that you feel is "to market" but you fail to research market expectations, you could end up with a lot of negative feedback.

After you've done all your research, it's time to write your book. I'm not going to get into the actual book writing part, because I'm assuming if you're reading this blog on publishing, you've already got the writing part handled, so I'll leave you to it.

Now, you need to go back to that list of books on Amazon and pay close attention to the covers of the books in your category. Make a list of what they have in common. Do they use similar fonts, images, design? The idea is to design your cover to be similar but still uniquely yours. This is difficult. You don't want to copy anyone ever, BUT you want potential readers to see that your book fits with the others in that category. It's a strange dance between fitting in with the others, yet standing out.

You'll also want to study blurbs and descriptions of other books similar to yours. Again, pay attention to how they are written and what they have in common. Like everything else related to writing to market, it's a matter of being similar and still unique.

That's all I'm going to write on this for now, because I'm still learning. I thought I had a book written to market, but no one saw it. Maybe it was written to market and I just didn't promote it enough. I don't know. I'm still learning.

If you have any advice or knowledge on this topic, please feel free to chime in in the comments!!


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