Discovering What Your Audience Wants

Whether you have yet to start writing your e-book or you’ve stalled partway, you need to find out exactly what your audience wants. Ideally, your e-book sits at the point where your own areas of interests and expertise match up with the wants and needs of your audience. Though you might have a good idea of what you’re capable of writing about, you might not be as sure of what people want to read.

Follow these suggestions, discussed in the following two sections, to figure out what readers want:

Look in-depth at popular e-books in your genre or field.

Request help from your existing audience.

Researching popular e-books in your genre or field

Even if you don’t yet have much of an audience or a platform (see Part V for tips on how to build them), you can still do market research. You can form a reasonably accurate picture of what your potential audience wants by looking at existing e-books that are selling well. Here are a couple of suggestions:

Go to the listing of Kindle e-books at Amazon (www.amazon.com/Kindle-eBooks ), and find your chosen genre or topic area. Look at the ten or so best-selling e-books, and consider their common characteristics. Download samples to examine their tables of contents (if they have them) and their first few pages.

If you’re writing specialist nonfiction, look at prominent blogs in your field. Which e-books are they selling or promoting? You may want to read customer testimonials, to not only get a feel for which e-books are most popular but also gain insight into reader demographics, such as the age and gender of typical readers.

Create a list of five to ten popular e-books that have subjects similar to one you want to write about. Copy their book descriptions and any other information (such as an author biography) from the Amazon site, or key information (such as bullet points describing the e-book’s contents) from their sales pages on websites.

Ask yourself these questions about your list of popular e-books:

Which are the shortest and longest? What is their median length?

How would you describe the writing style of each e-book (conversational, formal, irreverent, or down-to-earth, for example)? Look for common stylistic features in several of the books.

Who are the target audiences for these e-books? Look for indications of their expected age, gender, education level, social status, and current level of expertise in the area.

What topics or themes crop up again and again? In nonfiction, these might indicate vital information that readers need; in fiction, they may suggest popular genre conventions.

Avoid slavishly creating a distilled version of all popular e-books — it would be no fun to write and would likely be perceived poorly by readers. Instead, learn from what’s being done well, and figure out how to improve on it. Ditch anything that feels clichéd or less than useful. If a particular topic or theme comes up a lot, don’t simply look for ways to include a similar topic in your own e-book — try to take the idea further.

Getting help from your existing audience while you write

If you have a blog, an e-mail list, a Twitter account, or a Facebook page (for example), you already have an audience. Granted, it might be small now, but it can still be a useful source of support as you develop and write your e-book.

One simple way to tap into the desires of your existing audience is to run a survey. You can ask your audience anything you want, though you’ll find that surveys are most effective when you keep them short and to the point. That way, you receive more responses. This strategy is especially useful for nonfiction, but you can also use a survey to find out about your readers’ interests in fiction.

Here are some examples of helpful questions (with sample topics in angle brackets) to ask your audience:

What books or e-books have you read, and enjoyed, about <photography>?

What are your biggest struggles with <time management>?

What frustrates you most about standard <writing> advice?

Which of these chapters would be useful to you? Check all that apply.

Which of these extra features would you find helpful? Check all that apply.

If a survey feels too formal for your audience, you can simply write a blog post, an e-mail, a tweet, or a Facebook update that invites readers to respond to one question. If you have several possible e-book ideas, let your audience vote to find out which is most popular with them.

Let your audience help you as you’re writing your e-book. If you get stuck partway, share some of your work-in-progress on your blog, and ask readers whether it’s clear or whether it raises more questions that you need to answer. If you choose to publish your e-book as a serial while you’re writing it, you can solicit feedback on new chapters before committing too much time to a particular direction — an idea that can work for both fiction and nonfiction.