Planning for your book before you start writing it

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: Let's talk about what kind of things you should plan for before you start writing your book this video is brought to you by Appy Pie Academy so this is the phase of let's say you've got a great idea for a book what kind of things should you think about what should you keep in mind in knowing what we now know about how book sales are made let's plan and the first things that your plan is how do will you promote the book because as a self-published author you might love to write to you might love the idea of having your book but a book that doesn't sell does not position you as a thought leader doesn't position you as an influencer actually can be a little detrimental your potential buyers your audience can easily see on Amazon, if your book is not selling if your Amazon sales rank is low and that's public information so how will you promote the book is a very important thing to think through so very early it's important to start thinking about keyword research and your title because your title is going to contain some keywords in many cases and also your subtitle so books have a title and a subtitle those have keywords that can be important to rank for and when I talk about keywords I'm gonna talk about them more in the course but if you're new to the world of keywords and search keywords are things that people will search and might discover your book for example if you have a cookbook well they're gonna search for the word cookbook or if you have a book about health they're gonna talk about health, the problem is of course that you have to dig a little deeper into these subject areas.

Obviously there are millions of books about health or hundreds of thousands or who knows how many so you have to find more insightful more specific keywords and in addition to that you have to think about the niche in the book category in which your book will live in because again if you just create a general cookbook or if you create a general business book, anything general well you're gonna compete against many many many other books but also some of the top superstars in that niche for example if you write a business book well you're gonna compete with people like Gary Vaynerchuk and Mark Cuban and many other incredibly successful entrepreneurs so if your book is a general book it will be very hard to compete so you have to have a book that's specific on some subtopic within a category and that's very important to think through in the beginning early before you actually start to write the book and invest time and money into it another thing you really want to pre-plan is how will your book be the best book in the category one issue is the writing but another issue is you have to be aware of once you've picked the category what is the incumbent leading books in that category and you don't have to read all of them but you should be familiar with space you're entering and what you really need to also pre-plan is the competition level for your niche or sub-niche on Amazon and how does that compare to your marketing ability and resources because what you can put in as time skills and money and does the sum of the time skills and money that you have is that going to be enough to realistically compete in your category and these are the things to really plan ahead because if you don't plan them I often get clients who don't plan these things and because it's hard enough to actually write a book so these kinds of things sometimes get ignored but as soon as you launch the book they come back right away because if it's hard to promote the book if it's hard to sell these are usually the reasons why not ranking in Amazon people are not finding it all these kinds it's not the best book in the category all these types of issues are the most common issues why books fail and don't sell so if you start thinking about these things early it will save you a lot of headaches and it will increase the chances of your books success tremendously.