Market Research Like a Fox

Lead instructor Chris “Fox” Wallace shows you how to research markets using just WrittenWell and Amazon....
Lead instructor Chris “Fox” Wallace shows you how to research markets using just WrittenWell and Amazon....
In Writing to Market — Where to Begin, I talked about how I use Publisher Rocket’s category search function to identify potential categories to write in. We’re going to leave that program for now, and go to Amazon to look at the bestseller lists. Because nothing can kill a category quicker for you than a bad-looking bestseller list. As an example, let’s say you liked horror as a top tier category. And why wouldn’t you? It’s got a 41% pub percentage for a steady 12.5k in sales. The top books move big numbers. But let’s take a look at the...
The theory of writing to market is that most people don’t want to read something completely new. They want to read something like the last book they enjoyed. A new story, but one that makes them feel the same way as they did the last time. Essentially, they want to read the same thing, but different. Strangely, this is not contradictory, and is fairly easy to accomplish. The way to do it is through tropes. Tropes Tropes are not quite cliches, but they are in the same ballpark. They are certain characters or situations that people are familiar with and...
There’s a lot of confusion about what writing to market actually is. Let’s clear that up. Writing to market is actually a simple two-step process: you identify a good market, then you write a book that fits that market. Obviously, there is far more to it than that, but that is the basis of it. Find a market. Write a book for that market. And one must do both to successfully write to market. I have seen people find a great genre, then write a book no readers of that genre would enjoy. I have seen people write wonderful books...