What is the point of lavishing time, effort and emotion on writing a book when the chances are it is not going to be published in the first place?
I’ve been down that road before. A few years ago an agent asked to see more of a book I had written. I got my hopes up, only to be told that while I could certainly write, the book just wasn’t marketable. It’s an issue that has haunted me ever since – how can I tell whether my new story will be marketable, before I put in the hours required to write it?
The short answer is that I can’t. There are no guarantees. However, a little research suggests that there are ways in which you can shorten the odds in favour of producing a marketable book.
It’s hard to think of the process of writing a book as anything other than creative, but it has dawned on me that there is a great deal of business acumen involved as well – and that it makes sense to apply these commercial skills as early on in the writing process as possible. This particularly applies to the question of book marketability. As Susan Jane says in her very helpful blog “Writing for Publication – What Makes a Book Publishable and Marketable?”:
“Publishing is a business, and the business owner needs to be as certain as they can be that the products or services they offer for sale will sell and make money for them. No matter how much a writer thinks their book deserves to be published, the Editor of the publishing enterprises they submit to are entitled to make the decision to accept or reject the “product”. It is no different from a boutique owner deciding to stock one dress style and not another – or a building contractor using the same sub-contractors because they have demonstrated a superior service in the past.”
Nina Amir explains this further in her guest blog post “How to Write Marketable Books that Feed Your Soul”
“Your creativity, authenticity and even inspiration make it stand out from the pack,” she says, but “no matter how you decide to publish, your book, ultimately, ends up a product in the marketplace—a product for sale.”
She outlines a number of things that are common to marketable books: they are unique, have a sufficiently large target market, are deemed ‘necessary’ in that market, are successfully promoted to it and you, the author, are willing to participate in that promotion.
In a further blog, Nina then explains how to carry out a competitive analysis, to help you work out whether your ideas will fill a hole in the market and how to use your research to improve your work in the future.
It’s a worthwhile exercise, and I recommend you try it.
Helen MacKenzie 