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3| SELECTING BOOK TOPICS WITH STRONG SALES POTENTIAL

It’s embarrassing, you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on a Best Sellers List.

Abbie Hoffman 1936-89 American social and political activist, in response to the success of Steal This Book (1971)

This chapter covers:

-writing books with an eye on future sales potential

-writing books related to future major events

-anticipating centenaries, bicentenaries etc. of births, deaths, events

-writing biographies of increasingly prominent figures

-determining topics of growing interest through research

-Nielsen’s BookData service

-Nielsen’s BookScan service

-chickens – who’d have believed it?

A seminar for publishers and self-publishers at Nielsen Book gave me the idea for this chapter, and specifically the presentation on their BookScan service, which enables publishers to review the book market. More on this later.

Many successful businesses have been founded on a vision of the future. They are established to make a product or service available that does not have current demand but will have in the future. There was no demand for mobile phones until companies made them along with the networks that enabled them to work. And in the early days the buyers – the ‘early adopters’, to coin a marketing phrase – were prepared to pay huge sums for huge phones with minimal functionality, the sight of which would today render a child helpless with laughter.

If your primary goal as a writer is to write books which sell well – maybe even bestsellers – it may help to write books on topics which are currently of no interest or minimal interest to the book-buying public, but which for a variety of reason will, or at the very least might, be of considerable interest to that public one day.

By the time a topic is covered by the major publishers, and their books are selling well, it’s already too late. If you’re an unknown author you’ll have to come up with a radical new slant on a topic to have even a chance of commercial success. I’m hoping that when more people start to challenge the suitability of marriage for most people in the modern era, The Marriage Delusion will be well positioned as the only book which covers the topic in the way it does. I remain optimistic of it becoming a bestseller and I have my eye on a villa in Monaco with a large outdoor heated swimming pool; a villa with Keira Knightley as a neighbour on one side, and Cameron Diaz on the other.

Back to the real world. The challenge with this model is to predict the topic(s) that will interest the book-buying public of the future. A few ideas on how you might do this:

Writing books related to future major events

The idea here is to have your book available at a time when the public becomes particularly interested in a topic, or people related to it. An idea off the top of my head: a series of official biographies of prominent British athletes, to be published before the 2012 London Olympics. The Olympics have not been held in London since 1948, in an age of post-war austerity, and Britain will be determined to show a confident and modern face to the world. There will be enormous interest in British athletes with a serious prospect of winning a gold medal in sports requiring more athletic prowess than tiddlywinks.

You’d probably get plenty of support from the individual(s) in question, and their families. They’d surely be delighted to lend you photographs of themselves as children, as adults graduating from college, their wedding photographs, their sporting triumphs etc. Record material with a digital recorder as outlined in the chapter ‘Writing other peoples’ autobiographies’, have the interview transcribed online, scan the photographs, employ the digital short print run or ebook option, and you could have your book on the market in a few weeks.

Anticipating centenaries, bicentenaries etc. of births, deaths, events…

The idea here is to have your book published before – and possibly even years before – the centenary or bicentenary of the event in question. There are numerous internet sites which can help you with the search. In a few seconds my search turned up an American site, Timelines.com. Let’s say you want to publish a book in 2012 or 2013, in anticipation of it catching a wave of public interest in 2014. The website has around 200 references for 1914. In addition to the references to World War I there are many others, the following being a very small selection:

1914: Tarzan of the Apes is published.

22 January: Gordon Zobrod is born. An American oncologist who played a prominent role in the introduction of chemotherapy for cancer.

13 February: American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) is founded in New York City.

14 February: Babe Ruth signs first contract with minor-league Baltimore Orioles.

11 March: Toronto Blueshirts win Stanley Cup.

31 March: Octavia Paz is born. A Mexican writer who won the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.

9 May: President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Mother’s Day. [Author’s note: And we’ve all had to buy Mothers’ Day cards ever since. Thanks, Woodrow. Only joking, Mother.]

15 June: James Joyce’s Dubliners is published.

The website expands on each topic. So it was that I learnt that the first print run of Dubliners was for 1,250 copies, the publisher having made the preconditions that Joyce personally had to buy 120 copies and would receive no royalties until 500 copies had been sold. Joyce started off his career by self-publishing. A little trickier then than now, one imagines.

Biographies of increasingly prominent figures

The figures may come from any walk of life. Let’s consider up-and-coming politicians, especially those about whom opinion is strongly divided. Sarah Palin is very much in the ‘love her or loathe her’ camp. I’ll bet the person who published the first biography of her made a fortune.

Determine topics of growing interest through research

The idea here is to either anticipate topics which will be of growing public interest, or spot a ‘hot topic’ in its early days before numerous books are written about it. Unlike major publishers, self-publishers can often write and publish a book within a couple of months, sometime less. Major publishers – or at least those not using the POD model – can take six months from receiving a writer’s final manuscript to having stock available in stores. They often have books printed in developing countries and ship them to their final markets by sea to save money.

Nielsen’s BookData Online service (global data from major English-speaking countries) is a good way to review in many ways books available in the market. They offer a 14-day free trial to publishers and special subscription rates for publishers subscribing to their Publisher Enhanced Service. To find out more email Sales.bookdata@nielsen.com. From this service I learned that they had records of some 69 books with ‘self-publishing’ or ‘self publishing’ in their titles or subtitles, many of which were no longer available. The table on the next page shows information about the nine top-selling titles.

With this information a few months ago I may have modified this book in line with what book buyers were buying. However, this might have compromised my desire for distinctiveness, so I probably wouldn’t have. But if your prime objective is commercial success you might look at the matter quite differently.

BookData Online sorts search results in sales rank order without giving the actual sales data itself. For sales data you need to use Nielsen’s BookScan service, and you can then analyse data by country and in numerous ways. Both could be useful services for writers seeking topics of growing interest.

The speaker from BookScan at Nielsen Book’s publisher seminar asked if any of the publishers present could name their firm’s current top-selling title. A young lady next to me said her firm’s top-selling title was on breeding and raising chickens. I regret to say that I laughed along with some of the other publishers. The speaker tapped the book title into his computer and declared it was the highest-selling book that any publisher at the annual seminars had ever put forward. The laughter stopped. Expect more books on chickens to be published soon.

You may wish to look at gaps in the market or pick up early signs of new trends. BookScan has been measuring sales in the UK, Ireland, and many other key English-speaking territories since 1998. This data allows you to see what is selling, the format, and the price. It gives commercial publishers the opportunity to research new books prior to commissioning. BookScan can provide simple title/ISBN or author reports for relatively low costs, or you can have more in-depth analysis using their subscription service.

Once you have published your title you can set realistic targets, compare your performance with your competitors, and make more informed print decisions. See Chapter 8 for more details or go to their website: Nielsenbookscan.co.uk