How competing titles can help you plan your book

As a book coach, I always suggest that my clients look at competing book titles before they dive into their own writing.

Why? Because a well-written book can shape and improve our own work. Reading and studying books in the same genre as yours as you develop your manuscript will help you to emulate professionally published works. Find writers you admire. Re-read books that influenced you, then try to find one that stands out as one you’d like to emulate. While you won’t be copying anyone else’s style or content, your book models will inspire you as you write.

What do you admire about the work? How does the writer hold and build the reader’s interest? Read the writing out loud. Check out the length and rhythm of the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters to figure out how they serve the story. Study how the chapters are divided and how well they serve the book’s structure. Consider how different approaches could be effective for your own work-in-progress. To be clear, you should never plagiarize another writer’s work. Look for inspiration and then, by picking and choosing various elements, make them your own.

Think of your book model as a template to follow, if only loosely. Whether you’ve just begun or whether you’ve already completed your first draft, you can use your book model as a standard—it will give you something to shoot for, and your editor will let you know if you’ve hit the mark.

You can also focus and sharpen your direction by developing a title for your published book early on. Make lists of words, word combinations, titles, and subtitles while you’re immersed in writing to “try them on” and see what fits best. A working title serves as a guide to keep you on track when you’re writing the chapters.

Researching Competitive Titles

To evaluate how your book compares to others in the marketplace, it’s a good practice to research other books that compete with yours. The quickest way to research is to perform keyword research on Amazon. That way, you can not only develop a list of books in your genre, but the exercise will also give you insights into Amazon’s keywords and how readers might find your book on the site.

You can also perform category searches. Use Amazon to browse by subject, new releases, and bestsellers. You can conduct an advanced search by format (i.e. printed book, Kindle, audio book, PDF, etc.) Kindle searches are valuable because there are so many more categories to choose from. Once you’ve homed in on the subject categories, you can use a pull-down menu to see listings for the bestselling titles in that genre. Click on these titles and read up on them. Check out reader reviews to see what they’re saying.

Familiarize yourself with the lead titles in your category and identify how yours is different or better. What does your book add to the genre? Will you be able to compete head-to-head with a popular title and win? Or will you create content that complements a bestseller, and piggyback on its success? Is your book on-trend with any themes in popular culture? These are strategies to consider before you publish, so you’re not surprised later on.

Research blogs that review books or that might feature your book. It’s pretty easy to find bloggers that cover specific genres and topics online. Make a list of bloggers and see what topics and which authors they’re covering. Bloggers are influencers and can sway what books and which authors their readers will follow. Then, look up those authors to see what they are doing online to promote their books to see what’s working for them and to see how you might emulate their strategies.

Of course, don’t forget to use Google, Yahoo, and other browser searches on the Internet at large. You will turn up all sorts of information on your book topic including videos, blogs, and discussion groups. You may well find whole communities devoted to your book’s subject matter. It won’t take long to gather more information than you could possibly use. Try to stay focused on your mission: to identify and understand where your book fits in the marketplace, and how to position it for maximum sales by tweaking your content.

Spend time in bookstores and make notes on book categories and numbers of titles shelved in those sections to gather clues to popular genres. You won’t always be able to tell how well individual titles are selling, though, unless multiple copies of a given title are shelved, so talk to booksellers. They tend to be a passionate lot, and most independent owners are hyper-aware of what’s selling, what the popular trends are, and what readers have special ordered. Check out your local library, too, and browse their online catalog to see which new titles have the most “holds.” Talk to your librarians.

You won’t have time to read all the books that turn up, of course. The fastest way to gain insights on any book is to look at the back cover, the author’s bio, and the table of contents. That should help you determine how yours is different or better.

I also take time to read reviews on important titles. I usually read the three and four star reviews because they tend to be the most honest and accurate assessments. Raving fans and others who post five star reviews may simply be stuffing the ballot box. Reviews tell you what readers like, and give information that you might only find if you read the book yourself.

All the information you find will add up to give you a full picture so you can more accurately frame and position your book in the marketplace. It’s through researching that you will discover whether you need to make changes in your manuscript or your book plan so you can better align yourself with your market—and to avoid any surprises once your book is made public.