Conducting your own Book Positioning Study several months before you publish will help you establish creative and business goals for your book, identify your target audience, discover comparable titles and authors as well as get the details of your “book product” aligned with marketplace trends. The research involved in a Book Positioning Study will also help you write the best synopsis for your book and identify the strongest categories and keywords for better discoverability. Here is a list of the steps involved in a Book Positioning Study:
- Outline your creative and business intentions and goals for the book
- Write a working synopsis
- Identify your core and secondary audiences
- Articulate your book’s key differentiators
- List potential genres, subgenres and categories
- List at least 10 comparable titles and authors
- Brainstorm at least a dozen titles and subtitles
- List every keyword (and keyword string) that you think will be relevant to your book
- Mock up your book cover
- Capture specs from popular books in your genre (length, formats, trim size, price points)
Doing this important research before you finalize you pay for cover design, formatting, etc will save you time and money, and give you a strong foundation for a successful launch of your book. Bublish Founder Kathy Meis did a full training on this topic for the first Indie Author Fringe 2017 event at the London Book Fair. You can watch the recorded training by clicking this link below (you have to scroll down a bit to find the video):
We’ve also created a FREE “Book Positioning Study Template” that you can download and keep on hand. This resource will guide through every step of your Book Positioning Study, setting you up for a successful launch of your book.
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