You Can Write for Niche Markets: Dreaming Ideas and Writing Information That Sells
A book about finding and writing for niche markets – and packaging it to sell. This book is no longer available.
[excerpt]
Introduction
In the busy, fast-paced world, people want solutions. It’s like, as the story goes, that everyone is walking around with a radio tuned to WII-FM. Their whole focus is on WII-FM – “What’s In It For Me.” People want answers to their problems. They are looking for the missing puzzle piece. That’s where you come in. You can write to those niche markets.
The markets today have become very specialized. Go to the bookstore and look on the magazine racks to see how specific magazines have become. There are more magazines today than ever before. As fast as some disappear, others take their place. There are already five magazines devoted to scrapbooking. Creating Keepsakes, a magazine for scrapbookers, grew to a circulation of 500,000 in less than 15 years. Most sports have magazines devoted to their unique niches. Parenting magazine abound. Crafts, health markets, business, technology—whatever the topic, there are magazines for their eager readers. Is there room for your articles?
For each of these magazine markets, there is a matching market for books. Books abound on all of these topics and the shelve sare overflowing with new titles every month. The numbers vary depending on whom you talk to, but R.R. Bowker, the leading provider of bibliographic information in North America, listed more than 135,000 new books in 2001. That figure is up 10% from 2000. The numbers for 2002 were projected to be even higher. So is there room for more books? Or even more specifically, is there room for your book?
Going beyond books one can find other information products that readers buy. Booklets are always in demand if the topic is timely and right for the market. Then there is the whole huge market of information sold over the Internet that never sees ink on paper—electronic documents read on computer screens and occasionally printed out on paper. Some of these are e-books while others are reports and documents. Is there room for your information products?
If your articles, books, and information products are the same as everyone else’s, the answer is “No.” But, IF you can find a niche market, research it, verify the numbers exist to make the writing worthwhile, and write specifically for it—then the answer is “Yes.”
As I wrote this book, I played with different titles and subtitles. The main title was easy. The subtitle is where I struggled. In reality, You Can Write for Niche Markets: Dreaming Ideas and Writing Information That Sells is the title the book needed. Yet, I felt strongly that “Everything is a Niche Market” was also a true subtitle. I believe that virtually every market for writers is a niche market. Whatever your topic, whatever your medium and genre, everything today is a niche market. Gone are the days of general publications. We live in a market that has become highly specialized. That specialization is needed to survive as a magazine and book publisher, and subsequently for us as writers for these markets. And so the challenge before us is to dream big and write information that sells—for niche markets.