How To Create A Better Product Than Quick Internet Marketers
In the first article of this series, I gave away the one secret that Amazon publishers need to know: People on Amazon are looking to buy a book. As a customer, you’d feel cheated if you spent $5 on a book that was 11 pages long and those pages were copy-pasted from Wikipedia. Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of e-books currently are. We can all do better than that.
But how? And when we’re talking about a niche market that we presumably don’t want to dedicate our lives to, how do we create such a product without spending forever penning the next Encyclopaedia Britannica?
The answer is simple, but it’s not a ‘hack’ and you will have to write high-quality material. I will give you the blueprint however. Firstly though, a mental exercise:
What do you think a book is?
Literally think about what happens when you’re buying a paperback book (You can do this with a Kindle book, but it’s better to visualise a real book.)Think about:
- How thick is the book?
- What does the cover look/feel like?
- What’s inside when you flip through it?
- Where does “the content” actually start?
- What else is included in the book other than the content?
I’ve bought some pretty shoddy books that have all fooled me because they looked and acted like good books. When an internet marketer does as quick a job as he can, he tends to completely forget about certain things that a book made by a traditional publisher would include (to unscrupulously raise the page count, those capitalist swine!) These might include:
- Acknowledgements
- Dedications
- Tables of Contents
- Preface/Introduction
- Bibliography/Further Reading
- About The Author
- Conclusions
- Images
- FAQ’s
These aren’t going to turn a 3,000 word article into a 100,000 word book, but they’re professional and they boost the word count without being unethical. For a PERFECT example of how to boost a page number properly, check out the For Dummies series. Those books are chock full of “boosters.” They’ll have core content, and then “10 mistakes people make,” “10 questions you might have” and other similar chapters added on at the end.
But you’re still going to have to write some good content.
The linked article from earlier got a comment from Walt, who is interested in potentially creating an e-book for his Kratom site.
I checked out his site KratomGuru.com when I saw his comment. He’s got a lot of content on the site, including a two-part guide to using Kratom. (Remember, I know nothing about Kratom.) If I were a scammy internet marketing guy, I could tell him to paste that guide into a document and then upload it to Kindle as an ebook. He’d then be among the authors who have a little 20 page ebook (I pasted both parts of the guide into Word – his two part guide is 21 pages long as it stands) and he could compete with the authors from the previous articles.
Instead, Walt should do exactly like he says, and think about producing a higher quality ebook. The thing is, whilst it may seem daunting to write an actual book as opposed to a glorified article, it wouldn’t require that much extra work. Walt has a site already, and from the look I took at it, he’s answering all the right questions on his site and including pictures and talking about what Kratom users might need to know about.
He’s also got 21 pages of basic information to start with, that does a basic job of answering questions that could easily be a foundation for a book:
- What exactly is kratom?
- Is kratom legal?
- Why should I use kratom?
- How does kratom work?
- What are the effects of kratom?
- What forms does kratom come in?
- How do I avoid negative effects from kratom?
- Is kratom safe?
- How do I take kratom?
- How much kratom should I take?
- How often should I take kratom?
- This is my first time taking kratom, how do I do it and what should I expect?
- How to avoid building up a tolerance to kratom.
- If I quit kratom will I go through withdrawals?
- Where can I buy kratom?
If you’ve found a niche and you don’t know anything about it, look at the above list and think about how it’s similar to the questions you ask yourself about the new topic. For instance, if you saw a book on HIIT Training and you were completely ignorant of the subject, you’d probably ask questions like:
- What is HIIT and what does HIIT stand for?
- Why would I do this?
- Will it work better than X?
- Can I do it if I’m X, Y or Z?
- Do I need to change my lifestyle to fit around HIIT?
If you’re running a niche site already and you already know a lot about your subject, then you might want to ask someone you know who is a novice what questions they’d like to see answered.
The reason you’re doing this is because you’re going to build your book by answering these questions. Walt has a couple of sentences answering each question on his guide. He can easily expand this for a book so that each question could almost be a mini-chapter of its own. For example:
This is a succinct guide to whether Kratom is legal or not. However, I might want to buy your book on Kratom. I live in England. Is it legal for me? Where it’s legal, is it likely to remain legal? Where it’s illegal, how illegal is it? Why is it illegal and since when? What are those laws you mentioned?
Just by doing that you’ve gone from a couple of sentences to a paragraph:
“I am based in the United States, where – as of writing in 2016 – kratom is legal in forty seven states. It’s banned in X, Y and Z as of 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively because some kid decided to eat three tons of it and then shoot up an aquarium. Whether it’ll remain legal or not is up in the air because it contains X ingredient but on the other hand people drink alcohol and kill each other all the time. At the moment though, you can buy it, sell it and spike a girl’s drink with it without worrying about the cops. But please check that the laws haven’t changed or aren’t different in your local area first.”
(Obviously don’t steal that paragraph.)
You’ll already know this information and the background on your subject by the time of writing, so you might as well include it. You could easily write a chapter on the legality of kratom (or, whatever your subject is) that’d be useful and informative for your reader (Or, all the potential readers of your book. There’s always more than one market for a book.) Remember, a reader is going to give you a bad review if you omit too much information. If you provide too much, they’ll just skim it and move onto the bit that they care about.
This is the opposite of how websites work. On a website, you provide a concise amount of information and then hyperlink to more background information; your readers can bounce around from webpage to webpage forever and get as much or as little detail as they need. People who have bought a book can’t and don’t want to do the same. They want all the answers in the product they’ve purchased.
One Secret Tool To Guarantee Your Product Is Better Than The Competition’s.
I’ll give you a hint:
In short, you can use Amazon reviews to see exactly where your competitors are going wrong. There’ll be a lot of “This book is useless” reviews on the short reads, and those are from the customers expecting an actual book and getting a short report. You don’t need those reviews, what you need are reviews like this:
This is not a gripe – it’s a one-star review expressing a tangible weakness in the product. If you can create a book without proofreading and typographical errors, then your book will be superior to this one.
On the other hand, don’t concentrate on just the negative reviews:
This review is a gold mine. This is one happy customer, and the great thing is that they tell you exactly why they’re happy with the purchase. What that means is that you need to include what the customer has stated they’d love to see in your niche.
Amazon reviews are great because people put so much effort in. You’ll often see people dropping reviews that are as long as some undergraduate essays about the pros and cons of books. These are all market research and if you take 10 minutes to read them, you’ll find exactly what to include and not include.
Final Thoughts
Over the course of the last three articles, I’ve talked about how to find markets where there’s a demand for a great book, what to put in your books and how to create better books than the competition. If you’re just looking to write some quick books for the sake of learning how to publish and getting your feet wet, then this is a great way to go about it, and you can just leave them up forever and do nothing with them.
Of course, once you’ve done this a few times, you’ll want to start making more money from each book and turn these books into better assets. When that happens, you can then move on to building niche sites and authority sites or other similar endeavours, and you won’t have to worry about learning to publish at the same time.
P.S. Here are three more articles I’ve written about niche site/book crossover projects:
What’s A Good Idea For A Niche Site?
Building Niche Sites… Tips and Tricks
Authority Site With Book Template – One More Thing