Commercial Viability

Do Your Homework Before You Start To Write

I write because I love to write, but I publish to make a living. Professional writers hesitate to publish books for which they suspect there's no audience. I did it once in my career and I was right, there was no audience. If you're living on a trust fund and writing books primarily because you want to change the world, you should still do your homework before you start writing because you can't change the world if you're writing for an audience of one. The homework you do on determining the commercial viability of a website is similar to what you'll need to write about competing titles for any book proposal, except on the Internet, it's possible to take a much more fine grained look at the market. The key metrics for competing titles research are the number of similar books, their sales, and if you're very sophisticated, something about the market muscle of their publishers. The key metrics for the commercial viability of a website are search statistics for key words and phrases, the number and status of competing websites, and the opportunity cost for breaking in with a site of your own.

So I went to Google Adwords and set up a campaign with Author Platform as a key search phrase I'm willing to pay for to have an ad displayed. The traffic potential, according to Google, is too low for them to estimate a number of visitors. Since I have a website in place with this draft book in progress, I went ahead and activated the campaign, with a $1.00 a day budget, to see if there are any people Googling the phrase "author platform." It's a good experiment to make, because it speaks directly to one of the main problems confronting the writer in reaching an audience online. Even though there are millions of writers fantasizing about getting a book published, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, who have done enough homework to recognize the word "platform", very few of them are see the the term "author platform" as a vital one to their goal of getting published. On the other hand, an Overture Keyword Tool check on "Get Published" turns up thousands of searches on the term (note that Overture ignores some articles and combines plurals and infinitives with gerunds).

So I went to Google and did a search on "Author Platform", and the results were somewhat shocking. Aside from the fact that Google only came up with 9,130 instances of the phrase (I've seen much higher numbers for misspelled words), three of the top five results were from article mills. These are sites that either lure unwary writers into providing free content for them under the delusion it make a great publication credit, or which pay commission on articles ground out for subjects in hope they will do well with advertising. This simple search on what I'd planned (past tense) to be the key definition of concept for a new book instantly told me two things. First, with relatively little effort I could build a web page or a site that would dominate the search results, and second, it wouldn't do me any good because nobody is looking. That's right, if the search results for a key concept in a work you are planning consist of blog posts and article mills, it's because there aren't any serious content sites in existence. As with the competing titles section in a book proposal, a dearth of competition is almost always a bad thing. It indicates a lack of demand.

But this is also one of the most valuable lessons you can learn about language usage, and the importance of writing for your audience rather than yourself. As a publishing professional, some of the language that I naturally use is little more than jargon to the uninitiated. Large numbers of unpublished writers and authors of slow selling books are in fact desperate for ways to win readers online, but they don't use the same label for the process as I do. Some common phrases that show up in search statistics from visitors to my site every day are, "getting published", "find a publisher", "book marketing", "book promotion", "write a book proposal", and on and on. In the past week, there were 66 different uses of the word "publish" in the top 1,000 search phrases bringing visitors to my website. There were only four phrases in the top 1000 incorporating the word "author" and two of those were part of a company name! So I'm going to take my own advice for a change and start recasting this book using terms that the potential readers will intuitively use, rather than insisting they speak the jargon of an exclusive club.

I mentioned above that Google only came up with 9,130 matches for the search phrase I used, and not every one of those matches represents a website. In fact, Google only lists 416 distinct websites using the phrase in their entire index. On the other hand, Google lists over one million matches for "getting published" and the distinct websites result easily exceeded their maximum number listed, which is 1,000. While "getting published" and "author platform" are practically synonyms in my mind, they may as well be in two different languages when it comes to search engine visibility.

The status of competing websites is important if you feel it's important to attract visitors for a particular phrase. The Google PageRank, as displayed by the Google Tool Bar if you install it and accept the more intrusive terms, is one measure of the authority of those websites. More important than the bare rank number is the quantity and quality of pages on other websites linking to the particular page. And even more important the the quantity and quality of links is the context. That's why Apple and Dell are both in the top three results if you search on "computer" but nowhere to be seen if you search on "computer repair." From the context and the huge numbers of links to them, it's clear to Google that Apple and Dell are both involved in computers, but that there are much better places to send visitors who are interested in computer repair. Besides, neither company is really interested in making repair part of their corporate image. Dell, on the other hand, currently ranks #2 in Google for "support", behind Microsoft:-)

That's another key as to whether or not you're likely to be able to win significant traffic share for a particular term or phrase. Is that term currently in the page title of web pages posted by large companies or long-time web players with high authority ranking? If so, there's a good chance you'll never be able to compete for that specific phrase. Again, this isn't a bad thing for your overall chances of gaining visibility writing about the subject, it just means that you're better off not building your web strategy around that particular term. And not focusing on some specific, ultra-popular term in your writing will save you from wasting a lot of time and make your writing a lot better. Don't slip into the career of a keyword writer, grinding out fifty articles combining every state in the union with some keyword involved in your topic, like "Tsunami Arizona", "Tsunami Ohio". That's not platform building, it's bottom feeding, and rather than becoming known as a Tsunami expert, you'll become known as a spam expert.

One interesting and underused resource for writers is Google Trends. They track the use of keyword and key phrases over the years, and make the results available for those that archive a certain threshold. It's a quick way to check whether or not you're arriving on the tail end of some trend that you thought you were out front on. For example, I'll include the trend results below for baseball vs opera.

The slight deterioration in the total traffic for both keywords is probably a result of Google user searching on longer phrases as time goes on, rather than making single keyword queries. I chose baseball because I wanted to show a subject that has very cyclic interest, and indeed, you can see that Internet searches on baseball peak in the early spring each year as teams put together their rosters, with a mid-summer spurt near the trading deadline. The play-offs in the fall are a quiet time for baseball related search, because people are watching the games, not doing research. Keep in mind that a lot of the traffic has nothing to do with major league baseball, it's parents looking for coaching advice, or kids uniforms, or baseball summer camps. You could investigate any of these by using a longer search query on trends.

Opera, on the other hand, shows steady interest year round. While some of the interest is no doubt for the Opera web browser, I'd assume that most of it is from Opera fans, and that most of those searches are about opera facts, rather than schedules. Opera has a season as well, and the lack of seasonality in the search results implies that not that many people are using a simple search on "opera" to look for opera tickets. In fact, I went back and checked "opera tickets", which showed a demand peak around December each year, with low interest mid-summer. The results in Google Trends are all relative, there are no absolute totals given so the only way to get a handle on the volume rather than the trend is to compare with a phrase for which you know something about the volume, either through your own web results, through overture, or through public web reports on search traffic.

Here's another example to demonstrate a subject that's losing interest with web researchers even while it's gaining share of news reporting.

It's the Google Trends for real estate. For those of us who've been in the market for a home for some time, the results aren't surprising at all. As prices accelerated upwards through 2005, people were gobbling up books and information on real estate investing, flocking to websites that had investor kits, stories of success, flippers egging each other on. But when people began to realize that nobody could afford houses anymore, even with the most creative financing in the world, the general interest in real estate investing began to dip. At the same time, the news stories about the potential, and then, actual problems in the housing market began to take over more and more press space. Looking at the chart and estimating, I'd say search interest in real estate fell about 30% between the start of 2004 and late 2007, while the number of news stories quadrupled.