Change. It’s hard to know just where you, and your book, stand in the world of publishing. Sizing up your competition is important especially considering what it is that consumers want to read. The simple fact is that selling your book lays in the hands of finding out how to fit the reading needs of your target market better than the competition. Here are a few (free) ideas on how to research your competitors, so you can gain the selling edge:

• Go look at its genre sections in local bookstores (and even your local library)
  • Look around at what’s there:
    • How are books titled to hook people in?
    • What kind of visuals are on the front cover?
    • How many of your specific subject area are there?
  • Don’t forget stuff that’s not in stock! You can use the search computers at Borders to look up titles/subjects/authors, so you don’t miss potential competitors that happen to be sold out that week (if they are sold out, they are your biggest competition!).
  • The library can provide a good hunting ground also, although its titles can tend to be a little dated for your research. What is once again important to note is which books are consistently NOT on the shelves – these are the ones that people are reading. If your library has a searchable database, browse around a little and see what the waiting list books are.
• Use info from Bookhitch or Barnes & Noble
  • Bookhitch allows you to browse by genre and gives you the little and big titles from your competition.
  • Barnes & Noble provides the top sellers you’ll be facing off against and gives sales rankings so you can see just how popular your title’s subject area is with consumers.
• Search it
  • When anyone wants to find out more information about a topic, they can simply type key phrases into a search engine. Typing your book topic into a search engine will allow you to see how much general interest there is in the topic and may help you pinpoint the titles that fellow searchers are finding when they Google the topic.
• The blog search
  • Blogs are the new candy of the Internet. There will be bloggers who talk about books in general and bloggers who are blogging about your book topic. Check them out, see what they have to say, and see what books they are recommending.
• Bestseller lists
  • This can be NY Times style or your local bookstore’s top list. Why you’d want to look at a bestseller list is pretty obvious, but I don’t recommend relying too heavily on them. The lists tend to be short (which doesn’t provide you with much workable information) and putting a book on the bestseller list tends to keep it there, so you don’t really see the wide range of your competition. They can only choose one book, so if Book A outsells Book B by a thousand copies, only Book A will appear to be on the list, but both of these books are your competition