While we all hope for mass market sales, sales from niche customers are also profitable. Paying attention to your book's niche builds your audience, provides for a nice, slow, steady stream of sales, and moves you closer to the possibility of mass market sales.
Where's your niche? Inside the topic. For non-fiction writers, that's an easy search. Let's try for a niche within a fiction title. Say your fiction title is about an Honda auto mechanic who fights demons at night. OK, you've got:
• first fiction
• horror
• auto mechanics -- even better, Honda maniacs
• mystery
You have the opportunity to build audiences within each one of those categories. Note each one might have their own rules and customs: Mystery fans try out new authors based on "authenticity" checks. Otherwise known peer reviews, or bookstore vouches. So get on the mystery blogs, and have fans post reviews of your book. Make sure independent bookstores, especially a mystery oriented one, get a handwritten letter from you asking for them to tell others about your book.
Niches are remarkably important because they are the filters that help readers sort through the bast amount of choice in entertainment. As Chris Anderson noted in "The Long Tail: "Rankings are most meaningful ˆwithinˆ such communities, not across them."
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