Choosing to be the author of your own e-book is exciting and rewarding. You have a fresh start to write about whatever you want and do it in your own style. The hard step is determining the topic of your ebook. What do you want to spend the next few weeks doing, pouring your heart and soul into the hope that people will find your work informative and enjoyable? I’ll help you on your journey to find good ebook topics that pique your interest so you can pick one.
Below are two main goals that I want you to keep in mind as you continue with this reading and begin your writing process. Just keep them in your memory for now.
- Do you really LIKE the topic and
- Is there a MARKET for the item?
Current issues
What precisely are the hot topics? These books tackle a specific topic that is hot right now, but will eventually lose a following after a short while. These are useful to earn money quickly, as well as promote your name and become familiar with them to launch your own FAN FOLLOWER. In other words, the hot topics are “money makers.” It has the potential to sell so many copies in the short term after publication that its sales drop when the topic cools down.
Time and trends are two components that you really need to understand when choosing the right hot topic. Obviously, you don’t want to select a topic that is prevalent now, but isn’t at the time of publishing your book. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees how long a topic will be popular, so the concept is to discover a good hot topic, quickly write your book, and get it out to the public quickly to receive as many sales as possible before it’s gone.
How to find hot topics
Hot topics are all around us. Just think about where you are informed about upcoming news and events.
Social media websites, TV news, and online news websites probably come to mind.
These are all great places to start your research. In all likelihood, you’ve already been introduced to some CURRENT topics, but you haven’t recognized them yet. Take a step back. Start thinking about the most recent things you’ve heard about, whether it’s from your local newscaster or a friend’s tweet. Today we are more in touch with things happening around us and throughout our global society than ever before with all these means of communication available at our fingertips.
You need to keep your eyes and ears open to emerging problems that people are looking to solve. These don’t necessarily have to be big problems, like getting the country out of debt. They can be as simple as altering a certain store in your sales process. An example of this is when eBay chose to ban infoproducts from their virtual auction areas. This probably sounds like a minor change to you, but for many internet marketers this was a GIANT problem. A quick fix was needed so that these sellers could repackage their products in a different format to continue selling them on eBay. If you had written an ebook on exactly how to repackage these infoproducts in a way that eBay authorized their sale on their website, you would have had a lot of internet sellers buy your ebook, not to mention a GOOD chunk of change.
This may be outside your scope of specific subject matter knowledge; In fact, you may not have a clue how to sell on eBay, infoproducts, or auction sites. This is only meant to be a small sample to brainstorm your mind. Minor changes like this affect a lot of people and offer a large audience that could potentially buy your eBook for a solution to their problem.
The Kindle Store and forum groups like Yahoo and Google are other great sources for finding good hot topics. Kindle Store provides a very useful option to filter all available books by best sellers. If you open your web browser, go to the Kindle website and check out what their current best sellers are, you will receive tons of books on particular topics (HOT TOPICS). Going to Google or Yahoo chat rooms, you will discover threads that have many posts about people sharing their own answers on how to solve certain problems. Look for a topic that’s been featured recently and has a lot of updated posts under it, that way you’ll know people are discussing it right now (meaning it’s currently trending).
Develop a list of several potential hot topics that an interest aligns with. Only include topics that you can honestly write about and ENJOY writing about, otherwise you won’t have any real motivation to intrigue potential buyers and ultimately make sales.
After creating your list, you’ll want to visit Google Trends, which actually offers a handy little tool that helps in tracking current trends. The web address is www.google.com/trends/. Type the first topic on your list in the search box. Your search results will be a trend graph. By default, the graph will share past trends for a topic over several years. You’ll want to filter the results to only include a topic trending over the last year. To do this, use the left sidebar of the results page. Simply find the title “Limit to” and change it to the current year. See the trend.
Is the trend increasing or decreasing? Is this specific topic becoming more popular or is it starting to cool off? Narrow down your list by testing each of the topics and eliminating the ones that show a clear decline in popularity. Once you have a limited list of available topics, simply pick one and write about it.