Research the Competition: Writing a Non-Fiction Book

"I’m Bobbi Linkemer on behalf of expertvillage.com, and I’d like to invite you to visit my website at writeanonfictionbook.com. We all have a story to tell, so you start by going to amazon.com and punching in your subject and seeing what turns up. There are hundreds, sometimes thousands of books on your topic. There were something like 29 thousand books on the subject of time management, so if you want to write a book on time management you really ought to know what else is out there. I don’t think there is any substitute for actually going to a bookstore. First of all, just feeling a book is much better than seeing it on amazon.com. I think you can get an idea of what the competition is, but you want to know what else is out there that appeals to you. Let’s say that you’re writing a history book or a memoir, you find that section in the bookstore and you go there and just start pulling books off the shelf. You do things like feel the paper, look at the cover, look at what’s on the back of the cover. The questions you want answered.are: What else is out there on my subject? How is my book different, better, unique, special? How does it solve a problem that the other books don’t? What is your purpose for writing it? Is the purpose just to get your grandfather’s story down and do you think there a lot of people out there who want to read your grandfather’s story and who are they? In what way will they relate to it?"