Books, Niches and Marketing … a workable solution

I’ve often marvelled at the niche the Da Vinci Code is pitched at.
(and this post is worth gold to a budding author!)
(or exactly how we wrote our book)

Having read several books on the subject before the Da Vinci Code I was really interested.
The books I read were fairly heavy on the subjecyt and often the author was pushing a particulay band wagon.
– Jesus’s body is buried in France
– The bloodline still exists
– The cult Jesus belonged to
– What did the Catholic Church really know and what was covered uo.

Eoin Purcell’s blog post ….

Eoin Purcell’s Blog » Blog Archive » Its all about marketing

puts a lot of this in to a good context.

The niche that Dan Brown took was writing something that put many non-fiction books in to a context and language that many people could understand. Of course many serious scholars had covered this niche, and lots of non-fiction writers but there are millions of people that dont need all the cross references and lengthy support of circumstantial co-incedences.

The message is just as Eoin says …

“You can have a book that to the elite appears predictable
and clunky but raises the pulse of the majority of readers.”

“if you cannot create a reason for a book to be bought then
there will be no sales.”

Dan Brown put in to context for me a lot of the books I had read thqat now sit on my book shelf probably never to be read again because they are all a small part in the puzzle.

As a result of Dan Brown I also uncovered a niche ….
and published an eBook together with a scholar.

We set up a web page that people reached via a google advertisment like the following …

, Books, Niches and Marketing … a workable solution

On this page we had a question like ….

What is the one major question you had after reading the DaVinci code?

People could enter their question and boy did they do that …

… thousands of them

Look at the stats …

, Books, Niches and Marketing … a workable solution

The advertisment appeared on 1,684,102 pages.
People reached these pages after seqarching for things like “opus dei” “priory of sion” “mary magdalene” etc

Once they reached the pages our advertisment was on 33,644 of them CLICKED on our advertisment and went to the questionaire page.
… and hundreds of them asked questions.
Questions like ….

So once we received these questions we wrote the book …

, Books, Niches and Marketing … a workable solution

The DaVinci Answers “Facts Behind the Fiction”

So … following on from Eoin’s statement …
“if you cannot create a reason for a book to be bought then
there will be no sales.”

We had the questions people wanted answering and went out and wrote them.

That is how we wrote the book!

, Books, Niches and Marketing … a workable solution
We sold thousands of books as a result.
This was long before the Da Vinci hysteria and the film.

If any budding authors want to receive the full blow by blow of how we got 1,683,102 adverts for our soon to be written book in front of people, extracted hundreds of questions and sold thousands of copies then leave a comment on this blog entry and I’ll get back to you.

This will work for any niche that people need questions answered.

All will be revealed!