Checklist For E-Book Ideas.

Every time you have an idea for a new e-book, run it through the following checklist. If you can answer each question with a resounding ‘Yes’, then you have a real possibility for a saleable product on your hands:

1) Will it appeal to a reasonably large group of people (i.e. not a really tiny niche such as fishing for eels in Alaska)?

2) Will it solve a problem for whoever reads it?

3) Is it different from anything else that is out there on that subject at the moment?

These are the 3 main questions that you need to be able to say ‘yes’ to. If you can’t, then it is back to the drawing board. After all you won’t sell very many copies if it doesn’t do anything for people. If your idea meets these requirements, then it’s time to see if that idea really will fly.

Is Your Idea Saleable?

There is only one way to figure out the answer to this question and that involves doing research.
Don’t let that put you off though, because researching potential ideas for e-books is far from boring! It helps you to determine if your idea will work, and if you need to adjust it to make a real success of it.

And what’s more, if this idea is related to an area of interest that fascinates you and has the potential to spawn more than one e-book in the future, you should pay close attention when you do your research.

So let’s start researching. A great keyword tool is offered by Wordtracker, and it’s free. You can subscribe to the Wordtracker service if you wish to get more comprehensive results, but you should find the free service meets your needs initially.

So let’s try an example. Suppose you are thinking of writing an e-book about saving money and budgeting. Just enter each phrase into the search box to see how many times those words were searched for recently. If you only get a handful of results, you might want to think about choosing a different angle or another subject.

If we put the phrase “save money” into the free keyword tool, we get 1,554 results. But the best thing about this service is that you also get other variations on the term or word you type in. In this case, you’ll see lots of other phrases that people have used as search terms as well, which will help you to gauge how popular your idea will be. The most important thing to remember here is that some of the results that appear will be related: so for example we’ve got “save money”, “ways to save money”, “how to save money”, and many more which could equally relate to the topic you have in mind.

The free WordTracker tool also has a GTrends feature to help you out—if you do your keyword search using this page you will see a small symbol of a graph appearing at the end of each line of search results. Clicking on this will give you a better idea of the search volume of that particular word or phrase over the past few years. It gives you no more than a broad glance at the market for your idea and potential e-book, but that glance can be all you need to determine whether it’s worth a shot.