The Alchemy Of Success
Nichecraft is the name we use for the literary alchemy of spinning ideas into gold. Pick a niche in a subject that you will remain eager to write about and promote and make nichecraft the heart of your strategy for success.
Every book you can write can help sell every other book you write. Make synergy one of your objectives. The more books you write on the subject, the more copies they will all sell, along with the products and services based on them. Just as you can build a house brick by brick, nichecraft is the easiest, simplest, fastest way we know for you to build a career, book by book.
Nichecraft also makes it easier for you to focus your attention on authors, books, other media and speaking opportunities in the field you want to enter. You have to assess its long-term prospects and convince your networks and yourself that you will enjoy being part of it.
The idea of nichecraft is worth many times the price of this book. It’s as logical and powerful as it is simple, and it works as well for Jay Conrad Levinson, who laid the foundation for a virtually endless series of books that are needed by more people in more places in more kinds of businesses every day.
Our certainty that practicing nichecraft will make you a successful entrepreneurial author can’t guarantee that you will be able to sell your books or that they will sell well enough to warrant more books in the series. But the unpredictability of publishing is part of what makes the business exciting and keeps publishing people open to new authors and new ideas.
Excellent post. Real life example:
My first books to be published were expressions of myself that boiled up and out, exactly like a pot that overflows on the stove. I did not set out to be an author or to “make money selling books.” I was stunned that I felt such a biological need to get certain information out of me an into print. These books sold very well, but they were in a tightly focused niche that I grew out of over time. I list them here to illustrate my point:
Book 1: How to be a Sexual God (in 3 easy lessons!)
Book 2: How to Be a Sexual God book 2, workbook & tapes
Book 3: The Easiest Way to meet and Pick up Girls–EVER!!
I could have stayed with them and become a national figure in the “how to pick up girls” market, which sells a LOT of books, tapes, CDs, DVDs, and seminars. I had guaranteed promotion and distribution from the #1 nice publisher of this information platform. But the more I interacted with the whole genre, the more slime I felt coating me. I had said what I felt I needed, and in turn I felt validated that I was a published author. I hit a wall and just could not bring myself to write or speak on the topic anymore, but I still felt the need to write.
Fortunately for me, my passion has always been philosophy and metaphysics, and I have been a lifelong student and practitioner. I have noticed long-time niche authors like Silver Ravenwolf, pumping out a new book every year for Llewellyn, becoming the rising stars of their areas of expertise and I felt it was my turn. I knew as much as many of these authors, perhaps more, but I had been wasting my time floundering, writing on topics that I had lost interest in long ago. My saving grace was “The Easiest Way to ____ –EVER!!” series I had trademarked.
A thorough realignment of my mental focus allowed me to write and publish The Easiest Way to Learn the Tarot—EVER!!, with The Easiest Way to Learn Astrology—EVER!! coming in 2010, and Aphrodite’s Book of Secrets, due later this year. Additionally I am finally finishing off a divination deck I have been toying with for almost two decades. None of this could have happened if I had not realized that (a) you MUST find your passions and share what you know, and (b) don’t wander into your neighbor’s yard and give advice on what they are doing.
The first books I wrote continue to pay the rent, but that is about all I expect them to do, as I am focusing on the new niche, the one I have been passionate about all of my life. Each book adds another collection of pieces to the overall information portrait I am painting. This is no different than creating a series of cookbooks, a line of romance novels, or a complete history of llamas in New Zealand (volumes 1 through 27).
No matter where you start as an author, or what you have already written, you must, at some point, find your special area, “your happy place,” and fill that area with YOUR BOOKS and YOUR knowledge, stories, wisdom, or humor. Not only will the world in general be a better place for it, but YOUR world, the one that exists 5 feet around you at all times will be much more fun to live in.
Well, that’s my 2 cents. Thanks for reading.