Children Book Market Testing Made Simple

[Jonathon Francis]

I wrote this response to a struggling Self Published Children Book author. They spent a lot of money printing the book first then setting out to promote it. After writing my response I felt I needed to share it with the group here Published Authors:

Hello Amandha,

I am a romantic short story writer. But what I do for a living is I am a market research and business analyst. I lead with this to answer your question of “Can self publishing work and How do I get our printed book to sale?” You outlined that "we spent a lot of money printing our book but it's not selling. We had a book signing which was a waste of time. What did we do wrong?"

All marketing of any product must start with a Marketing Plan. This is the road map and test point system before execution. A key component in market research is “target audience testing”. You may have seen advertisements for this or have heard of them as “Focus Groups”. A Focus Group is where you sit with a group of people that you want to discuss and get their opinion about your product. Through the “Focus Group” you learn what they like, don’t like, what needs improvement, pricing, color selection, branding and content.

With this being said Self Publishing has two launch methods, several tools and components that can be expensive and inexpensive. The Expensive route is “hard print” – the method that you chose. You have printing cost, distribution, promotion and publicity. As you have pointed out, you put a lot of money into printing your book but your sales plan failed. You also outlined that no one is buying the book and it has not been picked up by a publishing company.

There are a couple of things wrong here. You didn’t test the children’s marketability of the book before going to “final print”. A very low cost way to have tested your book would to have “first drafted” a print versions of the book cover. As you know the book cover is key to a book being first pulled off the shelf. With today’s computer software programs like Photoshop by Adobe, you can create several book cover versions before final print and with a color printer you can print them and then have a “Focus Group” to see which one is most likely to be attractive to kids. Not an artist? Your local art college students would jump at the chance at this creative oppourtunity and the chance of seing their work in print!

How do you have a Focus Group with kids? It’s simple. You do it several times a year and didn’t know it. It’s called a Birthday Party ;-) In this case you have a Story Book Party. You have all the fixings of a Birthday Party but the theme is a “Book Day Party”. You are going to do what is called a “collage product test”. A collage test is where your “actual product” (book cover) is mixed in with several similar products (book covers).

Each one is numbered or has an alphabet code. You also have “Word/Phrase cards”. The “Word/Phrase cards” becomes the opinion voice of the kids. This way you get honest answers without them feeling the pressure of being asked several questions and risk them telling you what they think you want to hear. You have words/Phrases for example – I like it a lot, I like it some, I don’t like this one, I like the colors, I like the title, I the characters, etc. You pitch this as a game to the kids. The rules are simple, Match each book cover the Playing Cards. And poof, there you have it, true opinions from the innocent mouths of your target audience. All this potent marketing information for the low cost of a kid’s party and pizza!

I could write several other levels of a marketing strategy here, but this will give you a simple testing method for the next book you have in the making now. Take a look at my website www.johnmarionfrancis.com (under development – I am a web designer as well) and see the book cover art (all created by me with Photoshop). With the internet I can test several book cover designs (I’ll be adding a opinion poll to each book cover).

But one of the most potent tools that I use to test my short stories is www.authorsden.com. Without doubt this is the best tool you can use to test your books and chapters without going to print. This site receives 1.4 million hits on average per month of readers! Here is my link on this site http://www.authorsden.com/johnmarionfrancis so you can get a feel of how a authors page look and is setup. In the Romance category http://www.authorsden.com/categories/stories.asp?catID=50 my recent romantic short story release Runway Girl is featured in the Popular Romance Stories Section!

What marketing information did I gain from this? Two big things, 1 – Is this a story that people want to read. By having this answer I can take it to Novella or Novel level, 2 – I gain a lot of “Author” exposure which is critical in the writing industry. Last and most important, this site is reviewed by agents and publishing houses. The bottom line here is, if they like my short stories enough I’ll be picked up by a publishing house to go to print and be commissioned to for more titles.

Well hope this helps you! Let me know if I could be of more help.

~John Marion Francis

[Shelagh Watkins]

Great advice John and an excellent, professional approach to market research. You know there's a but coming, don't you? LOL! Well, the market research is sound but it doesn't fully answer the question, "What did we do wrong?" The answer is: you assumed that, if you put a great deal of work, love and attention into producing a book, it would sell. Unfortunately, even after all the suggested market research, the book will not sell.

THIS IS THE SINGLE MOST DIFFICULT THING TO SAY TO WOULD-BE AUTHORS:

APART FROM SELLING TO YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS, YOU WILL SELL VERY FEW BOOKS.

My children's novel was published in 2005. Before I sent the manuscript to the publisher, I set up a free website on geocities.com. I put a chapter a week onto the site and asked all my friends and family to visit the site and read the chapters. I joined as many teenage forums as I could find and asked the members to do the same. It soon became obvious that just persuading people to read the novel was going to be hard enough without asking anyone to buy the novel.

Therefore, I decided I would print out the book as cheaply as possible and sell it at cost price to the few readers who always looked forward to the next chapter and gave me feedback on the work.

Not long after I made this decision, I saw a post on one of the forums by a nineteen year old advertising her about to be published novel. I checked out her website and followed the link to her publisher, PublishAmerica. On the site, I read that the publisher did not charge to publish any of their authors. Brilliant! I thought. This was the perfect answer to giving my readers a chance to read the whole novel without me paying anything. I sent off the manuscript, which was accepted and published in May 2005.

I posted on my local forum in Lancashire that my book had been acepted by a publisher. To date, the thread has been read 6,743 times. If you look down the list of topics to "Guestbook Entry" you will see the thread that was set up for me by the forum administrator:

http://forum.leylandtown.info/forum/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=2

Only one member of the forum bought the book!

The members have watched my progress with great enthusiasm and support but none of their interest has translated into book sales. They are waiting for my name to hit the headlines and then they will go out and buy the book. Not to read, but to show to everyone and say that they know the author. It isn't that they won't buy the book, it's just that there has to be something in it for them. That something isn't the enjoyment of reading the book, it's the enjoyment of telling everyone that they know a recognised author. It doesn't seem to cross their minds that they have to be part of the engine that drives the sales to bring about what they want and that by not buying the book until I become famous is the very thing that is stopping me from becoming well-known as an author.

The bottom line is: if you are self-publishing a work of fiction, you can only expect the satisfaction of knowing that you achieved something you would not be able to achieve by any other means. It does not mean that you will sell a great many books. If you sell 50 copies, that is about average. If you sell 100 you will have done well and if you sell 200 you have probably reached your limit without having to spend money on pushing sales higher. Money that you will never recover.

[Jonathon Francis]

Excellent points and reflections on the reality of SP and HP. I am enjoying that my short stories are being read by many. If I happen to get published that would be great, however, I am content knowing that I have an audiance that wait for the next chapter and look forward to the next short story.

I must say though I really appreciate the hard work and constant upgrading of widgets, the forum and everything you do for the authors here. You have good sound resources, a good pool of authors that are reaching out to help and encourage each other. It was what I was looking for when I set sail in this vast ocean of "I want to write a book" and to see so many others like me with the same desire.

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you...

~Jonathon~

[Connie Arnold]

Thank you, John and Shelagh, for the information you've shared! My first two books were published by PublishAmerica, and like Shelagh, I was delighted to have them published without paying for it. They are poetry, which in itself is a very limited market, but I am pleased to have had over 400 of the first one sold in a little over a year, and time will tell how the new one does!

Also I have written two books for young children, which are being illustrated now (paid for by the publisher, Living Waters, to my delight). The first covers for them were put through the kid test and didn't pass, so they were redesigned. The new ones really look good and what I've seen of the illustrations are wonderful. They were written for my little grandsons, so however many little children get to enjoy them are just a bonus. That will be a whole different marketing experience than the other books.

[Shelagh Watkins]

Congratulations Connie! Four hundred book sales is quite an achievement! I'm not surprised you managed to find a new publisher. Good luck with the children's books!