It’s sort of a marketing conundrum

I’ve come up with what I believe to be a viable solution for the book I just set aside. The problem now becomes: It’s probably going to take a lot of research to either prove that the solution is indeed viable, and/or it will take a lot of research to make the book believable while implementing the solution, or I can just write it implementing the solution without doing a lot of research and hope that it does turn out okay (wait, isn’t that what got me into this problem in the first place?).

The questions resulting from that problem: Do I want take the time to do the research and hope that my solution works? Or do I want to just write it out and hope that it works? Or do I want to move on to a different book idea and do that just to get something written?

At this point I’m leaning towards answering the last question in the affirmative and ignoring the other two questions.

Okay then, so why am I still still pondering instead of writing? Well, I’d been writing this book that was set aside with the idea that I could market it to the readers of my fantasy basketball blog. According to FeedBurner, there’s anywhere from 160 to 180 people reading that blog. Give Me The Rock gets 400 to 500 hits per day, so there is kind of a built in audience there. Compare that to the readers of my personal blog, whom FeedBurner counts at 13. “Nels Wadycki” – as it’s called – probably gets about 6 hits per day on average. But I don’t post there often, so it could certainly be higher. And it’s a tech blog, so if I started posting timely, relevant stuff frequently, I’m sure it could get up there.

In fact (or speculation), by the time I got a book written for the tech blog type market, I bet I could have the same kind of traffic at Nels Wadycki as I get at Give Me The Rock. My next thought propels me further in that direction: The people reading the tech blogs probably (in my mind, at least) read more books than the people who read sports blogs (no offense to sports blog readers – there are a lot of fun people out there).

So to answer my own questions, and solve my own problem, I’m going to shift to something completely different and write a kind of sci-fi (now known as speculative fiction) book that will appeal to the tech blog market. As a bonus, I think it will be more fun to write anyway.

~ by endub on June 22, 2007.