Do you have many book topic ideas and struggle to narrow down your ideas and vision?
A decision-making matrix can help guide your book topic decision. It is a really useful method, enabling you to perfect your ideas and move forward with a topic that has great impact, profitability and that fits with your long-term vision as a published author.
I was inspired by this concept after reading The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau. <https://chrisguillebeau.com/books>
I find a decision making matrix works extremely well for narrowing down any kind of decision. By using the matrix to analyze book topic ideas, it’s possible to see which of your ideas will be the most beneficial to take forward. Many of us are gifted with the ability to generate many topics in our minds so this process helps you to focus.
How to create a decision-making matrix
Open a spreadsheet and write down all of the book topics that you are considering on the left-hand column.
On the top row, moving across from left to right, write the four headings:
#1: Impact
#2: Effort
#3: Profitability
#4: Vision
The four headings are the criteria that you are going to rate each idea against.
Using a scale of 1-5, for each of your book topic ideas, rate them against the criteria as follows:
#1: Impact
Your book topic needs to make maximum impact to gain popularity and sales. It needs to be something that not only affects you but also affects many others. How is your book topic going to change people’s lives or their perspectives on life? The bigger the impact, the better the chance of the topic being a success.
#2: Effort
As an author, it’s really important to accurately factor in how long the book is going to take to write. Some topics will require years of research to assimilate and write, whereas other topics are all in your mind and are ready to be recorded much more quickly. Both approaches are possible, but it’s very useful to see where this element of the matrix fits in with the others when making the final decision on a topic.
#3: Profitability
It’s vital that you do your research on what the currents trends surrounding your proposed book topic are. Explore online sites to see what books in your topic area are doing really well and identify any potential gaps in the market that you could fill. Rate your book topic based on this. Be conscious that if there are a lot of books on your specific topic already published, you will need to find your niche/angle to produce a book that is unique to the marketplace.
#4: Vision
It’s very important that your overall vision as an author is in the forefront of your mind from the start of the book topic decision process. This is what will drive your vision from concept to reality. Where do you see yourself in the future? This is pivotal- decide what your overall vision for life is and work back from there. Make sure the topic is something that you are passionate about and something that you can turn into a successful career.
Once you’ve thought about each criteria and written down your scores, total up your numbers and you should see the most promising topic.This is the topic that you should go ahead with – it will create the most impact with the least amount of effort, it will be profitable and align with your vision.
I’d love to hear about your book topic ideas and your decision-making matrix. Please go ahead and schedule a call and I look forward to helping you.
