You’re an eager author. You have a great book idea. You’re all fired up about it and think it will sell like wildfire. So you’re getting ready to pitch your idea to literary agents and publishers. Of course you’re going to use a book proposal to do that, and one of the things you’re going to do is tell them that nobody has ever written a book like yours before -- nobody, not Stephen King, not Michael Crichton, not anybody. Right?

Oops! You just went to Amazon.com and did a book search, and to your great embarrassment, guess what? Hard to believe, incredibly hard to believe, but you found that there are four -- count ‘em -- yes, four books on your topic that have been published by other people. How dare they! How could they! Now what are you going to do?

THE COMPETING BOOKS SECTION OF YOUR BOOK PROPOSAL

I’ll tell you what you’re going to do, and it’s really easy. Trust me, this is kid stuff. It doesn’t matter how many books there are on your subject already. It could be one or it could be a hundred, the procedure is always the same. You select the top books that are your competition and you talk about them in your competing books section of your book proposal.

“Talk about them?” you ask. “Why should I even mention them? I don’t want my publisher to know about them! They might not want to buy my book.”

Now, that’s a natural first reaction. But think about it. You can’t prevent your publisher from knowing about these other books. You found them easily enough by going on Amazon.com, didn’t you? Well, guess who’s on Amazon nearly every day? Yup, that’s right. Your prospective literary agent and your new editor. These are professional book people. They virtually live on Amazon. So don’t think they won’t find out about these competing books.

“Then what am I going to do? They’ll never buy my book once they see all this competition.”

HOW TO KNOCK THE COMPETITION

Let me share a secret that all nonfiction book authors know. It’s easy to deal with competing books. Sometimes the very fact that there are competing books is good for you. How? Well, it shows there’s a market for your type of book. After all, if there are fifteen other books selling like hotcakes about sports cars, chances are there’s room for one more. Like yours.

Then there are books that may appear on Amazon but that are out of print. Don’t even mention these. They’re not your competition.

Finally there are books that are in print and are selling. You can tell if a book is in print by looking at the top where it mentions the price. If Amazon is selling it new, then it’s probably in print. This is your competition. But it’s easy to deal with it.

The thing you want to do is admit that this book exists, that it is on your topic, but then immediately say something negative about it, or explain in a few words why your book will be better or more popular.

DEALING WITH COMPETING BOOKS

“Can you show me how to do this?” Sure, here’s an example. Let’s say you’re writing a book about sports cars and the title of your book is going to be HOW TO CARE FOR YOUR SPORTS CAR. Pick a popular competing book and describe it and then knock it, like this: “Going Faster! Mastering the Art of Race Driving (Bentley Publishers 2001) by Carl Lopez is all about race car driving and has very little information that would help the owner of a sports car. My book, on the other hand, will be all about caring for your sports car, including practical tips every reader can use.”

That was easy, wasn’t it?

See what you did there? You described the competing book in one sentence. You wrote the title and author, and you included the publisher and the date of publication. Not only did you describe the competing book, but in the same sentence in which you described it, you also criticized it, that is, you said something negative about it. No matter how great a book is, there’s always something negative you can say about it because no book can cover everything. And you’re not saying this other book isn’t a good book. It may be a great book (if it is don’t say that in your proposal!) but it just doesn’t cover everything, and it doesn’t cover what your book covers, namely HOW TO CARE FOR YOUR SPORTS CAR.

Deal with the top three or four competing books and leave it at that. Once a publisher and literary agent see that your book proposal fairly deals with the competition, they’ll know that your title can hold its own in the marketplace. And that’s going to help you sell your book and land that publishing contract.