It's probably safe to assume that if you are writing a book, you have an affinity for the topic and audience. Whoever your target audience is, you must ask yourself:

* Where are they most likely to be when they are online?

* What web sites do they visit?

* What discussion boards do they frequent?

* What support/social groups do they belong to?

Asking each of these questions will be useful when developing your marketing plan.

Finding your target audience can be as simple as searching for keywords and phrases on the Internet or as detailed as doing research offline at the library. Either way, here are a few ways to make the process easier for you to determine if a market exists for your book idea.

Finding Your Audience Online

The Internet has become THE place go for information on any and everything. If your target audience exists, you'll find them there. The best place to locate your target audience is on bulletin boards, forums, and newsgroups. This is where groups of people come together to share ideas and stories, or to ask questions on a particular topic.

To quickly find your target audience online go to any search engine like Google and type in the keyword your target audience is most likely to use and add the word forum to the end. For example type "web design forum" and you will get a listing of web sites that have some type of forum that discusses web site design. For better search results put quotes around the keywords you're searching for and the results that come back will be even more relevant to what you're looking for.

Visit these places and find out what people are talking about. You will surely determine what to write about when you walk in the footsteps of your target audience.

* "keyword message board"
* "keyword bulletin board"
* "keyword forum"
* "keyword community"

Also in my ebook, "7 Things You Must Know Before You Self Publish" there is section titled "Finding the Right Niche To Write For" (page 15 and 16). For a complementary copy of the ebook, visit http://www.bookadvocate.com/bonus that will help you to more fully understand why this step is so important.

In part 2 of "Find The Audience For Your Book", I'll discuss ways to find your audience offline.