Question re: Perceived Interest

JenNipps said:

I went to a workshop on Monday. It's an on-going workshop series that meets once a month. I've gone to a different series given by this same person (very multiply published & a great lady) on writing romances.

This series is on writing nonfiction (and where I got the factoid I passed along Tuesday). Here's my question:

The project I decided on is one that I've thought about for a long time. I tried to do an article series about it, but apparently that's not the right format since it fizzled pretty quickly.

The working title is "Blue Jeans & Tennis Shoes: Working from Home." Here's the first paragraph from the cover letter (we're working on half of the proposal for the next meeting):

“Blue Jeans & Tennis Shoes: Working from Home” is a guide for people who want to work from home part- or full-time. Areas covered include setting up a home office, bookkeeping, taxes, promoting yourself, networking, avoiding scams, and various work-from-home opportunities.​

Based on that, do you think this is something people would be interested in? I can show you a very rough version of the table of contents if you want to see it, too.

Click to expand...

Hi Jen,
I know there are a lot of books out there that are how-to guides for working from home. What I would recommend is checking out those books and finding a way to make yours different (better and different). There is certainly a market for this kind of book, but lots of competition, too.
Good luck!

I like your title and it suggests to me your idea might make a good column. You have a rich quantity of material which can be reworked into many different angles to keep something like this going for a quite a while. (Longevity--which a column wants to have.) You said a series of articles didn't go over well, but perhaps changing the format into a column would work--you could make it humorous, bring it your own voice, create a first person narrative... I could also see creating a whimsical cartoon character to accompany the title, and running a regular 600-800 word column once a week.

Even though I like your title, nothing about tennis shoes and blue jeans makes me think "oh working from home, eh?"
" On the other hand--slippers and bathrobes might...just food for thought.

Good Luck

I've been working on home business articles and ebooks for a number of years. What you have listed in your first post seems so common. It's really all over the place and actually, each of those topics have been discussed in books throughly. It would be really hard at this point to just try to pull it all together.

On the other hand, are you talking home business or getting a work from home job? This would be two different angles.

You talked about different opportunities that are not in those books. Are they not in those books for a reason? Or are they just over looked?

More than likely, you'd do much better to narrow down your field a bit. How to Avoid Work At Home Scams could be a series article or a whole book on it's own. You can not only write an article about a specific business opportunity, but go into depth on how to start that particular business up. That could make it book worthy.

I think you should dig deeper. You're on the right track. I understand you're a writer, but have you ever owned your own home business outside of writing? Could you give valuable insights on how to start a home business?

Try to think on this for a bit. I'd be more interested in picking up a book on one specific home business than one that is so general as you have mentioned.

Ditto on what Button said.

There's a plethora of titles in the marketplace on working at home, so you're going to have to offer something unique.

Hi Jen, I'm afraid I agree with others that your idea needs some kind of uniqueness adding to make it sell. As a series of articles or a column, however, I think it has a lot more potential. And potential to be reworked for different markets, too. A magazine I read regularly (.net mag, in the UK, published in the US as Web Builder) has recently been running a series of articles entitled BYOB (Be Your Own Boss, rather than Bring Your Own Booze!). The articles are geared at those working in the web design business, but for the most part, the advice is relevant to other types of home-working, and it is an article series that could fairly easily be reversioned for different magazines. For example, a few interviews with people who work from home in the specific business area of the magazine you're targetting would allow you to rewrite your own existing articles for that target market.

So, I would advise trying a bit further with the articles, before you attempt turning them into a book. I think you'd have more selling power that way. Unless, of course, you can come up with some astounding unique angle for the book (sorry, can't think of any myself!).

Good luck!