At Mashable.com Luke Williams wrote about "how to develop ideas that will disrupt your industry."
One of his key points is that although everybody says the way to prosper is to identify a problem and solve it, there are many successful ventures that don't do this. His example is "Little Miss Matched," a company that sells mis-matched socks in sets of three, a quirky fashion statement that has led to six retail stores employing more than 150 people. Nobody was saying, "You know what really bothers me? I can't find a place to buy mis-matched socks."
Taking this notion into our own field of writing and other creative ventures, it seems to me that one way to do this is to ask what's working pretty well and figure out how to either improve it or, probably more easily, piggyback on it. Let's brainstorm some examples (feel free to join in!):
AMAZON is working very well indeed. Their recommendations tend to be a bit patchy, especially if you buy books for friends with interests different from yours. So what about a very narrowly niched site that reviews and recommends books to others who share your specific interest? The narrower the niche the better, because you'll be able to be comprehensive and you won't be competing as much with review sites that cover a broader range.
Is there money in this? Maybe, if you become an Amazon Associate and get the commissions or if you are able to generate ad revenue from your site. Examples of niches would be: vampires (too big a niche), teen vampires (still too big), romantic teen vampires (now we're getting there). If the niche happens to be the one that fits your book as well, you'll be attracting potential readers for yourself.
Side note: I thought it would be easy to pick three or four aspects of the creative industries that are doing well, but it's taking a depressingly long time to come up with them...OK, I have another one:
READING GROUPS are doing well. Publishers have started providing discussion guides for their best-selling books, sometimes even within the book itself, but these tend to remind people of high school or college class topics. Could there be a market for online quirky guides that suggest how to relate the books' topics to the group in a more fun way? Once you've established contact with these groups naturally you'll want to tell them about your own book (do you see a pattern emerging here?).
FREE is doing really well on the web. Everybody wants everything for free, if possible. A friend offered one of his information products for "whatever you care to pay." Guess what the favorite choice was? Yep, most people cared to pay nothing. But one thing that hasn't been tried much online is barter (at least as far as I know). If you have a valuable course or service could you ask people what they are willing to barter for it? For instance, their own expertise or x number of hours of virtual assistance online? Hmm, I might try this one with my Writing Breakthrough Program...
You get the idea. What's working in your field? How could you improve, add on, or vary it to your advantage?
(There are lots of ideas on how to be more creative in my book, "Creativity Now!" published by Pearson and available from Amazon and other online and offline retailers.)
