Choosing to be the author of your own eBook is exciting and rewarding. You have a fresh start to write about whatever you want and do it in your own style. The difficult step is determining the topic of your eBook. What do you want to spend the next few weeks doing, putting your heart and soul into hoping that people will find your work informative and enjoyable? I will help you on your journey to find good eBook topics that pique your interest so you can choose one.

Below are two main goals that I want you to keep in mind as you continue this reading and begin your writing process. Just keep them in your memory for now.

• Do you really LIKE the theme and
• Is there a MARKET for the topic?

Current issues

What precisely are the hot topics? These books tackle a specific topic that is all the rage right now, but will eventually lose its following after a short time. These are useful for making quick money, as well as promoting your name and getting familiar with them to launch your own FAN FOLLOWER. In other words, the hot topics are “money makers.” It has the potential to sell so many copies in the short term after publication that your sales drop when the issue cools down.

Time and trends are two components you really need to understand when choosing the right hot topic. Obviously, you don’t want to select a theme that is prevalent now, but not when your book is published. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees how long a topic will be popular, so the concept is to discover a good hot topic, quickly write your book, and get it out to the public quickly to receive as many sales as possible before it’s gone.

How to find hot topics

Hot topics are all around us. Just think about where you are informed about upcoming news and events.

Social networking websites, TV news, and online news websites probably come to mind.

These are all great places to start your research. In all likelihood, you’ve already been introduced to some CURRENT issues, but you haven’t recognized them yet. Take a step back. Start thinking about the latest things you’ve heard about, whether it’s from your local newscaster or a friend’s tweet. Today we are more in touch with the things that are happening around us and throughout our global society than ever before with all these means of communication available at our fingertips.

You need to keep your eyes and ears open to emerging problems that people are looking to solve. These don’t necessarily have to be big problems, like getting the country out of debt. They can be as simple as altering a certain store in your sales process. An example of this is when eBay chose to ban info products from its virtual auction areas. This probably sounds like a minor change to you, but for many internet marketers this was a HUGE problem. A quick solution was needed so that these sellers could package their products in a different format to continue selling on eBay. If you had written an ebook on exactly how to repackage these infoproducts in a way that eBay authorized for sale on their website, you would have had a ton of internet sellers buying your ebook, not to mention a GOOD chunk of change.

This may be outside your scope of subject-specific knowledge; in fact, you may not have a clue how to sell on eBay, infoproducts, or auction sites. This is just meant to be a small sample to get your mind brainstorming. Minor changes like this affect a lot of people and offer a large audience that could potentially buy your eBook for a solution to their problem.

The Kindle Store and forum groups like Yahoo and Google are other great sources for finding good hot topics. Kindle Store provides a handy option to filter all available books by best sellers. If you open your web browser, go to the Kindle web page, and check out what their current best-selling books are, you’ll get tons of books on particular topics (HOTTING TOPICS). By going to Google or Yahoo chat rooms, you will discover topics that have many posts about people sharing their own answers on how to solve certain problems. Look for a topic that has recently been featured and has a lot of updated posts under it, that way you know people are discussing it right now (meaning it’s currently trending).

Develop a list of several potential hot topics that an interest aligns with. Only include topics that you can honestly write about and ENJOY writing about, otherwise you won’t have any real motivation to intrigue potential buyers and ultimately make sales.

After creating your list, you’ll want to visit Google Trends, which actually offers a handy little tool that helps in tracking current trends. The web address is www.google.com/trends/. Type the first topic on your list in the search box. Your search results will be a trend chart. By default, the chart will share past trends for a topic over multiple years. You’ll want to filter the results to include only the trend for a topic over the past year. To do this, use the left sidebar of the results page. Just find the “Limit To” heading and change it to the current year. See the trend.

Is the trend increasing or decreasing? Is this specific topic getting more popular or starting to cool off? Narrow down your list by testing each of the themes and removing the ones that show a clear decline in popularity. Once you have a limited list of themes available, just pick one and write about it.