Writing some time ago in a Harvard Business Review blog, Robyn Bolton asked a good question about selling a product into a new market. Would you prefer to get 1% of a huge, established market or 100% of a new one? Translate that question for anyone hoping to publish a book: Would you prefer a little bit of a million-person readership or all of twenty or thirty thousand?

Bolton gives her answer by citing the example of Kellogg when it first tried to enter the breakfast market in India in the 1990s. India had 950 million breakfast eaters. If Kellogg could capture just 1% of the market, it could have sold an awful lot of cereal. And it tried. But a year after rollout, its products, captured only 0.01% of the market (i.e., 95,000 consumers). Sixteen years later, it had still not reached the 1% figure.

We can all dream of how we should be able to sell tens of thousands of books when we target an audience of a million readers. But as Bolton says, “What matters is not how big any existing market is but how many people are wrestling with some problem that no current offering really solves...”

In books as in cereal products, you need to offer something for people wrestling with your problem—and readers will follow.

To be sure, you may have a topic that will eventually get 1% of a global market in the billions. (Think J.K. Rowling.) But if you’re like most authors, you’ll probably do better to serve the narrower 100%, your core readers. If you strike a chord with them, word of mouth about the broad relevance of your message can still lead you toward the 1%.

Put another way, most of us will do best by preaching to the choir before preaching to anyone else.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published May 21, 2012]