Most books, from idea to print, take two years to finish. How do you know what the market will be like when your book launches? How do you know what your readers’ state of mind will be?

Is there any way to know how to write today so you’ll be in sync with your audience tomorrow?

You won’t find anything akin to a crystal ball. But as an author toying with a new book idea, you can gain an understanding of the future of your topic, society, and the English language. Check out these tools and sites on the web:

• Google Trends. Test your book’s keywords in Google’s trends search box. Is the trend line rising or falling? What are related terms? Do you need to retune your language or message?
• Amazon autofill. Enter keywords (or book titles) into Amazon’s book search box. What related words or titles come up? What do they suggest?
• Trends on social media. Check a Twitter trend-tracking site like hashtagify or Northwestern University’s twXplorer. Even if Twitter trends are short-lived, twXplorer and hashtagify get you thinking about keyword nuances.
• Google Adwords. Sign up for Google Adwords and test keywords in the “Google Adwords Keyword Planner.” You’ll get a measure of each word’s advertising value, its search frequency, and the value of related words.
• Trend-watching. Go to one or several trends-forecasting sites for a view of the future of technology, society, culture, and more. Browse articles at Alltop and JWT Intelligence.

These tools have their limits. But they can prompt you to take the flow of history into account. You don’t want to be talking about economic hard times during a coming boom. You don’t want to talk about an artist’s rising celebrity when it’s falling. You don’t talk about people writing appointments in calendars when they don’t use paper anymore.

There’s also the flow of the language. Idiom, expressions, and metaphor evolve. Is an environmentally minded company “green,” “socially responsible,” or “sustainable”? Are you still using the frog-in-hot-water metaphor after scientists have debunked it? (As Fast Company reported, it’s not true that a frog, put in a beaker of water and heated gradually, will stay put until it boils to death—even if such imagined behavior makes a colorful metaphor for describing people failing to act when times change.)

Give a selection of these web-based tools and news sources at least a few hours of time to spur future-minded thought. Your book will be better for it. A side benefit is that you find keywords that can later give your book top search-engine placement, a valuable asset when it comes to book marketing.

[Revised January 2020. Originally published November 17, 2014]