In their 2005 book Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne group types of business ventures into two buckets:

• Red oceans: Intensely competitive areas, such as desktop computers à la 2006.
• Blue oceans: Untested areas, such as Amazon Web Services à la 2006.

You weren’t going to make a killing launching a new desktop fifteen years ago. Dell’s net profit margins certainly weren’t Prada’s. Beige boxes didn’t hold the appeal of sleek MacBook Pros—and they still don’t.

AWS could have spectacularly failed, but the opposite happened. Thanks to Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other entrants, that blue ocean is now red.

Does Your Book Need a Subtitle?

Author Parallels

Authors need to think about books in the very same way. On a personal level, my 2013 book Too Big to Ignore was one of the very first on Big Data. Ditto for my 2011 title The Age of the Platform. These were blue oceans. Red ones at the time included anything on social media, entrepreneurship, and small businesses.

In a way, going red or blue doesn’t matter, but don’t be surprised if your book’s success is limited. Selling books en masse is really freakin’ hard. If someone tells you otherwise, run.