Defining
Your Audience and Positioning Your Book is Critical for Sales Success
The
more clearly you can define your audience—and identify their
precise needs—the better you are positioned to develop a book
and create sales pieces that address those needs.
Understanding the needs of your target audience and the strengths and
weaknesses of your competition will help you develop a meaningful book
that provides a unique solution or tackles a known problem in a new
way. This clarity will help you create elements that will
speak directly to your target markets (i.e., topic, title, content,
design, layout and cover).
While you may write a book that anyone might enjoy reading, there is
probably a most likely reader—male or female, thirtysomething
or older, lay person or professional, and so forth. It is
critical for the author to know who is most likely to want and benefit
from his or her book and then write that book in a way that is most
accessible and interesting for her targeted audience.
The wider the appeal, the bigger the potential audience for the book.
Your book is competing with so many other books for shelf space and the
reader’s dollar. Your “position” is how
your book compares with what else is out there and what makes it
special to your readers.
By identifying your audience and their needs and knowing what their
other choices are in the book marketplace, you can decide how you want
readers to see your book. Then you must create one that fits
the market position you want to occupy. For instance:
• Do you offer a broader or a
more in-depth approach to your subject?
• Are you easy to read or
designed for the subject matter expert?
• Is your price point higher or
lower than other books of this type?
• Who are you versus other
authors? What is your level of experience and breadth of experience
vis-à-vis other authors?
• What does your book offer
compared with other books? Do you have exercises, resources, Web
interactivity, and the like?
Design the book to fit the needs of your audience and be sure to
communicate your positioning with your title and back cover copy and in
your sales information. Don’t make your customer
work hard to discover you’ve written just the book they are
looking for.
There is as much controversy about writing a book in a way that will
appeal to the audience as there is about product placements in
movies. Should a writer write what he or she has to say and
not be concerned with the audience? Most of our brilliant new
ideas are controversial and not very popular at first. This
is a decision only you, as the writer, can make.
But if large volume sales are your goal, you can’t ignore
what the audience wants. If you think a particular company,
association, or group would be a good candidate for large volume
purchases, showcase material that might make them take notice.
A rookie mistake of new authors is to tell people what they should do
instead of enticing them in with stories they can relate to and
accept. If you are the expert, then you do want to share your
knowledge. But berating your readers so they feel bad about their
actions isn’t the way to high book sales.
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