Why Your Book Isn’t Selling: The Real Marketing Missteps

And it sounds like you're saying from the standpoint, especially on the book side, of alignment and making sure you're very clear on who is it that's going to be buying this book.

Yeah.

These things really need to be baked in from the very beginning, because it's incredibly hard to fix when the book is done.

And once it's published, it's not fixable at all.

Like, if you've gotten-

Yeah

... close to the mark, sometimes you can recover a book, maybe fudge the, you know, copy a little bit.

Yeah.

But generally speaking, if you've created a book that isn't strategically aligned, the right audience, the right goals, the right places, you know, to have the book, the right tactics to support those goals, then i- it's just too late.

So yeah, you gotta think about it-

Exactly

... really early from the very beginning.

Pretty much as soon as you sit down to start writing, whatever that initial impetus was to start writing, make that shift into, "Okay, I started writing because I wanna say this," or, "People are asking me about this," or, "I think this is really important," and now start thinking about who that is gonna get that book.

What do they really wanna hear?

Mm-hmm.

What do they really need from you?

Yeah.

The sweet spot of a marketable book is that Venn diagram, right? That, that place in the middle between what you really wanna say and what you know is important, and what your audience actually wants and needs and is looking for.

Yes.

Which I love that you just said that because that's how I talk about marketing messaging in general.

It's like so often we as business owners are like, "We have to tell people this.

It's so incredibly important.

They need to know." And it's like, okay, but do they? Like, do they care?

[laughs]

Like, the way that you're positioning that, like, is that a problem that's keeping them up at night? Is that something that's even on their mind? 'Cause if it's not, like, your message is not gonna resonate and it's just gonna get lost in the sea of marketing noise that we're all surrounded with every day.