If I had a free yoga session for every time have I heard someone say, “I hope everybody likes my book” I would be significantly more toned and tuned in than I am today!

Oh dear. “Everybody” won’t.

That’s because your ideal reader is not “Everybody.”

Even a highly-trained copywriter can’t write to appeal to an “everybody.” But they CAN write to appeal to the 47-year-old Chief Financial Officer of a company that is growing like gangbusters and struggling with cash flow…and who has been struggling with stress and burnout and needs…something!

As the author of a book where both time and money count, you want to start conversations that might lead to a book sale with the people who are likely to resonate with what you’re offering.

“Everybody” doesn’t need what you offer. But your ideal reader is eagerly scanning the bookshelves hoping you will show up in them someday.

THOSE are the people your book marketing should be targeting, so you need to maximize your chances of finding them. Both in the writing of your book and in the marketing of it.

What Goes into Getting Clear on Your Brand?

It does take some time and effort to do this work, and whether you plan to coordinate it all yourself, or hire someone else to do the leg work for you, it’s probably helpful to get guidance from a branding expert, or hire a coach, to help you gain clarity.

These people know the questions to ask, and branding experts, in particular, are quite often experts in graphic design, which is a key element of your brand communication.

The assistance will be helpful because your brand requires you to get clear on:

• Your ideal reader

• Your values

• Your business “personality”

• Your vision for you, your business (if you have one) and your world

• The issues that differentiate your book from the books of other authors

• The main benefits of to people of reading your book

• The ways in which your book is unique

• The ways in which other books might make a better read for some people than yours does

• The things other authors are doing that you could do be doing, too – with your own “twist”

• The areas of excellence that you don’t tell people about

• Your reader’s values

• Your reader’s needs

• The things your readers don’t care about

• The aspects of your book that your readers are likely to love

• The aspects of your book that your readers might want you to strengthen

• What you could do to improve your book and your writing

• The visual imagery that is likely to appeal to your ideal readers

Whew! That’s an exhausting list, isn’t it? The point of acquiring all that information is so you can package it up into marketing materials— your book cover, your website, your branded bookmarks, your online content and anything you produce to speak for your book—in a way that will immediately appeal to your ideal readers.

In our next post we’ll look at your ideal reader in detail so you know what kinds of questions you might want to know the answers to when you start writing for, and marketing to, your ideal reader.

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