Why Should Anyone Care About Your Book?
Book positioning = Who will read you and why?
Instead of giving you a long spiel about book positioning, let’s dive straight into the questions I use to help authors as a book coach, ghostwriter, and editor. Whether you call it a north star, guiding light, or compass, this positioning exercise will help you discover who will care about your book and why.
I’ll answer the prompts for my own memoir to illustrate how the exercise works.
Why do you want to write a book?
Because I wish I’d had a story like mine to read when I needed it.
If you are unsure why you write in general, it will be harder to figure out why you want to write this specific book. If that’s you, this post might help: Why Do You Write? How to find your core thematic.
What is your book about?
I recognize myself when I meet other people who never got to be kids:
the serious ones who can’t take a joke, because their parents viciously criticized them every day
the clowns who can’t stop joking because their mothers were depressed and needed constant cheering
the peacekeepers who learned to accommodate everyone trying to pacify violent drunk partners
the martyrs who don’t need anything, thank you-I’m good-I got it, who flip quickly to I’m the only one who ever does anything around here
the perpetually cheery pleasers who are deathly afraid of acknowledging or expressing “negative” emotions
the chameleons who have no identity because they were always expected to be whatever someone else demanded
Popular culture is full of inspiring stories of addicts turning their lives around or crashing spectacularly — tortured assholes with secretly kind hearts, geniuses with untapped potential, and tragic heroes battling demons. Few of these stories spend much time on the wreckage addicts leave in their wake. What about all the people who love these addicts: their children, parents, friends, and partners? We are the collateral damage, the supporting characters, the cheerleaders, the enablers, the complicit bystanders.
What we have in common is living for others because that’s what we determined to be the best chance for our own survival. We must reckon with being the collateral damage of the addicts we love and live with and a culture that centers addicts’ experiences above ours, before we can live our own lives.
If you can’t nail down what your book is about, this post might help: Three Questions to Help You Decide If You Should Start Your Book Today.
What’s your book in a nutshell (your elevator or cocktail party pitch)? Tighten up your longer book synopsis above into a few sentences.
Addicts leave collateral damage in their wake — the siblings, parents, partners, kids, and friends who are left to pick up the pieces. Our culture centers the addict’s narrative, so this book is about my experience being cast as a supporting character in my own life and how I reclaimed my identity.
What will readers get out of your book (what will they learn, how will they benefit, why will they care)?
Readers will feel seen in their own experiences, even if we have different life stories and backgrounds, because there is so much overlap in the feelings, thoughts, challenges, and behaviors that result from growing up with addicts. Readers will understand that they, their lives, and their stories have intrinsic value outside of their usefulness to the addict. Readers will become the main characters in their life story, and learn that they deserve to live for themselves.
If these questions don’t feel right, alternatively try these: What pain is your reader experiencing that your book could be the solution for? What transformation will your reader experience because they read your book or follow its advice?
Who is your primary audience (the people you must reach who would benefit the most) and your secondary audience (the group of people you’d like to reach)?
Note: Think of your book as the pebble thrown in the water — who is in the closest ring, and how do your audiences ripple out from that center? You must have at least one, but can have multiple, like my example below. If you have too many audiences or start saying stuff like “all women, everyone who’s had their heart broken, or every Canadian under the age of 50,” you might be writing a ‘meatball sundae.’ Refer to #2 in this post to make sure you have a clear book idea.
Primary: Adult children of alcoholics
Secondary: Relatives, partners & friends of addicts
Tertiary: Addicts who want to understand the human damage of their actions and decenter their own stories
Quarternary (I had to look up this word): Helping professions advising anyone in the addiction recovery space, such as counselors, therapists, doctors, and educators.
Who is your dream reader (this is a specific person in your audience, or a younger version of yourself if you’re writing for “people like you”)?
I’m writing to younger versions of me. The 15-year-old struggling to find her own identity, while being entangled in messy relationships, co-dependency, perfectionism, obligation, resentment, guilt, and people-pleasing. The 20-year-old who read all the self-help books ever written, but couldn’t make any real change. The 25-year-old desperately trying to avoid passing on her wounds to her children, while repeating patterns on autopilot. The 30-year-old afraid that being herself would lead to rejection and loneliness. The 35-year-old grappling with the realization that being the ‘functional’ one made her feel superior and pick fixer-uppers, so she’d never have to look at her own shit.
Okay, so was that book positioning?
Now, that you’ve done the real work, a quick word about book positioning. It’s not as fancy and complicated as it sounds.
Books, like groceries, vie for the highest-visibility space on the shelf. When you walk into a bookstore, you’ll see the hottest new releases near the entrance, preferably in your way, so you have to stop and look at them, or on shelves at eye level.
Book positioning was mostly a way for agents and publishers to discuss potential markets for a book, i.e., where, how, and to whom do we market this book to achieve the highest sales volume?
Whether or not you traditionally publish your book or go the self-publishing route, decide on hardcover, paperback, e-book, audiobook, or all of the above, book positioning is not just about physical shelf-space, but also about categories on online bookseller platforms.
Which category does your book fall under? Fiction or non-fiction? What is the genre? Romance, memoir, horror, mystery? Are you writing for children, teens, young adults, or adults? Within your category and genre, there will likely be subcategories to niche it down more.
For example, my book is non-fiction. It’s a memoir, primarily written for adult children of alcoholics, late teens, and up.
It’s good to have a general idea of these primary buckets, but what’s more important is really nailing down that one specific reader you’re trying to reach with your book and why they would give a fuck about it.
Who Are You Writing Your Book For?
Use the questions above and let me know. I’m curious.
Resources I’ve based my questions on — free and publicly available:
Next week, I’ll talk about how to:
Outline your book
Structure a writing plan that gets your ass in the chair every day and sets you up for success