6.1 Relationship chemistry
Want readers?
Most of us do. So how do we get them? There are tons of marketing techniques and lots of people teaching them.
But the best thing you can do is…
Midwife a heart-to-heart connection between your readers and your work.
In conventional marketing, this is called positioning. And it’s a good place to start.
In 1981, Al Ries and Jack Trout published Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. In it they explain that to “position” a product or service in the marketplace means…
You find a desire already in your prospect’s mind and you speak to that.
Instead of trying to put something new into the mind of your prospect, you make use of what’s there, which is a whole lot easier than “educating” your prospect.
Let’s say you’re the one who first came up with the idea of an ice–cream cake. Well, your potential customers already have a desire for ice cream and a desire for cake. Putting the two together is something unfamiliar, but you’re triggering familiar desires.
You’re not asking your prospect to do the hard work of grasping a new idea they’ve got no prior connection with.
So how can writers use positioning? Say you’re writing a mystery and you want to attract readers who love mysteries. You’re going to use familiar tropes. You’re going to drop hidden clues along the way. You’re going to have fun with surprising twists. And the design of your book cover will announce to the world, “This is a mystery.”
Some readers just want to escape into a very familiar kind of story. They’re not looking for a challenge. It’s like the print version of comfort food.
Then there are readers who want the expected but infused with the unexpected. They want the security of the familiar combined with the excitement of novelty.
No matter who you’ve decided to write for, you want your marketing riffs to speak in a direct way to the desires of your intended readers. And you want the substance of your book to fulfill those desires. After all…
You’re making a match.
That’s positioning.
You show prospects that what you’re offering matches what they want.
But writers are creative people, and this opens possibilities that go beyond the standard use of positioning.
Think about personal computers. Before they were developed, people didn’t have a desire for them. But once they were made available and people understood what they could do, demand exploded.
Or think about the new wave of TV shows that arrived with “Breaking Bad” and the Sopranos.” No one was asking for shows like that, but once they were broadcast, there were suddenly giant, committed audiences for them.
It’s a fact that sometimes…
People want something they don’t know they want till they can have it.
And this is very good news for creatives. You can write something new that people haven’t seen before and find a following.
But if you’re asking people to take a leap beyond what they know, you’re going to have to help them leap. (Apart from early adopters who are always searching for what’s new.)
This means you’re going have to do positioning, but ramp it up, intensify it, and deepen it.
If you’re selling chocolate candy bars you don’t have to reach deep.
And some authors who are selling comfort–type books don’t have to reach deep.
But a lot of us do. And want to. Because what we’re writing has a primal dimension to it.
I’m thinking about memoirs written by people with treacherous childhoods and searing tales of pain which resolve in triumph, but it’s a hell of a journey.
Or novels that embody the deepest contrary complexities of the human psyche as the characters navigate seriously painful issues in this modern, crazy world of ours.
And I’m thinking of my own books which are about asking more of love. They go deep and get dark. At core they’re uplifting, and I’ve worked hard to make them easy to read in terms of the writing, but it’s an understatement to say they’re emotionally challenging.
What i’m talking about is what I call a…
Yes-and-no book.
Which is something people have a strong desire to read once they know what the book has to offer, yet the reading of it asks a lot of them.
And if you’re writing a yes-and-no, you need to make an especially deep connection with your prospective reader to draw them in and help them push through any resistance that comes up for them.
So now we’re talking about…
Primal-positioning.
Which is not something you can produce overnight. It takes time. It takes exploration. It takes…
Feeling your way deeper and deeper both into the heart of your work and into the heart of your potential reader.
Recommendation
On the day you decide to write your book, I recommend you open these four files on your computer…
1. Amazon description
2. Proposal development
3. Title and cover
4. Blurbs and comments
Why on day one? Because then you can…
Play with your positioning.
Instead of waiting to the last moment. Which an awful lot of authors do.
They don’t like marketing. They don’t like the language of it or the style of it or the feel of it. So they put it off until they’re done writing.
So now they’ve got a completed manuscript, but instead of relaxing and celebrating, they have to get back to work and draft marketing materials under pressure.
Of course some publishers are really good with marketing and you can turn it entirely over to them.
But I don’t recommend that, because…
You’re the one who is deep in with your book.
You understand dimensions and nuances that a publisher might miss because they don’t have a lot of time to spend with each book they release.
Even if the publisher is an ace at marketing, I still recommend that you give them something to work with. And that you show them exactly how you’ve been thinking about your relationship with your reader and…
How you’ve been writing your way into that relationship.
Here’s another problem to consider. A writer comes up with really good positioning for her book, but now she takes a look back at her book and it doesn’t match this wonderful new positioning. Oy! She’s going to have to either settle for lackluster marketing or do serious re-writing.
The way to prevent these problems is to start playing with your positioning on day one.
And…
Develop your book and your marketing in partnership.
The deeper your writing goes, the more primal your story or your message, the more time you will likely need to be able to develop the kind of positioning that will touch the hearts of your potential readers.
This is not always true. Sometimes writers have a stroke of luck and the positioning shows up with the initial conception of the book.
But for the most part the deeper you go with your writing, the more time you need to develop positioning that also goes deep.
And like with all creative work, you’ll get a better result if you give yourself the time and freedom…
To play your way deeper in.
