Does your book have an identity crisis?

Part 4: Ask yourself these questions to find out what your book is about.

Lets backtrack and revisit one of our first questions, “Who is this book for?”
I have a friend who is a visual artist and when she was in grad school, a colleague was working on a sculpture called The Glass Trampoline. For my friend, this became a metaphor for a bad idea. 

There are books like that too.

Perhaps you want to make a book but really you only have the content for a blog entry. Maybe you don’t have a book idea really but a video concept. The glass trampoline question is a great one for any product you are making. “Is my idea, my project, a glass trampoline?” The possibility exists that you don’t have an idea at all. 

The reason to ask yourself is you don’t want to make a book that is useless. If it’s art, that’s great. Art doesn’t have to be useful, only beautiful right? Let’s assume if you’ve gone this far with me, you aren’t trying to make a book that you’ll only need two to three copies of for your mom and a friend. If you make a book that is not for anyone, then you might have a pile of boxes in your closet a year after releasing your book. We’ll talk about this when we get to the topic of forecasting. 

In publishing, when a book comes up for the editors to review  they answer the question, “Who is the book for,” with some answers like the following. “Fans of the author.” or  “Fans of the genre.” Or maybe,  “Readers in general.” Even if you are self publishing I behoove you to ask yourself this question.

If you still aren’t clear, fear not, there are even more ways to find out who a book is for by answering questions like the following, “Is this a self purchase or a gift purchase?” Or maybe, “Will the readers be primarily men or women or both?” Women read a lot more than men. In some genres women are the key audience. Of course, age also plays a part. Teens don’t buy titles like, “How to Get Your Retirement Plan Going.” 

Let’s do this with a book cover as an example. John Le Carre’s The Night Manager. The author’s name is bigger than the title. We’ll talk about this later when we get to designing your cover but this is a key. The author is a bigger draw here than the title so this book is clearly for “Fans of John Le Carre.”
It might also be “For Fans of Thrillers,” and most thriller fans know who Le Carre is. The book cover features a stark color palette and an approaching jungle cat. This suggests a thriller for sure! This book might also be for readers in general, because LeCarre has won numerous awards and he has a reputation for being worth your time. You can see that on the cover where they say, “New York Times Bestselling Author.” He also wrote “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” which was a film with a wide viewership.

As you can see, this book has a lot going for it when we ask these questions. What does your book say when you put it under the interrogation lights? If you don’t know the answers to the above questions, your book needs to do some soul searching.

KEY-If you have a product and you can’t think of who it is for, then your product has an existential crisis.