A famous quote reads:

“The nicest thing about NOT planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise and is not preceded by a period of worry and depression”

We’ve all heard that if we fail to plan, we plan to fail and this is never more-true than when you are creating a book that you want to sell and earn plenty of money from!

Let’s start with the end in mind here and look at our intended result: to make money.

Now we can backtrack – to do that we need to sell loads of books.  To do that we have to market our book well to the right audience (maybe we have a publisher backing us, maybe not, but marketing your book is essential to generate sales).

So now we know that marketing is essential, but who shall we market TO?  This is where your earlier planning comes in!  If you didn’t do any pre-planning when writing your book you are likely to have wasted more time than necessary.  Your book can still be knocked into shape ready to be marketed and sold but if you have a clear idea of who is going to buy your book from the outset, then you will have more direction when creating the book, greater focus, and the conviction needed to keep going and finish the work when you hit a plateau along the way where the end seems so far off.

Planning takes thought and time and it’s tempting to want to rush in and ‘get on’ with your book rather than spend this careful time in the planning stage, but the clarity that planning gives you will be worth the time spent and you will most likely accelerate your book further, faster for the time spent planning, so a proposition for your book is a must at the early stages of writing.

To write something that will sell, and not just something for your own enjoyment, you will need to address your readers’ number one concern: “what’s in it for me?”  This means you will have to put some structure around your thoughts, to answer their possible questions and this requires some thinking about.  But not only that, you will need to create content that your market will want so that they buy, and to do that you need to know who your market is.

My first book is called “The Virtual Assistant Handbook: insider secrets for starting and running your own profitable VA business” and my intended audience is existing Virtual Assistants and people who are thinking of starting up a VA business.  Because I had an idea of who would be buying the end result, I could ‘chunk down’ further to address their concerns.  I knew that many VAs who enter this profession do so from a career background as a PA, Secretary, Office Manager or Administrator so they would most likely come from a corporate background.  My book contains references to corporates and how the style of communication within them may not necessarily be the right way to speak to their new small business customers.  This is just one example of an area where planning out my end market helped to shape the content of my book.

To plan your book out and find the market that will eventually buy it, you will need to set aside some dedicated time to really think about the issues facing your readers, which direction you want the book to take and how you will get there.  Look at some books with similar content – your ‘competition’ and see who they are marketing to.  Would this audience work for you too?  If there are already books on ‘your’ desired subject, this isn’t a bad thing, it means that there must be a market for this kind of book.  You just have to make yours sufficiently different enough and address something that the others don’t or have a unique angle on the subject to motivate your readers to buy.

By taking time to work on the big picture, you can get on with creating the ‘little picture’ – your creative work.  The time spent planning and researching your end market will be recouped many times over when your book is a best seller!

2009 © Nadine Hill