Why Should Anyone Care About Your Book?

Book positioning = Who will read you and why?

Excellent book positioning intrigues the right readers enough to look inside.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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