Know Thy Self, Know Thy Audience: How Will Your Book Serve?

By Sage Cohen

Last month you defined your book's big-picture mission and vision. This month, let's narrow your gaze to get an understanding of the nuts and bolts of your book's offering and the problems it solves in today's market.

1. Describe the service(s) your book provides.
2. Why are these services valuable?
3. What needs does your book satisfy?

For example, following are my answers to these questions for my book, Writing the Life Poetic:

1. Writing the Life Poetic offers accessible tools, information and inspiration to help readers cultivate a poetry reading and writing practice.
2. Many creative people don't have a relationship with poetry because they feel it's too intimidating or incomprehensible. Writing the Life Poetic makes poetry approachable for readers and helps them cultivate a poetic way of being, reading and writing.
3. My book satisfies people's needs to engage with language in a way that is surprising and invigorating. It wakes readers up to the poetry they have inside them and offers a friendly invitation to start writing.

Answer these questions for yourself now. Write your answers quickly, without too much thinking and then put them aside. Come back to them in a day or so. See what resonates, then spend some time fine-tuning. The clearer you are now about what your book will do and why this is of value, the easier it will be to write.

Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry, forthcoming from Writer's Digest Books, and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. Her poetry and essays appear in journals and anthologies including Cup of Comfort for Writers, Oregon Literary Review, Greater Good and VoiceCatcher. Sage holds an MA in creative writing from New York University and teaches the email class Poetry for the People. For more than a decade, she has run the marketing communications firm Sage Communications.