Know Thy Self, Know Thy Audience: Defining the Experience Your Book Will Provide

By Sage Cohen

Last month you considered how the book you intend to write compares to similar books that it will be selling against. Now that you have a good sense of what's out there and how your book measures up, we're going to dig a little deeper into why readers should purchase yours! Ask yourself:

1. How do you want your book to be perceived in the marketplace?
2. Please use as many adjectives as you can think of to describe the personality of your book.
3. Write a sentence or two (called a value proposition) that defines what is exceptional about your book and sets it apart from the rest.

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

1. I want my book to be regarded as an approachable DIY creative companion that anyone can easily use to start writing poems and enjoying poetry.
2. Writing the Life Poetic is: fun, friendly, inspiring, informative, whimsical, inviting, easy to understand, bite-sized (chapters), poem-generating!
3. Writing the Life Poetic offers a friendly, fun initiation into the joys of reading and writing poetry. Craft, process and content lessons are all designed to invite readers to tune into the poetry of their lives -- then get it down on the page.

Your turn! Remember: this is your chance to expand the very valuable thinking you did last month into the more abstract realm of how your book feels. Have fun defining what kind of experience it will create for readers, and why they will want to seek out such an experience!

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.