If the free article, What If Your Book Doesn’t Need More Visibility? left you wondering whether your book has a visibility problem or a relevance problem, this is where we put the idea to work.
Visibility gets you noticed. Relevance gives people a reason to care.
Once people care, everything shifts. Your book becomes easier to recommend. Your message becomes easier to remember. Your speaking topics become easier to pitch. Bulk sales conversations feel natural, because you are no longer convincing someone to care about a book. You are showing them how the book connects to something they already care about.
This is what makes it a completely different kind of marketing.
The best way to test your book’s relevance is not to ask whether the book is good. You already believe in your work (I’m making that assumption). Instead, ask whether the right people can see why it matters to them.
Here are seven questions to find out.
1. Who has the strongest reason to care about your book right now?
Start here, because broad audiences create broad messages, and broad messages are easy to ignore.
“Leaders” is too broad. “Women” is too broad. “Business owners” is too broad. Even “people preparing for retirement” can be too broad.
The sharper question: what is happening in someone’s life or work when your book becomes especially useful?
A book about leadership grows more relevant when aimed at newly promoted managers who suddenly answer for people they used to work alongside. A book about retirement grows more relevant when aimed at professionals who built decades of identity around a career and now face an open question about what comes next. A book about financial confidence grows more relevant when aimed at women rebuilding their finances after divorce.
The narrower the situation, the faster a reader recognizes themselves in it.
Ask:
Who experiences this problem most intensely?
Who feels the consequences of ignoring it?
Who is already looking for help?
Who has a reason to act now?
Your best audience is not always the biggest one. It is often the one with the strongest reason to care.