An Author’s View on … Promises

Unique Selling Propositions or Unique Selling Points (USP) are the bees’ knees in the marketing world! Corbett Barr in his blog The Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Unique Selling Proposition submits that deciding on a USP is possibly the most important decision that can be made for a business. Authors, as is pointed out by author Brenna Aubrey, ‘should treat their writing career as a serious business from the start’ and therefore USPs are as relevant to the marketing of books as any other field of business.

In respect to defining a USP, it could be argued that authors have an advantage in that, as stressed by Mark Coker in his book, The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, ‘your writing is unique. There’s nothing like it in the world’. However, this encouraging point is somewhat undone by the fact that readers tend to have preferred genres. Through this lumping of books into genres, the author’s unique piece of work can become like so many others. The need to differentiate your work is therefore important. Paraphrasing Barr, in the context of selling books, if you can make your book stand out from the crowd, everything will be easier. To achieve this, Barr continues, instead of shouting “Hey, look at me, I have a great book as well,” authors should be saying, “My book is different because of X”. But how does one define “X”?

A suggestion from Barr is that authors need to look at their books from their readers’ point of view. To achieve this you need to know your customer. Greg Ciotti (5 Ways to Develop a Unique Selling Proposition) would suggest that authors must identify and appeal unashamedly to their ideal readers. Dan Shewan (How to Create a Ferocious Unique Selling Proposition) says (paraphrasing again) authors need to get inside their readers heads – they need to know almost everything about their “perfect” reader. Once authors have identified the type of person that is their core reader then they can think about developing a USP around their readers’ needs.

Jim Kukral’s helpfully identifies in his webinar, The Reasons You Aren’t Selling any Books some of the questions authors need to ask when developing their USP. These include; what is different, unique and better about your book(s) compared to others, how might it create an emotional reaction in readers, what would make readers think they should read your book(s) and how will it entertain them?

The author’s USP is, in essence, their promise to their readers about the quality and content of their books. It is one of the means of developing trust with their readers, which, as described by Coker, is a key aspect of marketing.