An Author’s View on … Making Promises
I recently posted a blog in which I gave some thoughts on USPs (Unique Selling Propositions). I gave it the title An Author’s View on … Promises as the author’s USP is in essence a promise to their readers about the content of their novel.
In order for authors to make a promise that is relevant to their readers, authors need to understand what their readers want. In the commercial world this can be achieved through a number of methods, such as customer surveys or focus groups. For new authors these are not tenable methods as they are time consuming and expensive and getting the correct attendance to a focus group would be especially so and also very difficult to achieve.
However, we are in luck, as there is actually a plethora of virtual focus groups already available to us. These are made up of those angels that leave book reviews on the internet. Take a look, for example, at GoodReads.com and the online book retailers, and you should find “focus groups” made up of reviews that are relevant for your own novels. In respect to my novel, The Battle of Paardeberg: Lord Roberts’ Gambit, this was relatively easy as I was inspired to write the book after reading Michael Shaara’s novel, The Killer Angels. My novel is the same genre as The Killer Angels so I used the reviews about it on Goodreads.com and Amazon as my virtual focus groups.
There are a lot of reviews of The Killer Angels, so it is a nice big focus group. I read the reviews, taking notes of the key comments that were made. I also read the 1 and 2 star reviews, as it is just as important to understand what readers didn’t like about the book. Once I had organised my notes, using a mind map, it became clear that there were two categories of reader needs; those that were generic and which would be relevant to any novel and those that were specific to the military history genre.
With this information and the key wordlist I developed, I was able to create a promise about my own novel in terms of what my potential readers might be looking for. It turned out to be quite long. Nevertheless, I decided to replace my blurb with this description, the rational being as a self-published author my books are only available on-line. Therefore I am not restricted by the length of the blurb having to fit on to the back of a book. Some might still argue that it is too long to be a “true” USP, but I feel that I am aiming my Promise at an intelligent audience that likes to read, not at people who are easily swayed by snappy strap-lines and sound-bites!
My Promise can be read HERE.
