Selling Books: You Don't Really Understand Your Book

A few weeks ago I gave you a simple plan to diagnose one of the three reasons your book isn’t selling. As I mentioned in that post, it’s always one of those three reasons.

But most of the time, it’s reason zero. You don’t actually understand your book.

“But wait,” I hear you saying across the internet. “I wrote the book. What do you mean I don’t understand it?”

The problem is that your book is your baby. You’re far too emotionally attached to it. As I said before, you are the biggest reason your book isn’t selling. If you want to sell your book, you have to get your ego out of the way and assess it honestly. Make no mistake about it - this is hard. But you can’t communicate your book to readers - you can’t even find the right readers - if you don’t understand it properly.

Somewhere out there is a reader who wants a book exactly like the book you’ve written. Actually, no matter how strange this is, I guarantee you there are at least a handful of them. But if you want to find those readers, you have to stop expecting them to speak your language. You have to learn to speak theirs.