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17 Seconds to Buying a Book: Will Your Reader Act That Fast?

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I subscribe to the newsletter Shelf Awareness Pro, which is a newsletter for booksellers. It often features books soon to be published, news about successful bookstore events, and tales of booksellers fighting the good fight. It’s one of my secret weapons for learning about the publishing industry. Many times, because of Shelf Awareness, I will know about a book, even if I have never seen it, never read a review about it, and never read it.

The Shelf Awareness newsletter gets rolled up into an aggregate email I get with all my newsletters — called Unroll Me. The newsletters appear as little icons, three across. So they are very small representations of the very top of the newsletter. On busy days, I do nothing more than open the Unroll Me email, spend three seconds scanning it, and move on. If something doesn’t catch my eye, I move onto other things.

On September 16, I had a very busy day. I thought for sure it would be one of those, “three seconds and I’m done” days. But I opened Unroll Me, scanned it, saw something that indeed caught my eye. I clicked on the ShelfAwareness tab, and within 17 seconds, had pre-ordered a book which is coming out in December.

The question is, WHY did I do that? And what can a writer do make sure your reader or customer acts that decisively and that fast?

1.) Know your audience.

I mean REALLY know them. What keeps them up at night? What do they talk to their friends about? What about their therapists? What do they tell know one? And what do they need from you — and I mean exactly?

Here is what I saw and clicked on:

I use the phrase “in case you get hit by a bus” all the time. It’s a thing I worry about and think about constantly — the sudden end to life. There is no real reason why this thought occupies the space it does in my brain, and it is nothing new for me. When I was 25 and published my first book, Altared States, the first line was, “I’m about to be married and all I can think about is death.” No bus metaphor, but the same idea.

Throughout my life, I have deeply connected to books about death and grief — everything from C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed to Kitchen Table Wisdom by Dr. Rachel Remen to Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die to Abigail Thomas’ A Three Dog Life to The Rules of Inheritance, Being Mortal, When Breath Becomes Air. My “death and grief” bookshelf is deep and robust.

And when I say there is no real reason for this, what I mean is that I did not lose a parent early, or a sibling or a best friend, or a child. I had breast cancer when I was 35, and wrote a book about it, and that experience no doubt contributed to my interested in death. But death has, for the most part, been a thing that comes in its due time in my life — something that naturally occurs when it is largely expected, not something that comes suddenly and without warning.

But I think about death all the time — and often use the “if you get hit by a bus” line. Lately, I have been thinking this way even more than usual, since my mom has lost her memory and I hold Power of Attorney and I have a lot of obligations related to that. So these 12 words about being hit by a bus spoke directly to something that matters to me in general, and matters to me in particular, and it spoke to me in a way that resonated. Will I be ready???

You have to be clear about who your reader is, and you have to speak directly to them. They need to feel as if you are in their head.

2.) Know what your audience needs

Naturally, I clicked through the ad, and this is what I saw next:

Now I have a lot of these things in place — wills and medical directives and protections around assets. All covered. Check. But that is beside the point. What I want is to hear someone’s simple, stress-free program for being even more prepared. The fact that someone even HAS such a program is comforting to me. I want to be immersed in the idea that you can control this uncontrollable thing and not be blindsided. I hate being blindsided. So these words spoke not just to my fear and anxiety but to the promise of what I can do about.

3.) Give your reader (or client) a path to transformation

I clicked through again and landed on the Edelweiss entry for this book. (Edelweiss is a site that publishers use to market and sell to the trade — kind of like an online catalog.) You can see the book jacket for this book, the comp titles for this book, the author bios, the page layouts, the TOC. I mean, be still my heart. It’s like a One Page Book Summary and a Blueprint for a Book displayed there for us all to see and study. (These are tools central to Author Accelerator’s Book Coach Training and Certification program — the things to help a writer get at the fundamental elements of their book so they can write a book that matters.

I went right to the TOC and instantly saw that I was in the hands of someone who had really thought through this topic, and who knew what they were doing. The TOC itself tells a story of transformation — from scattershot handling of these important topics to mastery. From dealing with stuff to dealing with your legacy — which is, of course, the real concern for anyone thinking about their life and death. Is what I am doing meaningful in any way? What impact will I have had on this earth? Have I done enough?

I mean, yes, I want to know how to manage my entire family’s digital passwords, but I always want to get at the deeper issues, and this book is going to take me there.

This is what everyone wants, no matter what you are writing. Readers want to be led on a journey, to be taken from here to there, to go down a path that will take away their confusion or anxiety or ignorance.

Here is a snapshot of the TOC on the Edelweiss page:

4.) Tell a story

I read about three lines of the description of this book and learned that it comes from a business that grew out of a tragic story of an untimely death:

That story convinced me. Someone turned their pain into a way for others to learn.

With any book, readers ask, “Why should I listen to you? Why should I pay attention to you? Why YOU?” Your story — the particular way you have lived and gone through the world, and the particular way you approach your topic — is the answer that seals the deal.

This means you have to put yourself into your message and your book — heart and soul. You have to make sure your reader can feel your passion and your deep level why. Which means you have to have one to begin with.

5.) How fast can you get them to buy?

I didn’t even finish reading the description of the book. I clicked over to my favorite online bookshop and pre-ordered it. All in all, it took about 17 seconds to go from my inbox to a purchase.

This is the way these things usually happen. If I hear about a book, or someone tells me about a book, I usually don’t deliberate. I either don’t care or I’m all in — and fast.

This is what you need to think about as you are writing. How fast will your audience know that you are speaking to them? How fast will they know what you are offering? How fast can you get them to want to put down their money?

It takes a great deal of work to get to those simple but powerful results — whether you are working on a website page, book jacket copy, or the book itself — and most of that work comes before you write a single word.

6.) Get strategic about your creative work

Abraham Lincoln said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” A book takes far longer than six hours. For a writer, it would be more like, “Give me a year to write a book, and I will spend the first three months figuring out what I want to write, who I want to speak to, what transformation I will take them on, and what I want them to feel when they read my book.”

Not quite as catchy, but just as true.

Author Accelerator just launched our nonfiction book proposal training course. We teach our coaching students how to help writers ask and answer these kinds of fundamental questions, and how to support writers throughout the book development process. They are similar to the questions we ask in our fiction course, too. We’re trying to raise the bar on book coaching and would love to have you come see what it’s all about. Visit bookcoaches.com/abc for a series of free videos.


17 Seconds to Buying a Book: Will Your Reader Act That Fast? was originally published in No Blank Pages on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.


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