Writing a book is a solitary pursuit. You must sit down at your keyboard and write all by yourself. That can be satisfying, but it can also be dangerous.
Every author runs the risk of creating their own little echo chamber where all their ideas seem wonderful, and all their prose is lucid and insightful. That’s dangerous, indeed, because we can’t do really good work inside the echo chamber. If you stay in the echo chamber you run the risk of writing things you want to write instead of what your readers want and need to hear.
You must avoid the echo chamber and seek help from others. Here’s how.
Get to know your readers.
Get to know your readers. Spend time with them. Have conversations with them. You’ll learn about who they are and their biggest challenges. You’ll discover their pain points and the language they use with each other.
Your book should grow out of your knowledge of your readers.
Draft your marketing copy before you write your book.
Before you start writing, draft the basic book description that will appear on Amazon. Your marketing copy is the promise of your book. It should tell potential readers who the book is for, why they may want to read it, and how their lives will be different after they do.
You can boil that down further. Draft a short elevator speech for your book.
Keep the marketing copy and elevator speech with you when you write. Ask yourself over and over, “Does what I’m writing help keep the promise of the book?”
Write to a specific individual.
Audiences don’t read books. Demographic descriptions don’t read books, either. Only people read books. And they do it one at a time.
When you write to a specific person instead of an audience, a demographic description, or an avatar of some kind you are more likely to be sensitive to your reader’s wants and needs.
Get good feedback.
Everything I’ve written about so far will help you minimize the echo chamber effect. But the key to breaking out and writing a great, relevant book is feedback.
There are three kinds of feedback you’ll need. You’ll need feedback on the details of your writing. We call that editing. You’ll need details on the technical aspects of your ideas. You get that feedback from other experts. But the most important feedback to help you break out of the echo chamber is feedback from people like your ideal reader.
They can tell you if your ideas are interesting or novel. They’ll let you know if they understand what you’ve written. And they’ll help you figure out whether what you have to say is actually important to them.
Beware the author’s echo chamber. Stay out of it if you can. Get helpful feedback from potential readers to shatter the echo chamber’s walls.
Takeaways
We can’t do good work in the echo chamber.
You must avoid the echo chamber and seek help from others.
Your book should grow out of your knowledge of your readers.
Draft your marketing copy before you write your book.
Write to a specific individual.
Get feedback from people like your ideal reader.