Developing Your Topic and Unique Angle
Let’s play the hypothetical game here for a bit. Let’s suppose you want to write a book. You have a ton of expertise in your chosen subject, and you’re ready to plunk all that knowledge down into a well-written and well-researched book. Now, we’re going to skip all the middle stuff, and you have a book that you’re incredibly proud of. You hit up some local book stores, you get it on the shelves, and you market it heavily through your social media and your newsletter.
It sells about 7 copies – all to friends and family that know and love you, but let’s be honest, they’re not actually going to read the book.
Choosing the right topic is important, you have to write about what you know. But there’s a little more to it. You need the perfect angle, the narrowed down topic, and you need to weave in your personal stories that create a book that’s *chef’s kiss* to read.
Just like in business, when you narrow down your niche, you actually stand out more. And it can actually be quite challenging to narrow it down, because you feel like you’re missing out on some people who would otherwise read your saga.
Let’s dive in. As I teach you how to write a book, you’ll be able to niche down like a pro.
Narrow Down Your Niche for Maximum Impact
In the world of fiction, there are a lot of crossovers. Star Trek did it when they visited planets that were straight out of a medieval storyline. Others have done it when they combine two seemingly distinct genres, and wrap them into something a big broader – Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, anyone? The thing is, though, by merging two niches, they’ve actually created an entirely new niche. Those who read about Pride and Prejudice would never read a zombie story. Those who read about zombies wouldn’t pick up Jane Austen’s classic. Squish the two together, though, and suddenly you have a market for people who want to feel sophisticated, but find classic literature too stuffy and boring.
No matter what you do for your career, you likely cater to certain niches so you can hopefully stand out in a crowded job market.
Teachers do this. Those teaching youngsters have special licenses that allow them to teach up to grade 5. Developing their teaching skills, these instructors know how to talk, inspire, and mold those young minds. However, if you want to teach middle school, high school, or college level, you have to narrow your niche. And you narrow it even further. Elementary school teachers teach all subjects, but middle school and above, they hone their skills for one (maybe two) subjects.
Doctors do this. There are some general practitioners that operate in nearly all fields of medicine, but they have narrowed their niche to work with those that need a primary care doctor. Others, like surgeons, focus on cutting people open. They can narrow even more, heart surgeons, neurosurgeons, osteo-something something surgeons. They know that narrowing that niche means they can focus on just what they do best.
Business coaches do this. Those that try to be overall business coaches that just work with anyone often struggle to get clients. Coaches that have narrowed their niche, however, attract more. Suppose you were a dentist and wanted to grow your practice, would you enlist the help of Joe Blow Business Coaching, or Joe Blow Dental Practice Coaching? The latter specializes in exactly what you need.
The same is true with your book. When you’re focused on providing incredible value to one niche, you get seen as the expert in that niche, rather the generalist that happens to dabble in a niche. You’re building credibility, growing trust, and becoming the go-to person. Fun fact – if you feel strongly about several different niches, you can write multiple books; each one focusing on a different niche.
How do you narrow it down though? How do you decide where to focus?
I like this exercise, which stems from identifying your target audience. Who have you spoke to or worked with in the past that you really enjoyed? What industry were they in? What made you love working with them? Super simple to extrapolate that into your narrowed niche focus.
Identify Your Expertise to Show off Skills
If you’re a business coach, you likely work with a variety of different clients in all sorts of industries. Maybe you’ve narrowed things down a bit, and you love working with dentists, lawyers, small retail, and construction. That’s a wide range of very narrowed focuses. How do you choose which one to target with your book?
You have to evaluate your expertise. Maybe you love working with lawyers, but all that legal mumbo jumbo and convoluted law stuff is kind of a pain. You find that you’re working more on learning what the law firm even does, and less time working on how to help them. You know that your expertise in this area is lacking, and you know that it’s one where you probably should hang up your hat.
Ask yourself: what do people come to me for help with the most?
Without diving into too many examples here, this should be quite straightforward (unless you’re just starting out, in which case you might have to go through a little bit of guess work). As a copywriter, people come to me with help on the copy for their websites. As a blogger, they need help showing off their authority and driving traffic with SEO. As a ghostwriter they need help writing their book.
Next, check your own background. What experiences do you have? What degrees have you earned? What career wins, certifications, or credentials do you hold?
Maybe you’re a wellness professional, and you’ve been certified as a dietician. Your expertise is guiding you toward writing a book with a niched focus on those who want to better understand how their bodies interact and work with the food they take in.
Depending on how you plan to use this book, you’ll want to focus your niche to exactly the intended outcome. For example, suppose you’re that wellness professional, and you want to book speaking engagements. You can focus your niche to something that would appeal to office workers, so you can apply to be the key-note speaker at annual meetings because not only do you know exactly what to say, but you’ve literally written the book on it.
Understand What Your Target Audience Wants to Hear
Of course, the perfect niched down topic and perfect angle mean a whole lot of nothing if you’re not focused on the right audience. I can write a book about how to write a book, and then if I try to get in front of a bunch of stay-at-home parents who want nothing more than to raise a loving family in a healthy home, well, I’m barking up the wrong proverbial tree.
To really know how to write your book, you have to really know who will ultimately read your book, and why.
Part of the battle is already done for you. Niching down that topic means that you already know who is going to read the book. You just have to pinpoint a few more things to really drive home your point in the right way. Writing a book for soccer enthusiasts will be very different if the audience is professional soccer coaches, or participants in youth soccer teams.
To do this, you have to create personas. Who are these people that will ultimately read your book? This can be highly detailed, describing an actual individual, or it can be a bit broader, describing those in a group. Let me explain.
For my blogging clients, I love working with personal injury lawyers. These are generally men, in their late 30s to early 50s. They have an established practice already, understand tech, and usually have a team of lawyers working in the office. They’re smart enough to do it themselves, but also smart enough to know they shouldn’t do it themselves. They want regular work done and hands off so they don’t have to review anything.
That’s the individual persona.
But I also have blogging clients that don’t quite fit this description. I don’t have that audience narrowed down to an individual persona, but rather more of a group. These are often those who had parents who started the business, but now the adult children are running it. An established business that did well over the years, but the aging parents were resistant to moving things into the digital world. As the kids took over, they realized the need for quality content and an online presence, and I work with them to ensure it’s done properly.
How do you identify the target audience that will ultimately read your book?
Start by identifying the pain points that the book will answer. What problem does your book solve? Starting with the end, you can work your way backward to figure out who has those pains, and now you know exactly who you’ll want to keep in mind while you write.
Remember, There is Nothing New Under the Sun
Of course, there is the issue that everything that you have to say, has already been said. There are very few truly unique takes out there. Which is why I refer back to Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” (NIV). Life goes in cycles, today we say that history repeats itself.
So, if most topics have been covered, and anything you’ve learned was learned by someone else before you, how do you create something truly unique? How do you develop your unique angle on a proven (old) concept?
It’s all about turning a book with facts and figures, into a book that’s a story about who you are, what you’ve learned, and how you’ve applied it. While the concepts may not be new or unique, your take on them absolutely is.
For example, let’s say you want to write a book about leadership. You study Stephen Covey, John Maxwell, and Simon Sinek. You incorporate their ideas and concepts into your leadership style, and as things go along you think, “I should write a book about what I know.”
Except, you know what you know because you learned it from books that are already written.
But you don’t need to merely regurgitate the concepts from those books; they already exist. What people want to read about is you. Tell your stories. Explain your failures, describe your wins. Show how you messed up because you failed to include one of those concepts you studied intensely, and then how you pivoted and were able to ultimately find great success.
So, What’s Your Unique Angle?
Here’s a little mini-exercise you can undertake.
Consider what you’ve been through, where have you succeeded and where do you struggle? Consider what got you those successes, and what you fail to apply that ultimately results in struggle. I bet you have at least a handful of ideas – those could be fleshed out into full-length chapters in your book.
To keep it from getting too dry, though, you need to really dive in deep and find the real story. It wasn’t long ago that I read an autobiography that just didn’t hit right. There were too issues with it. One, it was all narrative. Zero dialogue in the entire thing, just the author telling his side of the story. Two, there were very few losses. Some were woven in, but he set them up to look less like a failure, and more like it was just a stepping stone. His wins were rather unbelievable – things like, “I started this company and it was a raging success after just a couple of months, a testimony to how if you set your mind to something it will succeed.” Snooze.
As you’re finding your perfect angle, keep these concepts in mind:
- Use personal stories, including dialogue, to illustrate the concepts you’ve learned.
- Dive deeper into overlooked, or niche, topics.
- Show how a diversified approach ends up teaching better lessons.
That last one could be something like finding business ownership lessons while babysitting your nephew – things that don’t seem connected, but you can still learn from them.
What are some common concepts and topics in your industry, that you have a unique spin on because of your personal accounts and experience?
Give Your Reader Actionable and Easy Takeaways
When you’re working on setting up your book, you want the reader to take action when they’re done. Suppose you’re writing something like Harry Potter; the action you are looking for isn’t so much as “sign up for my course that teaches you how to make eleventy billion dollars online in less than a week!” and more of setting the stage so when the reader is done, they’re searching for the sequel because it was just that good.
The best way to keep those readers engaged, even after they finish reading the book, is to give them easy takeaways and actionable steps.
Suppose you have a book about your commercial real estate business, and how you grew your client list from basically nothing, to something incredible in just a couple of years (you could title this book Unknown to Unstoppable, perhaps). At the end of each chapter, you could put some action steps, maybe a checklist, and some room for people to write their own experience. Sort of combining a workbook and a regular book into one.
If you’re not keen on the checklists and worksheets, you can just tell the reader what they should do.
At the end of each chapter, put a little section like “Where do you go from here?” Then the reader can easily learn what they need to do to apply the knowledge they have recently learned. Some of the best books I’ve read actually summarized the concepts at the end. They made a nice little bullet point list, and then the reader could easily apply each thing to their own life.
Where Do You go From Here?
So, you’ve reviewed your concepts and gone through these key points. You have:
- Narrowed your Niche
- Identified your Expertise
- Created a Target Audience
- Pulled out Personal Stories
- Crafted a Unique Angle
- Figured out Takeaways
Now what? We still haven’t really started writing the book – this is all the prep work that goes into it. The next step is to read the full guide on how to write a book (and publish like a pro). And then it’s decision time.
Are you going to tackle this book on your own (with expert guidance from a published author, of course)? Or have someone else do all the heavy lifting for you? If you want to learn how to write a book, sign up for the Author’s Mastery Academy by clicking the big button below. If you want to see what it would take for me to do the heavy lifting as a ghostwriter, book some time to chat about your project using my calendar below the button.