Why Every Author Needs a Vision Statement
by Randy Ingermanson
Advanced Fiction Writing
- The size of your Target Audience.
- The Quality of your writing.
I hope it’s clear why these are factors in your success.
It’s easier to find True Fans of your books if you’re writing for a large Target Audience. So a large Target Audience makes your marketing easier.
And people in your Target Audience are more likely to become rabid fans of your books if your Quality is high. (I define Quality to be “how well you delight your Target Audience.”)
Note that different Target Audiences like different things, which means they define Quality in different ways.
So your first task is to define your Target Audience. (This doesn’t take long, and we’ll tackle this today.)
Then your second task will be to increase your Quality. (This will consume you for the rest of your life, but there’s a process for improving your Quality, and we’ll discuss that next month in this column.)
Who Is Your Target Audience?
I define your Target Audience to be the set of people who would like the kind of book you’re writing, if only they knew it existed.
So your Target Audience is much larger than your set of True Fans. When you start out, you have zero True Fans, but you may have millions of potential True Fans—people in your Target Audience. As your career moves forward, people in your Target Audience will find your books and become your True Fans.
It’s tempting to think that your Target Audience is nothing more nor less than readers for your category.
So if you write mysteries, for example, you might think that your Target Audience is “people who read mysteries.”
The problem is that this is too vague. There are a lot of different kinds of mysteries. Readers who like police procedurals might not like cozy mysteries, and vice versa.
So it’s important to ask what separates the mysteries you write from all the other mysteries in the world.
Maybe you write mysteries set in Kenya. Or mysteries featuring an eccentric British detective with an addiction to cocaine. Or mysteries where the detective is a cat.
Think hard about what makes your novels different.
Can you define a subcategory that your novel fits in? Or a subsubcategory? One with maybe only a few authors in it?
Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to write your Vision Statement.
Writing Your Vision Statement
Vision Statements have a bad reputation. They became popular a few decades ago in the buzzwordy business world, and they are notorious for being vague and useless.
Don’t write that kind of Vision Statement. Write one that’s precise and useful.
If you’ve identified the subsubcategory that your novels fit in, writing your Vision Statement is now very simple. Just fill in the blank below with your subsubcategory:
“I want to be the best writer of <your subsubcategory> in the world.”
That is certainly precise. Why is it useful?
Because it helps you make the hard decisions you’ll face in your writing career.
If you launch one or two or three books in your subsubcategory, and if they don’t sell like lightning, your agent and/or your editor is going to call you one day and say, “Hey, I just had this great idea. Your books aren’t doing as well as we’d hoped, but we think it would be cool if you wrote this other kind of a book that is selling really well.”
It’s possible that’s a good idea. Your agent loves you after all. Your editor loves you. They’re both looking out for your success.
But the odds are high that it’s actually a bad idea. Because neither your agent nor your editor is you, and they aren’t the person who has to write the book. If you write a book that you’re just not that interested in, you’re going to be miserable, and the book will very likely sell even worse than the books you wrote already.
So your Vision Statement is there to help you decide whether to say “yes” or “no.”
If the book they ask you to write fits in with your Vision Statement, then it makes sense to say “yes.”
If it doesn’t fit your Vision Statement, then either say “no” or change your Vision Statement so it matches what they asked you to write. (The polite way to say “no” is like this: “That sounds like it would be a super book, but it just doesn’t fit my Vision Statement, and I don’t think I could write it the way it should be written. So thank you, but I have to reluctantly say no.”)
A Tale of Two Books
Once upon a time, my agent called me and suggested a book I might write. (This was long ago, when I still had an agent.) I didn’t have a Vision Statement then, but I do now, and the book matched my current Vision Statement exactly. I wrote that book and it’s the one book of all the books I ever wrote that makes me happiest.
Another time, that same agent called me in a conference call with my editor, and they suggested another book I might write. The proposed book didn’t match my current Vision Statement at all. But since I had no Vision Statement at the time, I lacked any reason to say “no,” so I decided to give it a shot. It did sound like fun. Almost a year later, I delivered the book, but my editor rejected it. I rewrote it and delivered it again, and the editor rejected it again and cancelled the project. And I paid back the advance. I worked on the book again a few years later, planning to indie-publish it. About that time, I finally developed my Vision Statement, and I realized the book didn’t fit in. At all. It was a fine book. It was a good story. But it was a diversion from what I really wanted to write. So I decided not to publish it.
Brand Confusion
When every book you write fits your Vision Statement, your True Fans know what to expect. You are the author who writes the kind of book that your True Fans love. Bit by bit, you grow your set of True Fans, and you deliver the goods, over and over and over.
Suppose you then write a book that doesn’t fit your Vision Statement. Many of your True Fans will like it, but a fraction of them won’t. Because a fraction of your True Fans just don’t like that particular kind of story.
And now you’ve committed the sin of “brand confusion.” You’ve led them to believe you write one kind of book, and then you sold them something else, and they only learned it was something else after they bought it and started reading.
Imagine you walk into your favorite ice cream shop and order your favorite flavor of ice cream. Because you really, really, really want ice cream today. Your special flavor. And they take your money and hand you … a pizza. That would be weird. You didn’t come in for pizza. You came in for ice cream. Pizza is fine. You probably like pizza, but possibly you don’t. Either way, you suddenly don’t trust them quite so much. You expressly ordered ice cream, but they gave you pizza. What will they give you next, and will you like it? Now you aren’t sure. Next time you want ice cream, you’ll go to a shop that gives you what you ask for.
That’s brand confusion.
You don’t like it when somebody does that to you. Treat your readers the way you want to be treated yourself.
Your Vision Statement will protect you from brand confusion. Write your Vision Statement and stick to it.
Homework:
- What is the main category you write? (Romance or mysteries or thrillers or SF or fantasy or whatever.)
- What is the subcategory within that main category?
- What is the subsubcategory?
- How many competitors do you have within that subsubcategory?
- If you have more than 10 competitors, can you refine your subsubcategory even more—until you have fewer than 10 competitors?
- Define your subsubcategory as precisely as you can. What kind of readers would love that exact kind of book?
- Now write your Vision Statement. “I want to be the best writer of in the world.” Print it out and hang it where you’ll see it every day.
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