Peter Winick tells authors to stop chasing bestseller lists and define success on their own terms. Instead of broad metrics, aim for concrete goals like getting your book to a specific group of 100 people. A clear definition lets you build a focused marketing plan without burning resources.
Hi, this is Peter Winick from Thought Leadership Leverage, and I wanted to share an observation I've had with you today. And the observation, and I see this pretty often in my work, is someone's writing a book or they're about to write a book or they've just written a book, and now they, they're bringing it out into the world and they're overwhelmed. They're overwhelmed because they didn't realize that they're going to be in charge of the marketing of that book. They're gonna be in charge of getting that book out there. They're gonna be in charge of some of the tactical things that you need to do in terms of putting up a website and the promotion and all those type of things. And it's easy to get sucked into the tactical and all those kind of things. And what I always recommend is you pause for a minute and you ask yourself, what does success look like for your book? And success for your book doesn't have to be what success is like for someone else. For someone else, that could be numbers. It could be, I wanna sell X number of units. I wanna be on the New York Times bestseller list. I want it to be placed in a bookstore. Whatever the case may be. Oftentimes you can generate success from your book in small ways that might not be as grandiose, might not be as sexy. It could be success for your book is, I wanna get it into the hands of these 100 people. And it could be by title, it could be by name, it could be by demographic, by psychographic, by industry that they're in. And if you get those books into those 100 hands and those people start having conversations and they start sharing your thoughts and sharing your work, that is how success could start. So my point to you is think about what your success means and develop and design and execute a plan that's aligned to what your success is, not what someone else's definition is, and you're more likely to get there. And you're more likely to get there in incremental steps and you're more likely to get there without the expenditure of an enormous amount of resources. Thanks so much.
