The Importance of Setting Goals for Your Book

For the last two weeks, the question I've been continually asking authors is "what are your goals for self-publishing you book?" It's come up on four different projects. We've walked in a room, or gotten on the phone and asked right off "tell us about your book" followed by "what do you want to accomplish?" or "what's your goal?" It's been interesting to see who's had answers for this question. Big corporate clients? They have a ready response. Smaller companies seem to have a more difficult time focusing on the big picture. (It could be the nature of small companies and the strong teams of "do-ers" that most successful small businesses have, but that's a whole other blog post.)

When we ask you the goal question, know that the best answer is that you have them. Good answers? To market our company, to extend our brand, to add a touch to a high touch sale, to evangelize a message we're passionate about, tell people our style, give something back to our clients, give our philosophy to our client base, reposition ourselves in our industry, provide specialized information to help support/close a sale. Some good answers are less corporate -- to spend my retirement/time-off/2nd job selling and promoting my idea/message/advice to help people, to build my business, support my speaking, expand my credibility in my industry. To break even, to make money, to sell x-number of copies. These all worthy goals. "To have an expensive business card" is as worthy a goal as to "expand our sales by 50%". This I can work with.

What are bad answers? The worst answer is when you don't have a goal at all. Trust me, as an editor, I know when people are avoiding the issue -- and a bad answer is when I ask about goals and only get how cool the content will be. Or how there's budget and the CEO wants it. Then I get avoidance. Hey, I'm only trying to make you look good -- the CEO may sign off on a very big line item on the budget now, but what's he going to think in two years when those boxes are still stacked up in the storage room and he's wondering why they ever spent all that money on those crazy books.

Why are goals critically important to your project's success? Your goals will shape your book's content, its audience, its cover, its form, its interior design, its price, its market, everything. If you don't have a goal, you don't have a book. Or, rather, you can have a book but it's going to be an expensive hodge podge of text and pictures. Goals also help insure everyone is on the same page and that the entire team is working towards one objective. The author needs to understand the goal as much as each individual editor. It's going to be the first thing you need to tell each member or your team and its going to be critical for all your marketing efforts. Don't think you have a goal but know how you want to market your book? Tell me about that -- because sometimes that helps me understand what you're trying to accomplish self-publishing a book. However, if you're an editor or project manager and say to us "I don't know what they want to do with the books when they're done". Whoa, Nellie.

Self-publishing is a great endeavor -- and what's wonderful about it is how it opens up whole new avenues to authors to publish books for such a wide variety of reasons. But what just makes me want to cry is when I see companies allocate huge budgets to book projects that seem to just be a vanity gig -- or a pet project someone has sold them on -- and they don't have any idea what they're actually going to *do* with the books, or why they're doing them. They become expensive mistakes and put them off ever wanting to a book project again, when a properly focused book could actually be a huge help to them. So, set your goals. Ask. If you're an editor or freelance project manager, find out. But give it some thought, and know it's probably going to be one of the first questions I ask. You're going to increase your chances of publishing a successful project and you'll love us for making you look good.