Hi there,

Welcome to a new edition of Reedsy's marketing newsletter! After a series on Amazon Attribution (you can catch up on it here if you missed it), I wanted to turn our attention back to one of the most basic — and yet most important — parts of marketing: product-market fit.

I was watching a great video by author coach Becca Syme a few weeks back on TikTok, which immediately resonated with me. You can watch it here if you have the app, but in her own words, the fundamental gist is this:

“If you have either promoted or advertised your book to an extent where it has been potentially read, or downloaded, or purchased, by thousands of people; and you have 10, 15 reviews, and they’re all 5 stars — our temptation is to say ‘everyone who read it loved it’, because the reviews that exist are all 5 stars. 

But when you have widely distributed it and it does not have requisite numbers of reviews, everyone who read it likely didn’t finish it.”  

For a lot of authors, this may be a hard truth to hear, but it's an important one. 

As authors, we are often quick to blame the marketing. "Everyone who read my book loved it. It's just that I'm not good at promoting it." But 99% of the time, this assertion is wrong. Or rather, it misidentifies the problem. 

If everyone who had read your book truly loved it, you wouldn’t have to market it at all — your readers would be spreading word of mouth for you. Your only job would be to sit back and watch the royalty checks come in.

This is obviously a utopian situation, but the point is: marketing a book that is perfectly right for its audience is easy (as long as you know who that audience is). 

We have a word for this in the startup world: "product-market fit." It is the first and foremost, non-negotiable condition for success. If your product isn't a perfect fit for your market, you will forever struggle to get customers.

The same goes for a book: if marketing feels like an uphill struggle — if everything you try fails to produce meaningful results — then it means you don't have product-market fit. Even if a few random readers loved it and gave you five stars, that is not a sign that your book is great. 

By this, I don't mean that it's poorly written, or poorly edited. I simply mean that it does not captivate its audience. Even the best of writers, and the most renowned publishing houses, regularly release books that don't find an audience. And more often than not, they have no way of knowing that beforehand.

No matter how closely you research your genre, write to market, revise and refine your manuscript, there is always a chance that, for one reason or another, it will fail to grab readers. This chance factor is the reason why most books published traditionally don't earn out their advances. And this is not a testament of their authors' writing or storytelling ability (or lack thereof)! It's just part of publishing.

"If product-market fit is so important, how do I know if my book has it?" 

Trust me: usually, you’ll know. When a book is a perfect fit for its market, everything becomes so much easier that you’ll immediately realize you’ve created something special. Your Amazon Ads will convert better. Your Facebook ads will have a cheaper CPC. Your price promos will drive more sales. And more importantly: when you’re not actively promoting your book, it’ll keep selling.

What’s more important is being able to realize — and accept — when a book, or a series, just doesn’t have that product-market fit. If you don’t, you run the risk of spending countless time, money, and energy, trying to push a boulder that just won’t budge (I wrote about what happens when you try to advertise a book like that in the past).

So, how do you diagnose a case of missing product-market fit? You can watch for the following symptoms.

• Has your book has been downloaded or purchased by over a thousand readers, yet has fewer than 10 reviews? Or do fewer than 1% of readers who buy/download your book end up reviewing it?
• In the case of a series, is your read-through from book one to book two under 50%?
• When you stop promoting or advertising your book, do your sales immediately fall flat?

The first two are signs that most readers don’t finish your book. In the third case, they might finish it, but they don’t love it enough to spread the word.

What happens if you ticked one (or several) of the above boxes? You move on. If you want to make a living writing, you’ll need to write several books. And many of those won’t reach product-market fit.

So if you think you’re missing product-market fit with a book, the best thing you can do is to accept it, and write the next one. 

That said, if you really, really want this one book to succeed, then my best advice is to get an editorial assessment from a professional editor (especially if you haven’t gotten one before). A good editor will be able to tell you why your book might fail to resonate with your audience, and how to fix it. 

Sometimes, it might be a glaring but simple enough mistake to fix — for example, if you killed a dog in chapter two (spoiler alert: you should never kill the dog!!!). Other times, it might require an entire revamp of the story.

But in any case, it’s better to know and fix the problem — or move on — than to keep pouring money indefinitely into trying to market a book that just isn’t fit for it.

I know this may sound depressing, so to close today’s newsletter, I want to reiterate something I wrote above: when a book is a perfect fit for its market, everything becomes so much easier that you’ll immediately realize you’ve created something special. If you persevere in your writing endeavors, you will get there, and you will experience that marvelous feeling of publishing a book that just starts selling itself.

Happy writing, and happy marketing,

Ricardo

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