How to Get Clients Before They Ever Open Your Book
& What Happened to Me Yesterday That Proved It
Hey Revenue Writers,
In my latest book, Mini Book Flywheel, I talk a lot about category design, why it is important, and what makes you memorable.
Creating a category is like creating space on their mental shelf for you. Continuing with the shelf and book analogy, you aren’t fighting against other Action Books, you write “Urban Fantasy” and get a whole new shelf all for yourself.
For some they may think “That’s overkill, I don’t need to design a category I’m in a well established market and category.”
And I get that, but you can still design yourself space for you in your potential customers minds using the same principles.
To demonstrate this, I spoke with a potential coaching client yesterday.
I don’t publicly have an offer for my Mini Book Coaching. People reach out and depending what they want I make an offer and we both agree or don’t.
So I didn’t go looking for this client.
My Mini Book Flywheel found him for me.
He reached out to me via DM asking me about “Process and pricing.”
I had to ask him “for what?”
When we talked he explained, “I liked your post, you didn’t pitch slap me, I saw you are based in Key West and thought, ‘That is interesting’, then saw you talked about ‘Mini Books’. I’d been wanting to write a book for 10 years and been thinking I should do short focused books. So it made sense to DM you.“
Turns out he’s been shopping for coaches and support doing self publishing and gotten quotes from people. So he’s in the market for someone to help him.
Let’s just pause and rewind and highlight something,
He didn’t know who I was
He hadn’t read one of my books
He KNEW of other people
So why the heck does it seem like he’s going to hire some random guy of LinkedIn that doesn’t have a fancy website and video telling about how great his coaching is?
My category….
He saw “Mini Books.”
The category did the heavy lifting, not me.
That’s why you need one, even if you didn’t invent it.
I didn’t invent Mini Books, Category Pirates 🏴☠️ did. I just decided to promote the label and category to more people and to formally develop it and instruct people on how to do it.
Now I had expertise in short books writing Insurance books. I just didn’t know to call them Mini books.
When talking with my wife I called them “Pocket Guides” and got so excited 7 or 8 years ago about the idea after writing my 2nd book it’s all I talked about for weeks and months on end.
What’s the point to all this.
You need a category and naming it, framing it (defining it), and claiming it (writing a Mini Book on the category) is CRITICAL to getting you more clients and being remembered.
Whether its a whole new category or you just carve out a memorable identity inside of it, using the principles of category design will help you with your Mini Books and business.
Check out Mini Book Flywheel - Smart Book Edition to be able to interact with the built in AI, fill out the workbook that is integrated, and apply the principles of category design to build your own Mini Book Flywheel all on one page.
Coach Chris Stanley