You’ve got something special to share in a book. It could be to help people with your expertise, tell your fascinating life story, or even explore a topic that everyone’s talking about.

But there’s a niggle in your mind. A suspicion that you’ve missed something special for your readers. You know you’ve got a world-changing message to put out, but will your book reflect that?

You need to know one thing. What’s the gold in your book?

Because readers don’t buy books. Really. They buy solutions which encourage them to feel good. Even if your book advocates that they do some hard work to get there, they’ll do that happily if they know there’s one golden reason for buying it.

It may be to learn something important. It may be to make their business more profitable. Heck, it may be just to feel better. But if you don’t know what this central, golden nugget is, you won’t know how to decide what to write, or what to say about your book when you market it. And that would be a great shame.

So let’s dive in to find four ways of finding the gold in your book.

The ‘even if’ rule

Say you’ve written a book about how to create a profitable online business. Your readers want to know how to sell online. Obviously!

But that’s not all they want to discover. They want to learn how to sell online, even if:

• they’ve never done it before;
• they hate social media, or
• they haven’t got an online product yet.

You see where I’m going? The ‘even if’ bit is what makes your book meaningful for your potential readers and appealing enough for them to buy it.

Work out why you’re special

What does your existing audience say really helps them about what you do? Because that’s the point you need to be reflecting in your book, and in how you talk about it. I’ll give you an example.

A former ghostwriting client of mine helps people deal with divorce, and his book was all about how to manage the process with grace and ease. But his special technique is to do it in a collaborative way. Not all his competitors are the same; some are very prescriptive about the steps to take, and this can be off-putting, as you can imagine.

So the gold in his book (and its marketing message) was: ‘How to divorce your spouse without losing your house, your wealth, or your mind.’

Dust off the soap box

Your passions are often your best guide to what the gold in your book should be.

What makes you angry about the current state of your industry? What trap do your clients regularly fall into? What does everyone else seem to get wrong? Where is the world falling off a cliff?

When you tap into what gets you motivated to help people or to get up on your soap box, you’ve struck gold. Your book stops being yet another how-to guide or ‘This is what I think’ piece, and starts to address the core issue that stirs emotions in your readers.

Discover what your readers would gain from your book even if they weren’t to do everything it says

Of course, you want your readers to take action on what they’ve learned in your book. But let’s say they didn’t. Let’s say they’re a bunch of lazy so-and-so’s who are ‘all read and no action’.

What would they still get out of your book? Would they learn a new perspective on an issue? Would they feel better because they understood their problem better? The answer to this will give you clues which point to the real treat in your book. And this should form the basis of your book’s gold.

For instance, if you’re planning a book about how environmentally unsustainable our world is becoming, your golden nugget won’t be the fact that our grandchildren will inherit our problems, or that we need to recycle more. Those are important points, but they’re what everyone says.

However, the idea that you only need to change one thing to make a difference might be your golden nugget. That would create this message: ‘How we can make our world greener by making a single, sustainable change?’ This is more unusual and also more helpful.

Knowing the gold in your book is essential for coming up with strong content and for making sure your marketing message is clear.

When you look at it using these four techniques, it becomes easier. But if you’re too close to your book ideas to see the wood for the trees, you might need some expert help. This is where a ghostwriter comes in. One of the team here at United Ghostwriters will show you the gold in your book, and will work with you to improve it so it sells to both publishers and readers.

Whether you do this alone or with help, you’ll not only develop a killer message, but also discover some value in your book that you might not have known was there. How’s that for a result?