In an earlier post I talked about designing a cover for your target audience. If you are authoring your book to be your “ultimate business card” this is particularly important. You want to appeal to the type of people who represent your “ideal” clients. So how do you know who those people are?

A Good Place to Start

In the best of all worlds you’ve kept track of your customers’ past purchases so you can access their records. What you want to do is go through those records and first isolate the customers who have spent the most money with you.

Now that doesn’t mean that they are your most profitable or ideal customers. They are just your highest grossing customers. Unfortunately, gross doesn’t always mean more profitable but it’s a good place to start.

Narrow the Field

After you find your highest grossing customers, then analyze your profit margin on those customers to narrow it down even more. To make it easy for you, come up with your 50 highest grossing customers and out of those 50, arrange them in the order of most profitable in terms of percentages. For example, Sally may have spent $5,000 with me but the products or services she purchased  cost me $3,000 to produce so her profit margin to me is 40%. Dan spent only $1000 with me but the cost to me of the service or product he purchased was only $300 so my profit margin is 70%.

Next take your list and find the 20 most profitable customers by percent of profit margin. These are the customers that you want to analyze by demographics and psychographics.  How are these customers similar? How are they different? What are the typical problems that these customers have that I can solve? What kind of book would be the most helpful to this target audience?  Is there something I can write about that would make these customers money or save them money? Is there something I can write about that would help these customers find happiness or fulfillment?

Write from the Heart

Keep in mind when writing your book, you’re not selling information. You’re helping people solve their problems by providing information through your filter of personal experience. You’re recommending a course of action that will benefit them because you know first hand how you have benefited from it. Writing should be from the Heart – leave the editing to the mind.