Do you ever find yourself caught up in the shoulds?

I should be selling more books. 

I should be writing more. 

I should be on TikTok / BlueSky / Threads.

I should be further along in the edits of this damned book. That one is a little personal.

I should be able to make my social media posts take off. 

I should…

You get the idea. Shoulding all over yourself.

It’s so easy to beat yourself up over what you should and shouldn’t be doing. It can turn into a nasty spiral of self-doubt. The worst outcome? Fear-based decision making about your business.

To get away from the shoulds, you need to be confident in your strategy and confident in the system you have developed to support your author business.

The Who

The first step is to understand who your readers are and what makes your books special to them.

Want to know what the second step is?

We’re all a little bit Alexis.

The What

The second step is to be clear about where your books fit in the market. What’s the secret sauce in your books that keeps readers coming back for more?

If you don’t know what makes what you offer different, how on earth are readers going to remember you? Pure luck, maybe. But don’t you want to control as much of your business as you can?

And then we come back to the word “strategy”.

There is a big difference between strategy and tactics, but the two terms are often confused. Think of strategy as the high level overview of your business. What you do, how you do it, and what your business objectives are.

The How

Tactics are the HOW. Tactics support the strategy. Being on social, which social, how often to post, whether to use trending audio… that’s all tactics.

So, going back to the topic of should authors be on social media; it makes a lot of sense to be on social media as a small, digital business. It’s where billions of customers are, and it’s where you can quite inexpensively communicate to them. But what is your business strategy regarding social media? Is it to use social media to sell books? Is it to use social media for brand awareness? Is it to mostly avoid social media and focus on paid ads and your newsletter? Each of those will have different tactics, and different time commitments.

Can you see how defining and understanding your business strategy can help save time and stress?

Social media can be incredibly frustrating. Ever find yourself following the latest trends, but find it makes no difference? It’s not about the trends though–it never was–it’s about the substance of your message. You need to know who your customers / readers are, and you need to know how to stand out and be heard in a crowded space.

And this is where a lot of authors struggle. We are exceptionally good at writing long form, that’s what our books are after all. But diffusing that down into what makes our books exactly what a reader wants to read?

We’re collectively pretty bad at that! And it makes sense why. We are not marketers, copywriters or messaging strategists. But we can learn the fundamentals of these skills and make our lives easier. Promise.

The Why

And now we get to existential crisis time. Sorry, but this is where time needs to be spent at the early stages to make the biggest savings later.

The reason why it’s often so hard to define what makes our books different in such a crowded market is that we haven’t spent the time to understand the core values of our business. To understand why it is that we write and publish.

Why do you write? Why do you publish? The motivation for these two things is often very different. You might write because the creative outlet is an escape from the drudgery of the everyday (sorry, but existential crisis, remember?). You might publish because you want other people to read your work and know they’re not alone. Or you might want to make bank. Those two reasons for publishing are going to have very different strategies to support them.

Sometimes it’s the simplest sounding things that have the biggest impact. And it’s ok if this stuff is hard to define. Simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy, unfortunately.

So, question time: why do you write? Why do you publish? What’s your secret ingredient that makes your books great? Does it make sense to be on social media to support your objectives?