Phases of Feedback on Your Book
As an entrepreneur, validating an idea isn’t a new concept to you. You’ve gone through the validating process when you’ve launched courses, products, services, and the like. The concept is the same when it comes to a book: Ask the people who are your ideal clients (and thus likely your ideal readers) for feedback.
With a book, though, you complete the validation process a few times: with your book idea/topic, with your cover, and then with your actual text.
Writing Phase Feedback
Before you even start writing, you can validate your book idea with your existing audience. Make sure that the book you write will serve people. If you aren’t solving the problem they are looking to you to solve, your book will not be a success.
While writing, you can do versions of the email marketing A/B test to validate your subject matter, structure, and more. Ask your audience, for example, if they’d rather learn about X or Y. Ask if they’d rather see a case study about X or Y. You’re bread-crumbing what the book is about and building excitement while at the same time crafting a book that matches your audience’s expectations. Win-win.
Beta Feedback
After your book is drafted but before it goest into production (aka copy editing and design), you should get beta feedback, which essentially means having readers who are in your book’s target audience to read the book and help you improve and finalize it. Beta feedback is important because there’s no one better equipped to alert you if your book has any missing or unclear sections than people in your ideal audience. Learn more about the ins and outs of beta feedback in this post.
Publishing Phase Feedback
Editorial feedback technically happens during both the writing and publishing phases, depending on what kind of editor (or editors) you hire. Editorial feedback helps shape the book structurally, for clarity, and grammatically. If you’re self-publishing your book, you make the final decisions, but I urge you to take editorial feedback to heart. Editors are not readers; they are professionals who know how to improve books.
Marketing Phase Feedback
The ultimate feedback for your book is, of course, book reviews. This post contains tips to obtain book reviews. Book reviews help your book get seen on Amazon, but even if Amazon isn’t a huge part of your marketing strategy, reviews can be used in sales copy, turned into testimonials, and used in social media.
Each stage of book publication offers opportunities for feedback. Smart author-entrepreneurs take advantage of them. How are you going to?