Adding the Urgency Factor
“Urgent!!! Act now.” “2 days left to save.” “LAST CHANCE!”
We’re suckers for those subject lines, aren’t we?
One of the strongest tools in marketing is urgency. You see these tactics all the time. Here are the four most common ones: Time (limited time, last time, now, today only, deadline, seconds, minutes), Speed (now, act now, don't delay, hurry, rush, instant), Scarcity (once in a lifetime, one day only, never again, last chance), and FOMO (price going up, offer expires, now or never, final sale).
Like us, you’ve probably made a purchase based on one of those factors, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Understanding how marketing works is a super useful tool when writing your book. We commonly tell our clients to “bake in” the marketing hooks. That means viewing your manuscript through the eyes of a marketer.
(Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a marketer to market).
Let’s look at ways for you to add urgency to your writing and book idea.
As you view your writing through a marketer’s lens, ask yourself: What does my reader most urgently need to know?
What’s great about this question is it gets to the essential intent of your writing. It clears away some of those clutter ideas that may be stalling or impeding your progress. Instead of trying to incorporate an idea, you’re focusing on and refining that BIG idea.
The thing about adding urgency to that big idea, it points to a problem or need for your reader. Your job as the writer is to state this problem and then provide solutions for it. Think back to our list of urgency marketing tactics - time, speed, scarcity, and FOMO. Those are four categories that you can use to evaluate your solutions.
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“What does my reader most urgently need to know?”
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Let me give you an example. If you were writing a book on how to raise girls, time is a problem. Too little, never enough. As a writer, I want to point this out and then provide my solutions for how to make more time with your little girl. If it’s speed you want to focus on, you could provide solutions for how to have a new teenage daughter by Friday. If it's scarcity, you could focus on how important this relationship is - it’s the only one you have with her. And if it’s FOMO, remind the reader that this is your only chance before she goes off to college someday (unless she’s a millennial and chances are she will never leave, but that’s a different book, right?).
Successful books focus on the reader’s needs. Really successful books understand what the reader needs right now. Urgency is the key. And because you’ve “baked in” these ideas into your book, you’ve made it that much easier to message your book when you go to promote it through your socials, email list, etc. But hurry, this opportunity won’t last (actually it will because now you know how important urgency is).
Take Action: Book a call with us today!
If you have questions about writing your book, we’ve got some help for you in that department. Schedule a one-on-one meeting with one of our agents. During this time, we teach and coach first-time and veteran authors interested in advancing their careers, using our unparalleled experience, hard-won wisdom, and industry-leading strengths to help them reach their full potential.
