This week, I had a deadline to get the full title and subtitle of my second book to the publishers.
No problem, I thought. I have so many ideas! I already knew what the core title was – “Accountants, you are creative too” – and literally had forty or fifty potential subtitle texts in a note on my phone. All i need to do (any sentence that starts with those words is fraught with peril) is whittle them down, create a shortlist, choose one. Easy peasy.
Except it really, really wasn’t.
Rambling for many words and pages is easy to do. Gathering those words into a cohesive book, with a structure, edited and ready to be printed, much more challenging. Summarising all those thoughts, words, concepts, and inspiration into a ten-word subtitle is the most challenging of all.
Do I focus on the innate skills? Problem solving and curiosity? Inspiration? Value? Impact? Breakthroughs? And on and on it goes.
I had Friday morning blocked out to work on this. It will take me an hour or so, I thought, and then i’ll send the top three shortlist to a few people. Before lunch i’ll have it sorted. I went for my usual morning walk and started making notes on my phone as I walked. This approach, or that one? Ohh, this is an important concept too. Hello, sheep. I know I wrote a few things on value and– oh! Yea! Forgot about that one. What if i…
And before I knew it i was all the way round the village and well on my way to the next one because I had just so many subtitle options. It was starting to get ridiculous.
I’m much closer now: as usual, the most helpful thing is to see how the message will appear visually. I got a draft interim cover of my new book, and started playing with the possible subtitles. I got it down from about 80 to a total of 23 potential subtitles.
In no particular order, here are the 23:
- How embracing your creativity leads to break throughs in your marketing, business, and life
- Using your innate skills of problem solving and curiosity to get access to better marketing ideas
- Build confidence in marketing by leaning into your innate skills of problem solving and curiosity
- How to push past the fear of failure and get to the other side of ideas you didn’t even know were possible
- How believing that helps you push past the fear of failure and discover ideas that actually work
- How knowing your own creativity increases your marketing confidence and results
- How leaning into / owning your innate qualities of problem solving and curiosity will build marketing and business confidence
- Creative confidence for accounting entrepreneurs
- Using your innate qualities of problem solving and curiosity skills to do marketing that resonates better with the people you love to work with
- How the mindset and rhythms of curiosity and problem solving will change the way you help clients and yourself / your own business
- The art of creativity in the world of accounting science
- How embracing your humanity in a numbers driven world helps you do better business
- Accountants, BELIEVE you are creative. [You are creative. You need to embrace it ] And discover how problem solving and curiosity can change your firm for good
- How believing that about yourself will change the way you do marketing and business, for good.
- Giving yourself permission to be human in a numbers driven world
- Leaning into the art of creativity in the science of accounting
- How to access your innate curiosity and build rhythms in your business and life
- Accessing your internal problem solving and curiosity to build confidence in your own ideas
- How knowing you aren’t boring changes your approach to marketing and the results you get.
- How the rhythms of creativity build incremental improvements leading to big breakthroughs
- How every accountant can increase marketing confidence and change the results you get
- No apologies needed. Bringing your humanity into marketing
- It’s not only for the artists and painters: it’s for you, too.
You can see the themes I was playing with. Value. Confidence. Curiosity and problem-solving. Rhythms. Innate skills. Art v science. Belief. Breakthroughs.
But how to bring them all together? Which one is best? What’s going to resonate most with my audience?
Here’s how you do it:
- You create the whole list, first. It was overwhelming to have 80 partial pieces and notes of subtitles: I needed the exact subtitles listed as possibles
- Start shortlisting. Get rid of the ones that don’t sound right even just there on the page.
- Then, even with your long list, get a way to visualise it. Get a draft of the home page of your website, the first screen of the video, the subject line of the email drafted into the email system, a draft cover of the book.
- Put in all your options. See how they look. (New ones will come to you while you’re doing this.)
- Export them or zoom out or zoom in so you can get a sense of what it will actually look like. I created mine in Canva and then exported all the individual files as book covers, so I could see how it appeared at a glance.
- Give it a minute. Take a breather. Step away from staring at the same words over and over.
- Look at your visuals with fresh eyes. Instantly cut out the ones which don’t quite fit. It will be fairly obvious with many of them. There were some subtitles I’d crafted so perfectly (or so I thought) and then when i saw it on the cover thought “Oh my absolutely not”. For whatever reason.
- Whittle it down to 8 or 10 solid options. Give yourself a little more space, if you can. Even five minutes, if you’re under deadline.
- Push yourself to whittle it down further, to a shortlist of 3. Maybe 4, if you’re really struggling. (I went for 4.)
- Send those to a few people you really trust. What strikes them, stands out? Which one would intrigue them to read more, open it up, click?
- Most likely you’ll be down to 2 or 3 solid options by now. I was down to 3.
- Now, send those to at least ten or twenty of your absolute favourite clients. The type of people you’re wanting to reach with this messaging. These are the people whose opinion matters the most. Sure, you could ask your partner, or sister, or best friend, or a randomer at the coffee shop. But ultimately it doesn’t matter what “everyone” thinks: you’re not doing all this to reach everyone. There’s a particular kind of person you want to reach, and their opinions matter the most.
- If everyone agrees, you’ve got your wording.
- If there’s still a split, you get to choose. And if that’s the case you just…choose.
After all (and this may shock you) there’s no right answer.
Not really.
This is marketing, and marketing doesn’t work like a science. You can track numbers and gather analytics and do A/B split testing and check and double check, but often the biggest impact is going to surprise you, so you may as well just pick something. Or you’ll be there forever.
I’ve now chosen my subtitle. I’m not going to share it yet – I’ll let you see it when the new draft cover comes out – but the insights and perspectives of my favourite clients, the accountants whose work and opinion I respect, made a huge difference in which one I chose.
How about you? What short-messaging is proving quite challenging to choose? Send me a visual of a few options – I’ll give you my impression!
