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ON THE GRAM

Mar 31

Open
Last 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 knew the core title, and had a long list of potential subtitles. Whittle them down, create a shortlist, choose one. Easy peasy. Definitely wasn’t. Writing many words and pages is one thing. Editing them into a full book, more challenging. Summarising into a ten-word subtitle? Most challenging of all. How do I get across what it took me an entire book to say? 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. Some were good, some rubbish. But which one is best? Which would resonate most with my audience? I got there in the end - I have a subtitle you’ll see soon. Here’s a few pointers if you, too, need to whittle down an important message: Create the whole list, no matter how long it is. Weed out the ones that don’t sound right straight away Get a way to visualise it. (A draft of the website page, a draft email to show you the subject line, a draft cover of the book.) Enter the options and see how they look Take a break Look again at your visuals. Cut out the ones which obviously don’t fit. Repeat this process a few times Get a shortlist of 3 Send those to five or ten of your absolute favourite clients. The people you want to reach with this messaging. (You’re not doing this to reach everyone. There’s a type of person you want to reach, and their opinions matter most.) If everyone agrees, you’ve got your wording. If there’s still a split, you just…choose. Marketing isn’t a science. You can gather analytics and do A/B split testing and double check, but often the biggest impact will surprise you, so you may as well just pick something. Or you’ll be there forever. How about you? What short-messaging is proving quite challenging to choose? —— ✨ This is from my weekly Creative Headspace email. To get on the list, sign up in the link in comments. 💪

Mar 30

Open
Travels from the island to the big smoke! Verrrrrry smooth journey this time so I even made it for a lovely pre DAS dinner on Sunday night. See all of you DAS attendees very soon!
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