If you are interested in book marketing, book writing or even something similar in general, you’ve probably already heard the saying “don’t sell the sizzle, sell the steak”, right? This means that if you want to sell something, your overall messages should talk about the way the product will serve the inquiring customers, and not on its outward appearance.

Unfortunately, everyone doesn’t get this concept, however, and that is likelu the reason why people forget to apply it to their marketing info.

So I am going to explain how it works.

The main reason why the beautiful imagery of your product doesn’t sell is because consumers don’t care about them. Sure, they might use a list to decide between two like products, but the beauty of the item in and of itself won’t make them want to buy the product.

We could go a step further and say that these mystery people don’t even care about the item itself. They don’t want to buy it because it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread, because it is the latest version or anything like that. They don’t want to have it. They just want to use it to accomplish a certain task or result. In other words, the product is not the end but the means to an end.

My video production company tries too hard sometimes to sell the fact that it is a MOBILE production studio, like an NBC in a box. But who cares? All the customers want is a nice video.

We can entertain this notion to as many products as we want.

So, if you want to sell books, then don’t sell the fact that it is an ebook, a paperback, or an audiobook. Sell the story. Sell the characters. Sell the FEATURES of that book.

Want a practical example? Suppose you are looking for a book about coin collecting. You shop around using the right keywords until you find one that says:

200 pages of images and illustrations of the most popular coins!
Places where you can find coins for free!
A complete list of the most popular coins and where they are housed.

Then you find this:

Start coin collecting effectively in the first hour!
20 ways to get the highest paid coins!
Discover how to find coins that will get you in the collectors’ books.
Sites to find coins

Now which one would you like to read?

Yeah. It’s like that – sell the steak. Hope this helps.