Book Marketing Tips and Author Success Podcast

Finding the Right Book Positioning And Why It Changes Everything

• Penny C. Sansevieri and Amy Cornell Author Marketing Experts • Season 6 • Episode 4

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Feeling like every promo is uphill? We unpack why marketing stalls when a book is presented to the wrong readers — and how smart positioning turns traffic into sales. Penny and Amy break down the signals that shape buying decisions in under five seconds: category choices, keywords that actually guide Amazon, cover conventions that telegraph sub-genre, and hooks that speak to what readers want right now.

We share real-world shifts that changed outcomes fast, including a romance that soared after moving from an overly spicy label to a truer contemporary slot and a mystery that found its people by swapping “cozy” for “amateur sleuth.” You’ll hear how to diagnose a mismatch when ads get clicks but no buys, why “too unique” covers quietly repel your ideal audience, and how to use reviews as free market research to refine your description and promise.

This conversation is a roadmap for authors who want to sell more without burning everything down. You’ll learn to niche with confidence, align title and subtitle with retail reality, refresh descriptions with language readers already use, and adopt the 1% rule: small, targeted improvements that compound. If you’ve been trying to reach everyone, it’s time to reach the right ones.

Ready to fix the foundation and stop wasting ad spend? Listen now, then text podcast to 888-402-8940 to share your positioning challenge, subscribe for upcoming deep dives, and leave a review to help more authors find this show.

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SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome back to the book marketing tips and author success podcast. This is Penny Sansevery and Amy Cornell. And we are loving the way that these that these shows are rolling out this year. This one in particular is one of my absolute favorites. Um and we talk about a book not being positioned correctly, but this goes a lot deeper than that. So if you feel like the show isn't for me, stay with us because I think you, I think you will find uh I think you will find a lot of helpful information here. But before we get started, I want to mention um if you if you're a new listener, welcome, welcome. We love new listeners. This is our sixth year, so I know that we are getting new people joining us all the time. So thank you and welcome. Um I also want to mention that if you text the word podcast to 888-402-8940, you can communicate with us directly. We have people sending us show ideas and questions, and we take questions uh when we have them, we will take questions that are uh during during the recording. And um also leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. So with that, uh let's let's kick this off. Now um so it's really hard when an author comes to us and they say my marketing is marketing feels harder. My marketing just feels hard, like everything just feels hard. A lot of times that is because your book is sitting on the wrong virtual shelf. Plain and simple, right? It feels like if it feels like you're pushing mud uphill with your marketing, then this is the show that you're definitely gonna want to listen to. Because when a book is sitting in the wrong category, and Amy, we've seen this over the years so many times, right? Where a book is trying to go after the wrong readership.

SPEAKER_01:

Right, or trying to go after too broad of a readership.

SPEAKER_00:

Or try right, exactly. You know, if you're listening to this and you're saying, well, everybody is my audience, um that's first off, that's a really big target to hit. But secondly, it's just wrong. It's just wrong. Or as Amy says, Amy's hot take is it's just wrong. It's just wrong. Right, exactly. And and this is and we see this, this isn't this isn't just an Amazon conversation. This is an everything conversation. So last week we did a show on branding. And one of the reasons that I like that this show follows the branding show is that a lot of times we see so the branding is misaligned because the author is actually sitting in the wrong, they're trying to go after the wrong readers. They're appealing to the wrong readers, right? So just to give you kind of an analogy, so think about like the grocery store, right? So you went to the grocery store to buy, I don't know, whatever, almond milk, let's say, right? And you're looking for almond milk and you can't find it. And some Yahoo decided to put almond milk in the soda aisle, and you literally never find it because you don't go down the soda aisle. You're looking for almond milk in another area. But when a book is miscategorized, you're literally presenting it to the wrong readers. And the other, the other downside of this is that uh people may buy your book and then they get your book and they're like, well, I thought this was something else, and it gets reflected in a one-star video on Amazon, which is you know, which is problematic. Um so Amy, talk us through so my definition of correct positioning may differ from yours. I doubt it, but let's let's open up that conversation. Ooh, this is exciting. And and let's let's do this in a really non-scary kind of way. Because when we talk about book positioning, a lot of times I, you know, when I teach a class, like this is where I start to see people blaze over.

SPEAKER_01:

I know it sounds very high concept, like sounds very high concept, yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, but essentially, if you're positioned correctly, that means you're creating, you know, the fastest path between your book and the readers who love that kind of book. And that's why I wanted, like, you know, previously I jumped in and added, or going too broad. Because some of you listening may say, No, I write romance. My book is categorized as romance. I let everybody know it's romance. I'm not, you know, I'm totally doing all the things right. But a lot of fiction, especially, is I mean, there are niche readers within genres. You know, fantasy is another huge one. Science fiction, oh my gosh, that one still like blows my mind. You know what I mean? Yeah, so you really have to make sure that not only are you positioned correctly and you're in the right category, but a lot of this also, Penny, I think of it as making sure you're making your readers, your actual readers, the people that are looking for storylines like yours, feel seen and feel heard and feel special. You know, because if you just go and say, you know, this is the next great science fiction novel, it's like that is so broad. And even die-hard science fiction fans are not going to pay attention because they are looking for something very specific. They read a very specific kind of science fiction. And they are buying books that tell them that is what they write. This is what this book is about. And they can easily say, yes, I'm going to enjoy this.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. That's that, no, that that is a very, that's a very good point.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, it's it's a, you know, it's a combination of all these things. But again, you know, we did, I I agree with Penny completely that I'm so glad we're doing this on the heels of a branding episode. Because really positioning does, it's not just, you know, to like I said previously, it's not just the category you're in. Like the category matters, but it's also the keywords you're using to tell Amazon where your book belongs. It's what's in your description and how you're describing your book and that kind of promise you're making to the reader, even your title, you know, there's so often where titles are not workshopped enough in terms of what's really going to work as a retail product, it's more of a conceptual like I like this idea versus what's really going to work in the market. And maybe that sounds less fun. But at the same time, if you're here to make money and sell books and create an author brand and continue down this path, then you really have to look at things, even like your title and think about what is going to work as a retail product, not just the title that I've been attached to since I started the first chapter. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00:

Can I can I just say so? I just have to tell y'all, Amy is so sick of hearing about the title for my local marketing book. Like she could absolutely scream. I'm sending her all these like mock-up title titles and mock-up covers that I'm just throwing together in Canvas. I'm not designing my own cover, let me just be really clear. But I wanted something kind of visual. She's gotten to the point where she doesn't even respond to me in tech. Like, she's just like, whatever. I if you're not agonizing over your book title to the point that you are burning people out, yeah, then you're doing it wrong. I can't tell you how much I have agonized over this. Whatever title, by the way, y'all. I know I've been talking about this local book for a while. Whatever title that I said that it was in 2025, it is not that anymore.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00:

If you are not annoying somebody with your title changes, then you're doing it wrong. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to like I don't want people to go around and annoy other people, but honestly, like it's such an agonizing process.

SPEAKER_01:

It's very true. And I think you should feel the same about designing the cover, you know, because little details completely change your first impression. Completely change who you are appealing to. Same thing with your title, you know, swapping out one word. It's amazing how different that hits and who, how that potentially shifts who is instantly feeling a connection with your book versus people that would go, okay, no, that word doesn't work for me. And you're never going to please everybody. So don't come at this from like, at some point I'll figure out the perfect title and the perfect whatever. It's really just knowing, again, about who your reader is, who you really want to get in front of, and build your book's brand and position it correctly around those people. You know, don't go too big because if you do that, it's not going to connect with anyone. If you go too broad, nobody's going to feel special, nobody's going to feel seen, and your book is just going to languish.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and the thing about it is though, too, is that if you are running, so if you're listening to this and you're and you're running, let's say you're running Facebook ads or you're running Instagram ads or whatever, and you know, you're getting you're getting a lot of interest from these ads, and they're all going to your Amazon retail page, and you're getting tons of traffic, but you're not getting any sales, then that's a first off, I would stop those ads. I've just you and my permission to stop spending money on those before you fix all the things. Um then that's a that's a real indicator that there is a market mismatch. There's a there's a misalignment. And you know, we had an author, this is a couple of years ago actually, and she came to us and she had a book, and she had marked it as an erotic romance novel. This book was not, it did not fit the specific erotic romance category. Okay. So and we don't have to go into it in the podcast, but there's all these markers for these different genres. And the same thing is true for science fiction, right? Same thing, like you there are buckets of things that you have to, you know, you can't just create your own genre. I know we have whole whole shows that we've done on that. But anyway, so we started working with her and I said, you know, your book is not erotic romance. Let's position this as contemporary romance. It's a little sexy, but let's just position it that way. And she her book did so much better.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Just and we didn't, and she didn't change the cover, she didn't change the title. We we modified the book description a little bit and we changed the category. That was it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep.

SPEAKER_00:

And her book did so much better. So what we're suggesting to you is not necessarily, you know, like, oh my gosh, again, like we miss said in the branding, uh, you know, the branding podcast last week, we didn't we're not telling you to burn everything to the ground. It's just figure out where the problems are and then fix those. Figure out where the gaps are, where you're losing readers, and then fix those.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. And I love the line. Positioning is like setting your GPS. If the destination is wrong, it doesn't matter how fast you drive.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly, absolutely true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So it's like if you're positioned incorrectly, you can throw a ton of time and money into marketing and exposure and running ads on every platform that allows you to run ads, and it's not going to convert. End of story.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Exactly. Yeah. That's very yeah, that that's absolutely true. So I think that, and it the other piece of it though, too, is is that, and you know, I love my statistics, right? So um there's a bunch of data out there that talks about how consumers decide if something is relevant in under 10 seconds. On Amazon, that number drops to between three and five seconds. And I would bet that it's actually on the lower end on Amazon. So you really have to get people, but this is why a lot of our shows hammer about you. We we had a lot of shows on the Amazon retail page because tighten it up. And and again, back to the whole 1% thing that we've been talking about in a few shows now. You don't have to make like this erotic romance author. You don't have to burn everything to the ground. Sometimes small changes can really change the trajectory of your book. So uh I think the first thing to ask is, is your category so right? That's the easiest fix right now. And that was the easiest fix again with this erotic romance author who wasn't actually erotic romance. Is the category so right? And Amazon is kind of shifty about this, right? So categories shift, but also, you know, I mean, reader behavior shifts, trends shift. So you want to make sure, and and this is so I know we talk about a variety of different genre fictions already in this episode, but cozy mystery tends to be so miscategorized a lot of the time, for whatever reason, or a mystery book is being put in the cozy mystery. And and all of these genres have particulars, like they're read the what the readers are looking for. Um so categories can shift. And the other thing though, too, is Amazon actually adds categories, which is a little weird sometimes. Um, and I've noticed this in particular around genre fiction. So they will add categories and sub-subcategories, and like I think it was one that I had on the top of my top of my mind when we were in the green room and now I can't think of it. But it was something around like secret baby or second chance secret baby or something. Like you would be amazed how many, and Amy, you see this a lot because you're on Amazon a ton, right? Oh, yeah. Freaks me out. It freaks right into sometimes Amy, and we won't say what those categories are in the air, but sometimes Amy will text me, she's like, Can you believe that this category now exists on Amazon? And it's something probably creepy, which is saying a lot considering that we really love true crime, so it takes a lot to creep us out.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh yeah, I know. It's like this should not be a thing.

SPEAKER_00:

That exact right. That's exactly that's exactly right. So, you know, I mean, again, sometimes small movements, and we actually had um we've worked with authors just to go back to the mystery category, you know, from move from mystery cozy to mystery amateur saluth, which is really where it it belonged. Um and the conversion improved improved almost immediately.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh yeah. Absolutely. That's a real thing.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that yeah, absolutely. So these are really easy tweaks. All right, do you want to take the do you want to take the cover one? Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

And I mean, shameless plug on this one too. Sorry, real quick for categories. We see this a lot of time with our own clients that, you know, when they get started working with us or when the book first releases, a lot of times their categories are a little more broad. And so when we do that work and we actually get them into more niche, more specific categories that again really speak to how their book should be positioned. We love, we have little parties, you know, internally and share, you know, stats and stuff like that when we watch their book ranking just improve dramatically. Really makes us happy. But it does like to Penny's point, it really does make a huge difference.

SPEAKER_00:

And you know, look, we don't like to see authors come to us when their book is miscategorized, you know, but it's a fun fix because I hate like selfishly, it's really kind of a fun fix because we're not that we're not as close to it as the as the author is. Yeah. You know what I mean? And when they, you know, and when we see this and we're just like, oh, just make this tweet, and they yeah, they and they get overjoyed, and then the next thing you know, their book was doing really well, and their book it's climbing up the charts, and there maybe even a bestseller flag going on. I mean, it's it's it's a really fun thing. And we do, we share that internally, the screenshots and everything is we are as happy as the author is. It's a really very cool thing.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so the next one, uh, does your cover still match what's selling in your genre? And I feel like everybody listening by now is going, are they just subtly telling all of us to change our covers because we talk about it all the time? I promise that's not what we're actually doing. Um, but it's true. A cover revamp does sound it's like uh like twisting the knife a little bit, especially if you love your cover. But it is one of, I think, one of the top things that can dramatically change. And we've seen it with clients too, honestly. We've had a few standout clients that changed their covers and it dramatically changed how their book was being received in the marketplace. It that's another really proud moment, you know. Yeah. When an author finally says, like, you know what? Yes, I'm willing to go back to the drawing board. It doesn't have to be super expensive. There are some really great designer options out there where you can really where you can work with somebody directly and they can make your vision come to life too. Because I think a lot of authors, penny and rightfully so, probably feel like they're completely giving up what they had in mind for their book cover. But a lot of times what it does is it marries what your vision was with somebody that knows how to make things work for retail marketplace, you know?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So you really, it's not always about completely giving up. And again, now we apparently this is another uh phrase for 2026 is burning things to the ground. You don't always have to burn your cover to the ground. A lot of times there's some good, you know, like they say with houses, good bones there, but it just needs to be reworked by somebody that actually has the skill set to do that correctly, you know? Yeah. And covers evolve, you know, covers evolve within genres too. So something, if you've been doing this for a while, or even if you're a genre fan and maybe you have some books on your shelf that are, you know, your favorites or whatever, but that doesn't mean that's what people that are genre fans are actively shopping for right now. So as hard as it is to have to accept, again, it's not about you, it's about what people are looking for. If you want to sell books, you have to align with what people are looking for, not with what makes you happy. If you just want to do this to make yourself happy and tell your family you write books, that's awesome. We respect that. But if your goal is to sell books, you really need to constantly keep in mind what people are looking for and try to meet that, you know? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. No, I I absolutely think that's right. And I think that's a really good thing. You know, covers about and especially genre fiction covers evolve, but also business books.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00:

Nonfiction. I mean, my covers, I mean, some of my older books, the the cover redoos, I actually love doing those, even though I realize like I'm in the industry and I have people that do cover design, like I get it's penny, it's easier for you. But, you know, I mean, it's not easy to get rid of a cover that you once thought was just fabulous just because now it's dated. Right. You know what I mean? And like you said, the cover cover trends have changed. Take a look at, you know, I mean, look through the bestseller lists and see can your book stand on a the virtual shelf with all of these other titles?

SPEAKER_01:

Right. And I say this a lot, Penny, and I think it kind of catches people off guard when I write it. But it's like book covers are one area where you don't want to stand out too much. You know, you really want to, you want it well done, you want it to be noticeable, you want it to be easy to read, you know, you want it to be, we've all seen a great book. Cover and gone, whoa, that's a great book cover. You know what I mean? You want to do all of those things. But if you are doing something that is entirely unique and unheard of, and you don't see any other books like that on the bestseller list, that's a problem.

SPEAKER_00:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

Right.

SPEAKER_00:

That's that's absolutely true. So I think that there is too unique can be a problem. Yeah, exactly. Um, this is one of my favorites. So we did an episode last year on elevator pitches, and I think it's definitely worth a listen if you haven't or if you're new and you haven't listened to it yet. I know I I probably mentioned the elevator pitch episode in every single podcast, every single podcast episode that we do because I love it so much. But make sure that your book hook is doing what it needs to do and really speaking to the readers. I mean, I don't really know how else to say that because your book hook has to be um it has to speak to the reader and it has to speak to what they are looking for. Right. So your book hook, you do not matter in the, and I'm sorry to say this, but you do not matter in the book hook conversation. It's just about you and your it's just about your book, what your book can do for the reader. Right. That's really all that matters. The other thing though, too, is that you know, book hooks evolved. So I think this is something that, you know, once a quarter, go take take a look at the, you know, your Amazon retail description, your book description on Amazon, and take a look at that book hook and see if it's still relevant, right? See if it's still something that you want to, you know, new new terms start to show up. Uh they they start to become, you know, part of our vernacular and things like that. So maybe you could use, you know, maybe you could use a little bit of a little bit of spice. And speaking of book hooks and um I and again, I don't want to go too far down the book hook rabbit hole because we did that, we did that episode. So go listen to that because there's a lot that we could be we can be saying about this. But since we're talking about book hooks, what about the book description?

SPEAKER_01:

That's another one. Very similar book descriptions also evolve. You know, there are things that change in genres. There are definitely things that change in topics. You know, I think absolutely for nonfiction, this is something that you should be reevaluating all the time, you know, because industry changes, what people are focusing on for certain topics. Uh, you know, this was an example that we saved. A nonfiction productivity book got much better traction when the hook shifted from just get more done to break burnout patterns, you know, because burnout is something that people are talking about. So if you write in nonfiction, definitely stay on top of what is being discussed and what is like making it into conversations and weave that into your book description. And for, you know, fiction, absolutely, it can always get better. And I hope that everybody listening, you know, may you all be gifted with tons of reviews. But as you get reviews, hopefully you get some really thoughtful ones and use those to learn about what you might be able to do with your book description as well. You know, if you're getting reviews that are consistently giving you kudos for certain elements of your story or, you know, anything like that or characters, why not lean into that in the description? Because clearly it's resonating with people, right? Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. And I think, you know, any of this stuff, so your your book description, I mean, those clues that you're getting from either if it feels like you're pushing mud uphill in terms of your your momentum, your, you know, your the marketing that you're doing, um, there are always external signals that tell us if there's something wrong. It's just a matter of whether or not we're willing to listen to them. You know. Um, and I see this a lot too. You know, readers don't misread books, but they do read the signals that we give them. So I think um, you know, that we're never gonna be able to avoid knocking, you know, five-star reviews across the board, right? But sometimes you'll start to see this, it starts to show up in your reviews that this book wasn't what I expected, or I thought there was gonna be more of blah blah or whatever it is, right? Those signals are something that I would, you know, we that we definitely recommend that you listen to because that's the thing that um pay attention. You I we don't always like people who don't like our stuff. I completely get it. And I've had reviews that were not great. And once I got done rocking in the corner and I looked at the review, I was like, you know what, that person's that person's really right. Like I should have addressed XYZ XYZ more. So sometimes they can be really can sometimes they I mean, in the majority of them are it's completely awful to read them. Like I get it, but they readers will tell you what they want, and we should always be listening.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, and I think Penny, for a really honest example, I think um, and it this was I think a handful of releases ago, but I think one of your books got a review from somebody that was clearly a more veteran author. Yeah. And you know, that was their feedback was that, you know, and I think they they were very fair in saying that, yeah, there's some, there's some definitely some solid stuff in here if you're new, but as a veteran author, there wasn't really a lot that I wasn't, you know what I mean? And we can't tell that person whether or not that's accurate. But at the same time, it was great insight in terms of like, okay, who, you know, to narrow down who might instantly connect with the book or who like the really, you know, really targeted author market was for that particular title. You know what I mean? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And they were right. And again, it wasn't easy to hear, but they were, they they were absolutely, they were absolutely right.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, they got the feeling like, you know, they went into it thinking there was going to be a lot in there for even veteran authors. It really, the book really was designed more for authors that were just getting started, but you know, they didn't necessarily pick that up from the description and things like that, you know, and they bought it again, they were very fair, but this happens. It's it's a very real-world thing that you will probably encounter as an author, you know.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and something just um something that you say, and that we've talked about before is be careful what you're amplifying. Right. Right. Because marketing amplifies, running ads amplifies everything. And be careful what you're amplifying, because if you're amplifying the wrong thing, it's you're gonna be throwing a lot of money down a black hole that isn't gonna get you any sales, or you may end up selling, you know, your again. Sorry, not to lean back into the cozy mystery thing, but you may be selling your quote unquote cozy mystery, which really is a dark mystery, to somebody who's just like, well, I was expecting something a little fluffier, but okay, thanks. Like you know what I mean? Right, absolutely. And January, again, part of the reason why we wanted to roll the shot in January. January's a really good. We are we are wrapping up this month with fixing all the things so that you guys can hopefully have some smoother sailing in 2026 because we we do the show because we want you to be successful. And um, Amy, did I did I cover everything?

SPEAKER_01:

Did we yeah, I love this episode because again, it's one of those things that is not super hard to fix if you really stop to think about what positioning is. It's kind of like the branding episode. We really tried to break that down into something that was very easily to die easy to digest. You know, it can get very complex if you're you know trying to absorb everything at once, but there really are some very key elements that if you separate them and do one thing at a time, you know, like you said, Penny, that 1%. It'll get you that 1% better. It'll get you 1% better sales and all of those add up.

SPEAKER_00:

So, with all the things that, like I said, with all the things that we're talking about, just be, you know, just remember that 1%. Don't feel like you have to tackle all of it at the same time. Small tweaks, small changes can have some really, really big impacts. We really hope that you've enjoyed the show. We've hope thank you for being with us for the first month of 2026. We are so excited. You will not gonna believe the shows that we have coming up for February, March, and beyond. Um, again, we love your feedback. So if you're not already on our uh in our texting group, text the word podcast to 888 402 8940. And we also in the show notes, you will see we have our um survey. So that is still alive and kicking. We really want to hear your feedback. And leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Bye bye.

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Penny Sansevieri

Host
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Amy Cornell

Co-host