A few days last week I felt really invisible. My stuff wasn’t really getting shared, and people weren’t all that excited about visiting my site and reading the words I shaped into stories every week, and sometimes, when we feel invisible, we can forget all the value that lives in our writing. Because it’s not necessary, not like business tools or parenting techniques or “7 meals to cook in 15 minutes.” It’s art.
And then I started going back through some of the blogs I wrote last year, which I’m turning into a book, and I texted my husband. “This stuff is really good,” I wrote. “Even better than I remember” (writers don’t say that about everything).
We have a hard time seeing what value lies in our writing, because it’s artistic and it’s entertaining and it’s a fun story, not an I’ll-die-if-I-don’t-get-this kind of thing. But let’s just think about this for a minute. What kind of life is a life without art? What kind of world is a world without the beauty of words turned stories? What kind of society would this be without poetry?
It’s not an easy seeing. I know. I’ve been launching pieces of myself out into the literary world, and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done (besides raising children), because it means I have to toot my own horn a little. I have to tell people there’s value in my work. I have to be its champion, and you know what? I would MUCH RATHER have someone else do that. I’d much rather have someone else tell the world that my products have value. I’d rather have someone else claim that lives will be better for my words.
But something I’ve had to come to understand is that there is value in what I do. There is value in the words I spend twenty-five hours on every single week. There is value in the books I write and compile and then release. There is value in my offerings, in my talent, in my entertainment. My art fills a hole in the world, and it may not be a hole we can see surely and point to without question, but it’s a hole that is there all the same, and people are changed when art fills in their holes.
It doesn’t matter if we don’t have a five-step takeaway for every product we launch into the world. It just matters that we are looking for holes and we are filling them.
There isn’t a whole lot out there about selling entertainment and how to do it, because most of what’s written from the business perspective is about selling value, and when we’re in the entertainment realm with our parenting humor blog or our thriller novels or our kid-lit poems, the line between value and non value is a little blurred to those in the business world. They don’t often see the value in a person, bent nearly to breaking, reading the words of another who has been broken and finding strength and courage enough to say, “Me too. Let’s carry on together.” They don’t often see the value in words that grant hope and peace. They don’t often see the value in abstract things like poetry and music and stories.
But that doesn’t mean that we can’t take business principles and mold them to fit our entertainment offerings so that we can become even better at what we do. The first way I did that was by finding my “value propositions” for my different platforms.
A value proposition is a short phrase that states what value you bring to the world. It can be easier to craft a value proposition when we’re doing things like teaching writing or selling courses or meeting a real, tangible need in the writer world. We’re going to have to work a little harder when we’re not.
One of the holes I most like to fill with my nonfiction is the hole that says “I am alone.” I write honestly about life with six boys, and I turn it into a humorous, lighthearted offering on my parenting humor blog. I write about serious issues like anxiety and body image and depression and loss, and I help people feel less alone in their struggles. People find solidarity, and they are encouraged, and this is a valuable thing.
So, in crafting our value proposition, we have to think about what our art will do for the world. Will it encourage? Will it entertain? Will it offer humor to a dark world? Will it tell the whole truth?
Without a value proposition, we can get lost in weeks of invisibility. No one seems to care what we’re doing, and we start to wonder why we’re doing it. But value propositions can remind us that there really is a reason.
4 Steps to Creating Your Own Value Proposition
1. Define who you are.
Are you a storyteller? Are you a truth teller? Are you a fellow traveler? A sage? A muse? What makes you unique? Come up with who you are to your “tribe,” and you’re well on your way.
2. Determine who your audience is.
You’ll hear it all over the place, and it’s true: The wider your audience, the less influence you have. If we can narrow things down a little, we’ll be able to reach a wider audience, which doesn’t really make sense in the math of it, but it does, a little, in the marketing sense of it. Lots of people say they’re for everyone. Not a lot of people are saying they’re writing a humor parenting column for moms who only have boys. Niching down is scary. I know. It was for me. But sometimes it’s the best thing we can do. I felt much more focused when I niched down This Writer Life to be parents who are time starved and still trying to pursue a writing career.
Who is going to listen to you? Who do you most want to help. If you say, “Everyone,” you will help no one.
3. Figure out what you will help people do.
This could be anything as abstract as providing a new insight to readers or invoking a laugh to something more tangible, like learning how to use WordPress or self publish a blog post or write effective copy. Sometimes it’s hard to see what we will help people do when we’re on the entertainment, novel-writing side of it, but if we look closely enough, it’s possible. There is something unique that we bring to this world, and no one else can do it like we can. People can buy transformation they hope will happen in their life just as surely as they can buy a course on writing faster.
What unique thing do you have to offer in the world of entertainment?
4. Put it all together.
My value propositions for my platforms look like this:
Fiction writing/Wing Chair Musings blog:
I am a storyteller. I help readers who are curious, open-minded and seeking authenticity grasp new insights on life, love and family so they can remember and embrace the truth that already lives inside them.
Crash Test Parents (humor blog):
I am a mom of six boys. I help boy moms understand that the best way to survive life with boys is with a sense of humor, so that they can fully embrace the wildlings they’ve been given.
This Writer Life:
I am a parent writer. I provide productivity, publishing and writing advice to time-starved parents so that they can pursue a writing career in the margins of their parent life.
By far, the easiest one of those to write was This Writer Life, because it has more tangible benefits. But entertainment can have value propositions, too, and it’s worth it to do this work.
These aren’t perfect value propositions. They will probably shift and change over the years. But they’re a good start.We can do a whole lot with a good start.
Value propositions help you get clear on who you want to be and what you need to do to get there. Put yours together, and watch your focus completely change.
