Authors and audience; instant audiobooks; AI elevates thinkers: Newsletter 3 December 2025

Newsletter 127. Balancing between your inspiration and your audience’s desires. Plus, is publishing in crisis, Google powers a publisher, three people to follow and three books to read.

What do your readers want?

Authors are often torn.

On the one hand, they passionately want to tell their own story and share their own unique insights in their own way.

But their book is irrelevant unless it has a market. That argues for giving readers what they want, which demands market research.

How can you balance the need for originality with the requirement to satisfy readers?

Follow this principle: Don’t ask what people want. Ask what they think of what you’re considering . . . and adjust your plans based on what they tell you.

Start with your instinct. Authors are passionate to write a book because their interactions with clients, customers, or other members of their broader audience have enabled them to discover a revelation. Ideally, that revelation is a totally new idea. The author then conducts research and searches for evidence to support that new idea and assembles a book’s worth of advice and consequences. You can’t effectively ask your market what it thinks of your new idea; because it’s new, they haven’t encountered it before.

Then find readers who can test it. Your idea will shift once it interfaces with the real world. In practical terms, this means you need to assemble a group of people that look like your target audience and see how they react. You might test the idea in speeches or client meetings. You might try it out in a podcast or share parts of it with the world in your blog or Substack or newsletter. Or you might assemble a small group of trusted clients and associates who’ll share their opinions on your idea, a group often called “beta readers.” Based on how people react, you’ll likely reposition, revise, or improve elements of your idea.

Ask your early readers to choose, or to react. Open-ended general discussions with groups of readers tend to go nowhere. People’s natural tendency to seek agreement means they’ll drive you towards an ordinary, well-worn, middle-ground set of conclusions. That may make for peace among your reader group, but it’s going to generate a boring book. It’s far better to ask people very specific questions, like these:

• Which of these four title/subtitle combinations would make you want to buy and read this book?
• Is this graphic clear to you? What do you think it is communicating, in one sentence?
• Here is a provocative statement about the market we participate in. What is your reaction to this? Is it obvious, wrong, intriguing, offensive, original . . . how would you describe it?
• I’m considering quoting this specific individual. Do you find him/her credible in general?
• Have you ever heard about this case study? What do you already know about it?
• Does this acronym make sense to you?
• Read this 2-page passage. What part of it works? What doesn’t?

Those questions will generate useful feedback, where more general questions (e.g., “What is the biggest issue with AI right now?”) won’t.

Along those lines, I’m interested in your reaction to this idea: Imagine that you’re writing a book. You come up with a bunch of key questions about potential content (for example, the best title/subtitle, the most essential question for your audience, a list of proposed chapter topics, or the main problems people are wrestling with). You write a short survey about these questions. You also assemble a collection of people in the target market, perhaps by buying a mailing list, or by tapping into your own email list.

Now you conduct the survey, or perhaps conduct a focus group or put it in front of a C-space research community, to get insights about what direction to take the book.

This is exactly how you’d do market research before launching a product.

So why don’t people do this about their planned books?

Because let’s face it, a book is an enormous effort to undertake based solely on your easily fooled gut instincts.

News for writers and others who think

In Publishing Confidential, Kathleen Schmidt, MBA asks if publishing is in crisis. Crisis is probably too acute a description. I’d call it a long, slow transition. More ebooks and audiobooks, fewer physical books. More online sales, fewer bookstore sales. More hybrid and self-publishing, less traditional publishing. The whole industry will look different in ten years, but books aren’t going away.

The publisher Bloomsbury is partnering with Google to leverage AI technologies in its business. There will be a lot more of this kind of thing happening. Publishing is an old industry, but no industry can ignore AI-powered productivity gains at this point.

Self-publishing platform Spines will record your voice for 30 minutes and then clone it to create your audiobook. I’m betting this will very efficiently create some moderately boring audiobook recordings.

Joe Lazer (FKA Lazauskas) explains how corporations embrace of AI will cause the few remaining original thinkers to stand out. Sounds about right. Time to polish your writing skills.

Three people to follow

Wally Bock, infinitely experienced book coach

Joseph Quaderer , CEO of Quaderer Media, agency for ghostwriting and more

Jennifer Goforth Gregory , content marketing uber-influencer

Three books to read

How to Prove Anything: 30 absurd research papers no one else was brave enough to publish by B McGraw (Packt, 2025). Read papers like “Testicular Cancer Truck Nut Self-Examination for North American Pick-ups: A Cost-Benefit Analysis.”

Die Fläche: Design and Lettering of the Vienna Secession, 1902-1911 by Diane V Silverthorne, Dan Reynolds, and Megan Brandow-Faller (Letterform Archive, 2023). Just a really cool book for type nerds.

Bread of Angels: A Memoir by Patti Smith (Random House, 2025). An intimate reflection on genius and loss by the founding poet of the punk movement.