Monthly Archives: May 2019

How to sell a book from a twitter thread

How to sell a book from a twitter thread

Mindlessly browsing twitter feed when this bomb was dropped on me:

You can click on the embedded tweet to read the full thread.

Following the thread, I soon realized that the author is promoting her new book.

Seriously...

Forget about having a full-on website with a fancy landing page and 10 content marketing focused blog posts before you can launch your product.

April subtly sold me on getting her book by casually tweeting.

Now let's analyze how this magic works.


First tweet she starts with a story with an intriguing result: explosive growth and eventual company acquisition because of (re)positioning.

She then emphasizes the underlying theme of these tweets at the end: "the power of positioning."


Second tweet, she continues with her life story, again ending with a mouth-watering result: big growth and company acquisition in the billions.

Notice how April doesn't start out by saying something vague like "ever since I entered the workforce, many companies have seen explosive growth and eventually acquired."

It wouldn't have packed much power in the statements and thus wouldn't establish much credibility or trust.

Instead, she went into details (e.g. "personal database to an embeddable database") about a few companies she worked at that succeeded by repositioning. But not too much detail to not fit in a tweet or lose readers' interest.


Now that April has got her foot in the door with the two specific examples, she has established her credibility enough to move on.

In the third tweet, she lumps the many other companies that have seen success because of repositioning to further prove her point.

But this time, she does it while establishing her authority: 16 products, 7 different startups, being an executive. Two birds one stone.


OK, enough background and context setting, it's time to get into the main point: the book.

In the previous tweets, April talks about the attractive benefits of positioning.

In this fourth tweet, she starts addressing one of the pain points surrounding positioning and essentially describing the reason why she had to write this book: there is a lack of education on how to do positioning.


Fifth tweet, April continues to uncover the pain point while emphasizing on the importance of positioning, e.g. it's the beginning of everything and it defines a lot of aspects of the business.


Now April goes into more detail about how the existing solutions fail to solve the problem that is a lack of positioning education.

Notice her vivid descriptions of current solutions: "laughably vague" that relies on "voodoo+intuition". Surely you can't build a business on vagueness and voodoo and intuition, right???

In a word, she's agitating and challenging the status quo and getting the readers to really feel the pain.


More pain! Confusion!!? Do you feel it in your guts now???


"Positioning can be easy!" It's only just a few blanks to fill. Once you answer them, you'll be fine!

...or so you think.


Positioning can't be as easy as filling in the blanks!

There are more missing pieces that are missing that you didn't even know existed, such as the order in which you work through it (again, lack of education).

This is again agitating the pain even more.

When you really feel the pain in your guts or stomach or other body parts, you are more likely to seek solution and take action.

If you are not getting emotional about an issue, it's relatively hard to get you to hear more about it, let alone acting on it.


Here April says "fear not! Humanity is not doomed, yet."

Even though it's been painful up til now, but fix is around the corner.

And she's not just selling an idea that she came up with during shower (it could be); it's actually proven by herself and other startups founders — even the skeptical ones ("I'm looking at you, skeptical reader").

It's a proven and refined process, so don't worry.


Did April spark an idea in your head to ask her for positioning help?

Great!

But... [scarcity] she's too busy to help everyone. And you can expect her to charge a premium if you can get her to help you one-on-one.

By the way, this is great demand building and anchoring. April has built up enough credibility and authority for you to believe that

  1. She won't be cheap
  2. But you will get a lot of value from her

But she's only one person... can't help everyone...

Wait, there's hope.

She wrote the process down, and she's kind enough to let everyone have it!

And that was the perfect setup for the SALE:


Whew, that was a lot to go through, but April impresses me with every tweet in the thread. I have so much to learn from her!

The cool thing is that before this tweet, I had no idea who she is.

Now, without her explicitly telling me, I got the following impression of her:

  1. She's a successful executive
  2. She can help companies gain clarity and succeed
  3. She adds a great amount of value and probably charges a great amount as well

Overall, she's a person I can trust if I ever find myself stuck in a growth bottleneck and/or unclear about my company's positioning.

And that is how you sell a book from a twitter thread.