It’s important to understand that you can’t write or market yourself out of a positioning problem. If you get it right, positioning makes both the writing and marketing of the book easy, and ensures you get what you want from your book. If you do not take this seriously, and get your positioning wrong, then almost nothing you can do will save your book or make it successful. A (VERY) BRIEF HISTORY OF BOOK POSITIONING For a hundred years in the old traditional publishing model, every agent had to have the positioning discussion with an editor before they would buy a book. Strictly speaking, in traditional publishing circles the positioning discussion only revolved around how the book fit into traditional sales categories. That’s where the term comes from. It’s literally a discussion of what position on the bookstore shelves the book is supposed to go, because in the twentieth century, the market for books was essentially synonymous with the needs of bookstores. This is obviously no longer the case. Most books are now sold digi- tally, categories don’t matter as much, and the majority of physical books are not sold in bookstores, but rather in non-book retail stores like Costco and Walmart that don’t even have categorized shelves. Furthermore, when all book publishing was done by traditional publishing companies, the only positioning decisions they cared about concerned whether books would sell, because that’s how they made money. MODERN BOOK POSITIONING None of this is true anymore. Now, most books are published out- 54 · ThE SCriBE METhOD