Positioning Your Author Business In the Human Preference Economy
A strategic look at where you stand, where to shore up, and how to build what the economy is moving toward
Earlier this month, I made the case that the emerging “human preference economy”—built on authenticity, experience, and meaning and running parallel to an AI- and algorithm-dominated future—is moving toward what we’re doing here at The Profitable Author: authors building businesses around their books.
In this article I nudge us to ask ourselves the tougher things: How deliberately are we incorporating the pillars of the human preference economy into what we’re building? Where are the gaps? What can we do next?
We started with perspective and inspiration. Let’s move on to strategy.
First, the Audit
Before wrangling with strategic positioning, take stock. For each of the three pillars, ask yourself where you’re strong, where you’re solid (with momentum and ideas for building), where you’re inconsistent, and where you’re currently missing in action.
An audit lays bare your weaknesses hiding in plain sight and what your highest-leverage opportunities are. A weak authenticity signal, for example, may be wasting your experience and meaning investments. Exceptional meaning and substance with no delivery mechanism could be leaving money and relationships on the table. The pillars reinforce each other; gaps in one undermine the others.
Authenticity: Our personal presence and how we show up
Authenticity for the human economy doesn’t refer to a personality trait or us (necessarily) baring our souls, putting all our cards on the table, leaving it all on the field. We don’t need to wring ourselves dry, exposed without proper SPF. Rather, we need to understand that our unique voice, as we understand it, cultivate it, and want to share it is a strategic asset we deploy or leave untapped.
Where authors can fall short: Generic content that could have been written by anyone. Hedged language that softens our actual perspectives. Positioning borrowed from other authors’ templates rather than reflecting our true and specific expertise and experience—and business needs and preferences. Social media presence that performs and copies rather than self-expresses and connects.
Where to shore up: We should endeavor to have our unmistakable voices and presence evident across every touchpoint—our books, newsletters, website copy, event appearances, partnership proposals, social posts, customer service calls, etc.
Review your last five pieces of content. How much of your distinctive perspective, specific expertise, and real experience is apparent—and how much is generic? Do these things sing with who you are and who you want to be?
Move on to assessing your pricing; your positioning; your books, products, and services; and the clients, events, sponsors, and projects you take on. These can all reflect and reveal our authentic selves and strategic choices in light of them. If we sometimes make pure business decisions to accommodate the market, we can do that intentionally in a way that’s authentic to us.
Caveat: I do think we can come to understand and nurture our own voices and grow our own businesses by first copying from others and discovering how we want to deviate from that.
Have you heard about finding your “comp authors,” an excellent approach to building your own business model I’m hearing more about. Comp titles, of course, are a critical section of preparing book proposals for agents and publishers—comparing and contrasting the book you’re proposing to what’s already out in the world. Finding your comp authors means finding authors you admire with similar books, and perhaps personalities and inclinations, and discovering what you can about their book marketing and income-generation approaches to inform and expand your own efforts.
Experience: Are you creating memorable, immersive, transformative experiences?
The experience pillar holds perhaps the most untapped potential for our author businesses, where the gap between what’s possible and what’s currently being built is often widest.
Where authors can fall short: Treating events as one-off marketing tactics rather than experience economy plays. Underpricing experiences. Writing books and waiting for readers to find them rather than creating encounters with them. Relying solely on digital presence in a world that’s hungry for physical, in-person, memorable interaction.
Where to shore up: Look at your current author activities through this lens: Which of them create or deliver an experience someone would remember, think about, tell others about, and even pay for?
If the answer is um or not many, this may be your highest-leverage gap. Events, workshops, tours, and in-person gatherings are all experience economy opportunities, waiting to be built, optimized, or expanded.
This week, identify one experience you could create or upgrade in the next 90 days—something with a ticket price, a specific audience, and a reason to remember it. Create your before-during-after checklist as you to begin systematizing such events for you. Run version 1.0. Refine the list, your system, from there and plan about the next event.
Next, think about what experiences your books naturally suggest. A cookbook author has cooking events, sure. But these may be demos, hands-on classes, or shopping tours. A travel author may have slideshows, landmark walks, or ethnic restaurant gatherings. A business book author may have workshops and coaching sessions. A mystery author may host immersive whodunnit parties, behind-the-scenes crime tours, and guest-expert panels. What are the experiences your book is pointing toward that you’ve yet to develop and test?
Meaning: Are You Thinking About and Creating for More than a Transaction?
Meaning may be the pillar most authors understand most intuitively but don’t grasp just how far they can take it.
Where authors often fall short: Treating readers as numbers rather than a community of specific, real individuals. Fiddling with marketing funnels more than genuine relationships (really, which is easier for you?). Focusing on one-off sales rather than the cumulative impact of a body of work and the community and opportunities around it. Underestimating how much your distinctive expertise, approach, and worldview matters to the people who yearn and seek for those things.
Where to shore up: Meaning in an author business is built through such things as the work itself, how you approach and deliver it, the relationships around it, and the community that emerges.
Don’t shy away from being explicit about what your books and services are for and who they serve. Making your author expectations and goals explicit (see article below) applies to your readers and customers too—What do you want your books to do for them? What are you providing? When you have a clear sense of this, the more deliberate you can be about injecting meaning into every element of your author business.
For example, the talent curation, service marketing, and direct reader connections I’ve talked about here aren’t just business tactics—they’re meaning-building practices. Every real relationship you build around your work adds to the meaning economy you’re creating around you and your books and for others.
For us at Conspire Creative, our coaching and consulting services for entrepreneurial authors and indie publishers, Beyond the Margins event series, free monthly Power Hours, bimonthly email newsletter, this Substack, and other products and services aren’t just marketing channels. They’re the meaning-making infrastructure behind what we’re doing. What makes up your meaning-making infrastructure?
Identify one way you’re currently treating a meaning opportunity a wee too transactional, and commit to upgrading your approach for the human preference economy. It may be that a reader who emails you deserves a heartfelt response, no matter how brief, over an automated one. Perhaps it’s a community member who shows up repeatedly and deserves extra recognition for their participation and loyalty. Small investments in meaning compound significantly over time.
Next, where can you upgrade your meaning-making infrastructure? Which products and services you currently offer need substance-based improvements? What can you add to your business model/meaning-making infrastructure to better serve in this human-scale parallel economy?
Micro-Entrepreneur Positioning: We Are Small Businesses and We Are Mighty
Solopreneurs and microbusinesses are in their element in the human preference economy. This parallel track we’re talking about rewards micro-enterprises that are clear about what they offer and who they serve; go all in on authenticity, experience, and meaning; and know why their human-scale businesses can go head to head, mano a mano, rubbing shoulders with corporate grayscale and dross.
Where authors can fall short: We authors too often underposition ourselves. Shrinking in stature and reputation to match our businesses of one or two. Apologetic about our quirks. Vague about our expertise. Humble-reluctant to claim the authority our experience has earned us.
Where to shore up: Our positioning should make it clear that the human-scale nature of what we offer is an advantage, not a limitation. We’re not the petite version of a NYC publishing house or a mega-corp content mill. We’re what the human preference economy specifically values: a real person with genuine, hard-earned expertise; authentic voice, insight, and expression; and the ability to create meaning and meaningful experiences for a specific community of readers and customers.
Let’s remember that claiming our worth, owning our author voices and businesses, are not arrogance and bloviating. It’s accurate positioning in an economy that’s actively looking for and buying what we have to offer.
Schedule Quarterly Strategic Audits
Make time each quarter to review how you’re doing in light of the human preference economy:
Authenticity. Are my indisputable, sincere voice, perspectives, and expertise showing up consistently across all reader-customer-public touchpoints? Where am I still performing and attempting rather than connecting and self-expressing?
Experience. What experiences am I creating that people would pay for, remember, and tell others about? What experience opportunities are my books pointing toward that I haven’t yet explored, experimented with, built?
Meaning. Am I building honest, unaffected relationships and community around my work, or reducing every interaction to a basic transaction? What meaning-making infrastructure am I investing in? Am I imbuing my written, marketing, and business-building work with substance? Am I creating meaning-making work and situations for others?
Positioning. Am I owning the human-scale, authentic, meaning-provoking, experience-driven nature of my author business as an advantage—or ignoring, downplaying, or apologizing for it?
The human preference economy isn’t coming. It’s here. It’s growing. It’s running parallel to the AI-dominated economy you may be spending too much time griping about.
When we authors build deliberately toward authenticity, experience, and meaning now, we’ll be significantly better positioned than those who recognize the opportunities after the fact.
We at The Profitable Author already have a head start.
Let’s savor that, use it, and create forward with it.
Tell us in the comments
How do you feel about this mirco-entrepreneur moment? Which pillar—authenticity, experience, or meaning—is your strongest right now? Where’s the biggest gap? And what’s one specific thing you could do in the next 30 days to shore it up?
Shore Up Your Human Preference Economy Positioning—Strategically
The audit in this article is the starting point. Closing the gaps—building the experiences your books are pointing toward, deepening the meaning infrastructure around your work, claiming the positioning your expertise has earned—is the ongoing strategic work. My Author’s Business Accelerator is designed for published authors ready to move from recognizing the opportunities to deliberately building toward them. In 8 sessions (with a flexible schedule to work around your life), we’ll run the audit together, identify your highest-leverage gaps across authenticity, experience, and meaning, and build the specific plan that positions your author business for the economy that’s already here. Not group coaching or generic advice—it’s a strategic partnership built around your specific voice, your specific readers, and your specific path forward. Learn more about the Business Accelerator.
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