Marketing Brief
The Marketing Brief is the foundational document that makes every other subtab in the Marketing module work. It’s a twelve-field form you fill in once per book, capturing the core information a marketing agent would need to draft anything — title, genre, hook, description, audience, themes, comps, tone, unique selling points. Every subtab in the Marketing module that generates agent output — Copywriting, KDP metadata, Social Media, Query Letters, Ad Keywords, Market Intel, Creative Studio — reads the Brief as context. Fill out the Brief once and every downstream generation has the grounding it needs. Skip the Brief and the downstream generations are guessing at what your book is about, which produces mediocre output. Most authors who use Ishvana’s Marketing module for the first time underinvest in the Brief and overinvest in the individual generation subtabs, which is backwards — the Brief is the foundation, and the quality of everything else depends on it.
The Brief lives in the sidebar of the Marketing module as a collapsible form. You can see it from any subtab. Most authors fill it out once per book and revisit it a few times during the project’s life as things change.
The twelve fields
Section titled “The twelve fields”Each field captures a specific piece of information that generation tasks will reference.
Title and book info
Section titled “Title and book info”- Book title. The name of the book. Plain text.
- Genre. The primary genre — fantasy, science fiction, romance, mystery, literary fiction, thriller, horror, and so on. Drives language and conventions in downstream generation.
- Subgenre. A more specific shelf — epic fantasy, urban fantasy, cozy mystery, romantic suspense. The subgenre matters more than the genre for practical marketing because readers shop subgenres.
- Target audience. Middle Grade, Young Adult, New Adult, or Adult. Determines appropriate vocabulary, themes, and positioning.
- Series name (optional). If the book is part of a series, the series name.
- Book number in series (optional). If applicable, the position in the series (Book 1, Book 3, etc.).
Core content
Section titled “Core content”- Hook. One-sentence pitch. The single most important field in the Brief, because it’s the hook that everything else rides on. The hook should be specific enough to interest the right reader and compressed enough to fit on a book cover.
- Description. Two to three paragraphs summarizing the book’s premise, main character, conflict, and stakes. Not a blurb — a working summary that tells the agent what the book is actually about.
- Themes. The big-picture ideas the book explores. Power and cost. Family versus freedom. Identity. Grief. Coming of age. Freeform — list whatever is actually in the book.
Positioning
Section titled “Positioning”- Comp titles. Other books that are similar to yours. Usually 2-5. Pulled from your Market Intel but can be edited directly in the Brief.
- Tone keywords. Descriptors of the book’s voice and feel — dark, literary, hopeful, gritty, romantic, fast-paced, atmospheric. These drive tone selection in subtabs like Copywriting.
- Unique selling points. What makes this book different from its comps. What does it do that they don’t? What angle does it take that nobody else has? The field where honest positioning beats self-flattery.
Auto-save
Section titled “Auto-save”The Brief auto-saves every time you change a field. You don’t click save. You fill in a field, you move to the next field, and the change is persisted instantly to your project data. This matters because the Brief is meant to be iterative — you might fill in half of it today, come back tomorrow and add more, revisit next week after rewriting your pitch. Auto-save means you never lose in-progress work and you never have to remember to commit your edits.
There’s a completion counter at the top of the Brief that shows how many of the twelve fields have content. A Brief that’s 4/12 filled is weaker context than a Brief that’s 12/12 filled, and the counter reminds you to come back and flesh out the missing fields.
Per-book Briefs
Section titled “Per-book Briefs”If you have multiple books in your project, each book gets its own Marketing Brief. Switching between books in the sidebar also switches which Brief is active. Your fantasy trilogy might have three completely different Briefs even though they share most of a world, because each book needs its own positioning.
The Brief is per-book, not per-project. A single project can hold many books, each with its own Brief, each feeding its own downstream generation.
How every subtab uses the Brief
Section titled “How every subtab uses the Brief”| Subtab | What it pulls from the Brief |
|---|---|
| Copywriting | Title, hook, description, tone, audience for drafting blurbs and taglines |
| KDP & Metadata | Title, subtitle, genre, subgenre, series info for KDP-specific metadata |
| Social Media | Hook, tone, themes for social post drafting |
| Query Letters | Hook, description, comp titles, word count, genre for agent queries |
| Ad Keywords | Genre, subgenre, comp titles, tone for keyword research |
| Market Intel | All fields, for deeper positioning analysis |
| Creative Studio | All fields, as baseline context for debate sessions |
Changes to the Brief propagate. Update your comp titles in the Brief and the next query letter generation uses the new comps. Change your hook and the next blurb generation leads with the new hook. The Brief is a single source of truth for the book-level marketing information, and downstream subtabs read from it instead of maintaining their own copies.
How to fill out the Brief well
Section titled “How to fill out the Brief well”A few practical notes from authors who’ve used it seriously:
Write the hook first. Everything else gets easier once the hook is locked in. If you can’t write a good one-sentence hook for your own book, you have a clarity problem the agent can’t fix for you — and its output for every other field will suffer accordingly.
Be specific about comps. “Fantasy books” is a bad comp. “The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty” is a good comp. Specific comps give the agent real positioning anchors.
Don’t hide from your genre. If you wrote a romance, put romance in the genre field. Some authors undersell their genre because they want to feel literary, and the result is that downstream generation produces copy that’s positioned wrong for the actual market.
Revisit the Brief after you’ve used it. The first Brief you write will be okay. After you’ve generated some copy and seen what works and what doesn’t, come back to the Brief and sharpen it. Quality compounds.
Leave fields blank rather than filling them with filler. A half-full Brief with good content is better than a full Brief padded with vague language. Downstream generation can work with missing fields; it can’t recover from wrong fields.