Guest post with blogger A.O. Chika
Simple Book Marketing tips for Authors: How to find and Understand your readers
What's up readers? I really enjoyed this blog post and thought I should share with my readers. I hope you'll leave a comment and let A.O and myself know what you think.
Welcome to the first post in the book marketing weekly series. There were several posts I would have loved to begin this series with, but most Authors are not marketers, so I decided to start at the beginning i.e. knowing your “Ideal Reader”.
PART ONE ~ Knowing Your Ideal Reader
As an author, you might not be able to control your book sales, irrespective of the number of Bookbub ads and Facebook ads you run. Unless you actually know who your target audience is, you will spend lots of money on marketing your book and get little return. Alternatively, you could improve your reader’s experience and give them a reason to care about your brand – your books. They need to feel invested in your brand, you need to care about them… and by that I don’t mean just making Facebook and Twitter posts talking about how happy you are and how much you love them, that is great and all but that is somewhat impersonal don’t you think? I’m an avid reader of both original fiction and fanfiction, I read 10k words on a bad day and 100k words on a good day, I have a list of top ten fanfiction and original fiction authors whose website I check every morning on Feedly. Your readers most probably also have their mental or physical list of authors they love and follow, so you need to give them a reason to add you to that list, you need to give them a reason to buy YOUR books, rather than a similar book by another author. Keep in mind that readers do not buy a book after hearing or seeing it somewhere once, sometimes we won’t buy a book even after seeing it everywhere on Facebook.
Sometimes after seeing or hearing about your book and reading the blurb, we click on the amazon link to read the reviews before we finally decide to buy the book. We really did want to buy your book, but once we got to the amazon page we got distracted by “Customers who bought this item also bought” and ended up buying one of those books instead. You might not be able to affect your book sales directly but you can directly affect your “Ideal Buyer” buying journey. On the next book in the book marketing series, I will go into detail about the reader’s buying journey. There I will break down the process readers take before deciding to buy a book. First, you need to know who your ideal reader is. It’s important for Authors to know who their target audience is as well as who your IDEAL reader i.e. among the group of people who reads the genre you write in and who would love your book, we need to find the segment of people within that group that would actually buy your book. There are readers and there are buying readers. Those who would buy your book or at least has the potential to do so once nurtured, are your ideal audience within your target audience. I hope you see where I’m going with this. Before you begin marketing your book, you need to know who exactly your target audience is. Assumptions and guesswork will only end with you either targeting the wrong target audience, a fraction of your potential audience or an imitation of your ideal audience. Examples of an imitation of your ideal audience are book bloggers and book reviewers who read the genre you write in. We love your books and we will gladly support you where we can, we are the perfect audience… except for the fact that we don’t need to buy your book as we can get it free in exchange for an honest review or a blog post. Book Bloggers and reviewers are VERY important; they are influencers whose readers are usually part of your ideal audience. However, we are not your IDEAL audience, we are just an imitation of it, and you really shouldn’t spend all that time, money, and effort marketing your book to us instead of your ideal readers. I’m an avid reader as well as a book blogger/reviewer, but I’m also a professional marketer and the truth has to be told no matter how much I love your books.
When you really think about it, book bloggers rarely send out an email promoting just one book, we usually send a newsletter about several books, interviews, blog tour, giveaways etc. Now imagine your ideal audience reading that email, what would make them choose your book over the other books. Now that the groundwork has been set, let’s move to the next part –identifying your ideal audience. Writing books is an art, but it’s also a business so I’m going to treat this as I would when talking to a client at work. I will be calling readers who read the genre your write and love your books “Target Audience” or “Target readers” and I’ll call the readers within this audience who would actually pay for your books, or would after being exposed to your brand and nurtured until they are sales ready “Ideal audience” or “Ideal Readers.” I hope you don’t mind, I just really need you to get into the business headspace. The interesting part is that identifying your ideal readers or target readers is actually quite simple despite the effort it requires. It’s a lengthy process but you cannot skip it. There’s no need to rush, take as much time as you need to set the foundation of your business and when it’s time to run marketing campaigns, you would reap the benefits of knowing your target readers. It doesn’t matter what stage of the book production journey you are in: whether you are still writing your book, if it’s in the final stage of production or if your book is already released.
Knowing and understanding your ideal audience is a must, to get you started I’ve included a template and a checklist, feel free to use them to know who your target audience really is and once you do, you’ll be able to connect with them online and offline. This way, rather than target people who read the genre you write and MIGHT like your book, you will know who WOULD. Most importantly, you’ll be able to get their attention and guide them through their buying journey and eventually increase your book sales.
To read the rest of A.O.'s post, head over to her blog.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing with us today!
As a reader you do forget what has to go into the marketing side. Very interesting thank you.
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Thanks for the guest post. PS my last name is Chika lol :)
ReplyDeleteI'm always impressed with how much work other than writing authors do.
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