Finding your readers, Substack (for and against), influencer marketing
Published over 1 year ago • 4 min read
A couple of months ago I saw a man saying that he was walking around Bristol city centre with a sandwich board of his wife's book cover hoping to drum up sales. Although he certainly deserves praise for supporting his wife, I'd be VERY surprised if he sold any books.
Now, the two posts above caught my attention this month, and they reflect a very common issue that authors have about finding their readers (and then what to do with them).
In marketing terms, what you are aiming to do is find readers who like reading books like yours at a time when they are likely to buy a book and insert yourself in that process and say CHOOSE ME, or even CONSIDER ME. Sounds simple, doesn't it.
The concept of targetting is incredibly important, ie not leaving your book on park benches or getting your husband to wander around a city centre in a sandwich board. In simple terms, selling cookbooks should be significantly easier to people who visit Borough Food market or similar, than trying to target everyone who eats food. So, you should always be thinking how to target your potential readers and not how can you reach every reader.
To do this, you need to be thinking what do your potential readers have in common, what do they do in the real world and online, who is already reaching them, and how can I?
If you have some followers on social media, or newsletter subscribers, you already have potential readers. If that is the case, do you know anything about them? Have you ever surveyed your followers? Have you ever looked at your social media analytics?
This is an excellent post from BookBub, that explains how to do this, and what sort of things are useful for you to find out.
The online world should make finding your potential readers EASY. And I say that because readers already do lots of things online that will help you. Let's say that you are trying to find where sci-fi readers are active - they may do all or some of the following:
Follow other sci-fi authors & publishers (and buy their books)
Use sci-fi related hashtags
Be members of sci-fi reader Facebook groups
Attend sci-fi conventions (& use relevant hashtags)
Read sci-fi online magazines and blogs
Subscribe to ebook deals newsletter for cheap sci-fi books
Follow book bloggers, booktokers and other influencers who talk about sci-fi
Be active on Goodreads, Storygraph and other book communities
So, certain behaviour of your prospective readers is predictable. As an author, you'll need to find these spaces and insert yourself into them and start engaging with readers, bloggers and other authors.
Your options here are engaging organically and/or consider paying for ads to target these groups and subsets of these groups. (Through Amazon, Facebook, email promo ads and more).
5 practical things you can do to find your readers
Looking for local readers? See who follows your local library and bookshop and follow some of them
Connect with authors who are serving the same readers (comp authors) you want to reach and find ways to collaborate together
Google and search social media sites 'comp author name + review', 'comp author + interview' etc and see who and where these authors get publicity
Find your comp authors' blog tours, see which bloggers are on it, and follow them all
Attend bookshop events, festivals, cons in your reader space and soak up as much information as you can
I have super-simplified ways that you can find your readers, but I hope this overview helps clarify this for you.
In the last newsletter, I talked about a new service I'm launching later this month, that will help you
find readers
get reviews
encourage reviewers and influencers to read my book
be more targetted and not waste money
find beta readers
I am still accepting authors onto my Launch Team - to get an early look, give me some feedback, and in return be able to post one of your books on the site for free. If this appeals then please email me here and tell me a bit about your writing, books and publishing so far.
(This would be particularly useful if you have a book coming out in the next 6 months.)
As always, do scroll down for all of the useful and interesting posts I've found this week - this month is a bit of a whopper.
Enjoy
Sam x
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