Want your book to perform better? Turn to one of the heartbeats of your profession – your readers.
Think about this: Social media can be a useful part of an author’s platform to sell their books, helping them connect with readers, fellow artists and even the publishing community. It is a tool. What it is not, however, is a catch-all solution. Many authors waste a lot of time trying to use social media to sell their books thinking social media is a be-all and and-all of marketing and promotion.
Julie Board, author of More Than Cashflow shared a few thoughts on this. She underscored the importance of having a really good plan in place first so that you can use socmed properly as a tool to sell more books.
“First, you need a plan to sell your book from the start. Your book needs a hook. To know what will hook your readers, you need to know who your readers are,” she said in a Sep 2017 vlog at Book Launchers’ YouTube channel.
You also need to identify your target audience and know where they like to hang out. Sure, Facebook has about two billion registered users, but you can’t just market your book randomly to each one of them and hope for the best. ‘Everyone’ is not a target audience.
“For some types of books you’re gonna find readers hanging out on GoodReads, but a lot of time you’re actually gonna find them offline – at conferences, trade shows. They might be reading magazines or frequenting certain types of businesses in your area. Or they might be searching for solutions on videos or podcasts,” Julia added. In short, the marketing for your book should be planned out well and should target ideal readers.
Here are some essential questions to ask in order to identify your target audience:
- Who are most likely to read your book?
- How old are they?
- What are their interests and hobbies?
- What kind of work do they do?
- How much money do they earn?
- What kind of lifestyle to they maintain?
- Are they married? Single? Divorced?
- What other books/authors do they read?
Do you want to know a secret? Julia let us in to one very important point in her vlog: “People who will help you the most will know you personally. If you want your book to do well, make sure you’re building relationships, adding value and supporting people in your industry so that they will do the same when the time comes for you and your book.” The success of her first book More Than Cashflow was entirely a result of the support of a handful of key people in the Canadian real estate industry who, in one way or another, know her personally. These people showed up for Julia by promoting her book to all of their audience – the reason why it eventually went to number one overall on Amazon.
“Without them, when I was promoting the book to my audience, I was able to break the top 100 overall, but it was because of them that I hit number one,” she recalled.
Another example is American entrepreneur Tim Ferriss. When he launched his book Four-Hour Work Week over 10 years ago now, he relied heavily for its best-selling status using relationships he built with bloggers. He started before he ever needed something from them, reaching out to certain bloggers well in advance of publishing his book.
In the end, social media offers some great ways for readers to interact with you but make sure you’re connecting with people in other ways where you have control of the crowd and you are not being a promoter just for the heck of selling your book. What works good all the time: Building up a relationship over a long period.