Where are my readers? And other infrequently answered questions for authors.

(Please note: this post appeared on my original blog (Woman on the Edge of Reality, which no longer exists) in about 2011).

In a much earlier post, I introduced you to the concept of creating a marketing plan for your book … and on the subject of a Marketing Plan for Authors! You will need to read it before we carry on, as it introduces you to six important helpers in your arsenal to get your book into the right hands.

Today, I’d like to consider the question many authors have but don’t usually ask, and almost certainly never get answered. And that’s finding the elusive place your potential readers hang out.

Of course, before you can go to this mysterious place you need to know who your readers are. In other words, what do they look like? What age are they? Which country/ies do they live in? What languages do they speak? What other authors do they like? What are their ‘issues’ (mainly for non-fiction writers)? Whether or not they actually ever read a book; and if they do are they reading them on an eReader or as a real physical manifestation of something to hold and smell?

It is only by answering these questions first that you have a hope of finding their hideouts and hangouts. You can read a bit more about how I applied the above questions to 101 Handy Hints for a Happy Hysterectomy (I kid you not, it is a genuine book!) in the post called The good, the bad and the downright ugly of marketing books.

Answering the questions gives you a profile of your perfect reader. In some cases, you may even be able to ‘see’ them in your mind’s eye. Having such a good picture gives you two advantages:

1. firstly, you can now start to imagine what it might be like to talk to them over a coffee
2. you can hone the things you are saying to appeal to this ‘person’ – who could in fact be millions of people

So, let’s talk about the coffee (or in my case, tea) you are going to have with your reader. Knowing what they look like means you know the sorts of things they might be interested in, the way that they might speak and the things that they may respond to. Whilst this isn’t an absolute given as there will be readers who fall outside of your carefully prepared profile, that’s fine as we need to get to the ‘many’ at this stage; you can whittle them down later.

When you find them, you will need to speak their language and enter their world. This is not the time to sharpen your pitch and just talk about you. Rather you need to talk about them instead, and carefully build a relationship with them that is based on your common interests.

For example, I knew that readers of LinkedIn Made Easy were likely to be interested in finding out how to use LinkedIn professionally. As the most active users on LinkedIn are men I also knew my language needed to reflect this. I had a clear message to share, which was that using the network helped make small business owners and professionals more effective; just creating a profile and connecting with lots of people was never going to work.

Therefore, at the time I published the book my LinkedIn profile clearly mentioned I was the author of LinkedIn Made Easy. I also spent time answering questions about LinkedIn on the network and in places like Twitter too, when I still had an account. Every time someone sent me a canned LinkedIn request I returned the favour with a simple message asking ‘why?’ and pointed them to a blog post with the nifty title Please don’t add me as a connection on LinkedIn unless you REALLY mean it! explaining why I never accepted canned requests. This simple set of actions was responsible for making the book a best-seller in no less than three categories on the Kindle store of Amazon UK when it was first published and then later updated.

But my book’s fiction I hear you cry. And it’s true that fiction books are slightly more difficult to work with using these methods but they still apply. You know the topic you’ve written about and therefore your book will appeal to readers of that particular genre. Today, there are also websites and forums dedicated to almost every type of fiction imaginable as well as magazines and newspapers that your readers may well be interested in.

For instance, readers of Woman on the Edge of Reality are likely to be over the age of 45. They may well be looking a new chapter in their lives or questioning some decisions they made in the past. They might be empty-nesters or have no children at all. And it’s fair to say they could be reflecting on the significant relationships in their lives. The places I might look to talk about my book might be sites like Lovereading.co.uk, or female-focused forums of the major news and magazine websites in the UK. As it’s set in Cornwall, I might even contact companies and websites which promote Cornish tourism.

The places I will NOT be looking at are for those people who read murder mystery books or horror or sci-fi. They might read my book but they’ll find it through other means and I wouldn’t want to offend them by introducing something so ‘mainstream’ to their worlds.

In the coming months, I’ll be preparing more posts to explain how you too can find that elusive reader. That’s it for today folk and I’d be interested to hear how you get on and where you have found your readers too.

(Image by Lubos Houska from Pixabay))