I am an obsessive student of book marketing and I always believe there are things we can tweak in our own marketing strategies. Whether you are traditionally or independently published, we all need to know about marketing in a crowded online book market. In this guest post Kristen James asks a question that many authors want the answer to: how do you grow your readership?
A world full of readers is at our fingertips these days with digital publishing and global availability. With all the available information about writing and book promotion, many authors are successfully selling. You may be in a similar place, wondering what comes next.
How do you keep it going? How do you grow your readership?
Picture your readership as a garden.
To grow a garden, you prepare the soil with compost and fertilizer, till the ground, plant seeds or plants and water regularly. Once things began to grow, you need to weed and prune. I think you get the picture—there’s lots to do!
Now I don’t want to scare anyone into thinking that cultivating a readership is a lot of work. On the contrary, I want to excite you because there is so much you can do to connect with your readers and engage them.
(1) Quick and Easy. Giveaway Free Books.
I’ve found the easiest and quickest way to reach new readers is through offering free books. You can offer a free book as a download on your website, through Smashwords, or for 1-5 days through Kindle Select if you don’t mind being exclusive to Kindle. Even before Kindle Select, I noticed that my sales grew for all my titles when I offered a book for free.
Another quick step in building your readership is to include your links and book list in the front and back of all your books. Readers might skip the front matter, but if they enjoy your book, they’ll check out your bio, website(s), and other books at the end. Include direct links to your Amazon book pages for easy purchasing.
(2) Keep Writing
It’s fun to get involved online, and it’s easy to get carried away to the point of not writing. Your readers want more books, and it will make you a better writer.
(3) Deliver the Goods (Over and Over Again)
Yesterday I ordered my favorite crispy chicken salad at my favorite drive in, but it wasn’t my favorite salad. Instead of crispy chicken, I got some kind of mushy, processed meat. The crunchy noodles were gone. And it was much smaller than normal.
Ever have that happen to you?
Or maybe you downloaded the newest title from one of your favorite authors and found it to be lacking. You can mess up on quality with a weak storyline, weak characters, poor editing, proofing and formatting. If one of your books isn’t up to par, you’ll run off new readers and lose your loyal ones. I know because I once rushed a book to market by editing after proofreading, and not having it proofread again. It’s possible to fix things like this, and continue to learn and grow, but I’d love to save you the trouble! You want every book to be its very best when it goes out into the world.
(4) Engage Your Core Group
There are so many ways to engage the reading community online through a blog, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads and many other social websites. I enjoy talking to readers, book bloggers and other writers on Facebook and through my blog. Look for opportunities to join a blog hop, donate books or ebooks to another blog’s giveaway, guest blog, and celebrate others’ successes with them.
I’ve posted two covers on Facebook and asked people to like their favorite. Other authors post questions and ask for help in naming a new character, town or business in their book, or for thoughts on raising a 10 year old daughter.
(5) Speaking of Blogging…
Fiction writers sometime wonder, what on earth do I blog about? Posting novel previews is a powerful marketing tool, but it’s difficult to keep up an interesting blog just writing about your books. My blog is a mix of posts about my writing, my passions and adventures, and encouraging posts that share personal lessons. Think about what you have to offer besides a good read. If you have a completely different topic, consider a separate blog to read new and different readers. (I keep a separate blog about book promoting since the audience is different.)
(6) Stay Connected
While you don’t want to spend all your time trying to engage people online, it’s also important to keep a presence. It’s better to check in every few days than to do a big dump once a week, or worse yet, just when you launch a new book. I usually spend at least a few minutes in the morning and evening on Facebook, and I write a blog post for one of my blogs a few times a month.
(7) Mine Your Reviews
Your readership will naturally grow as you learn and grow as a writer. Beyond a writing group, critique partner, hired professionals and beta readers, reviews can be another useful source of feedback to improve our writing and future books. Reviews have shown me which of my romances have the most compelling couple, which evoked the most emotion, and highlighted my strengths and weaknesses.
You can learn a wealth of information by reading your reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, but I do advise against commenting, even if it’s to thank someone. Instead, check out your reviews from a learning standpoint. You can put on your marketing cap, too, and look at the things that readers love. What do readers compliment the most, and do any issues pop up in several reviews, or across several books?
Look for trends and not single comments. You can’t change your writing over every review, but if something positive or negative shows up often, it’s useful information. Reviews are a direct link to readers that show us how our end product comes across.
We’re very lucky in this day and age to be able to update published works, especially if we’ve self published. If an issue comes up in many reviews, we have the opportunity to revise it. Again, don’t rush a book to market, thinking you can fix things later, but there might be a good reason to revise a chapter, the ending, a character or some plot point that just didn’t work the way you thought it would.
Growing your readership is easier than ever with today’s publishing climate of print on demand and ebooks. Books no longer get a six month window before disappearing. They continue working for you, reaching new readers, growing your sales and your readership. Just keep believing in yourself and writing!
***
Kristen James is the author of How To Sell More Kindle eBooks as well as other non-fiction, seven novels and several Kindle short stories. View her full book list on Amazon at http://amazon.com/author/kristenjames. She lives on the river in Oregon and enjoys outdoor activities, especially with her family. Her motto? Life should be an adventure!
Connect with Kristen at:
Her writing blog: www.writerkristenjames.com or her Book Promoting Blog: www.bookpromoting101.com
Twitter at @writerkristenj https://twitter.com/#!/writerkristenj
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
As always. Great tips, Joanna.
I agree with your list, Kristen. Speaking of mining our reviews, I think the hardest part for any writer is seeing a negative review and wanting so desperately to explain your side to them.
I think every writer needs to learn how to take criticism well because once your books out there the whole world can see it and the whole world has an opinion.
Shaquanda, you often hear writers need a thick skin. I think the review system on Amazon and else is a good thing, but people can be mean at time! I do have to admit my biggest writing lessons have come from hired critiquers or bad reviews. Readers don’t pull punches. They’ll let us know if our character was too wimpy, our storyline wasn’t believable, or our writing can improve.
This site is like taking a brilliant writing class, absolutely free. It makes my whole day better, when I read a fresh post and I feel inspired! If knowledge is power then you’re making all of us incredibly powerful! Thank you so much!
I’m so glad you enjoy it Katie. I love that we can support each other on the journey.
Tips like these make a great post to readers like me. Thanks a lot Kristen!
Thand you. This is a great post. I’m going to tweet it and share it on our Facebook page. My partner and I are both writers who understand the constant content and time demands placed on writers in our socially connected 24/7 world. The opportunity of social media is amazing. It’s a way to find a global audience of loyal readers who will support you throughout your career. But, let’s face it, we’re all human! How much can we accomplish in a day? This is one of the reasons we created a free, social book discovery platform called Bublish. It’s meant to help you engage more readers by repurposing your best work, your book, and telling the story behind it. We just launched on June 4 at Book Expo America in New York City. We hope you’ll check us out, and let us know if Bublish helps you grow your readership. Best of luck to all of you. Kristen, thanks for a great post.
Yes, wonderful post. I especially love the part of not rushing a book to market when you *know* it isn’t ready. It’s tempting b/c you’ve been working on it for sooo long, and you just want it to be OVER already. But as they say, “haste makes waste” (or in this case, marketing mistakes!). Best of luck with your work.
There’s definitely a moment when you are ‘over’ the book. But that’s the point to send it to the editor
Good point! I can also rush by thinking a book *is* ready when I need someone else to evaluate that for me. I’m working on my first sequel and trying to take my time; I’ve been reading up on writing, taking apart other books, and taking my plot through every check list and quality control I can think of.
Luckily, marketing mistakes might be easier to fix than writing mistakes! Best of luck to you as well.
Sorry–silly question for Mrs. Penn–do you know how I can get my pic in that square when commenting? There doesn’t seem to be a sign-in area or anything. Just curious.
Hi Ilana, to be honest, I think it’s got something to do with Wordpress recognizing your URL or email and associating it with a wordpress site. But I’m not really sure
sorry. I am partially techy but not totally!
Sorry to butt in here Joanna & Ilana! Head over to Gravatar.com and register your name, URL and upload an image of yourself. It records it all on a central database so that whenever and wherever you comment it will show up.
- Laura
Thanks–I’ll try that!
Thanks Laura
That’s okay. I’ve only noticed that problem w/one or two other blogs I visit. If you’re okay w/me being a greyed-out little dude, I’m okay with it!
Great post. This helps me refocus, double down, and get back to it.
Great to hear this helped you, Rick.
Heaps of great tips here, some I’ve already been doing but a few others I never even thought of (and a couple I’ll use in the future). Thanks for the great list.
This is such a helpful blog! I am working towards having my novel ‘Tortoise Soup’ published and I will certainly be following the advice given above
Some great advice, thank you!
So many great articles here Joanna. Just wanted to say thanks to you and your guest writers for making writers like me feel supported. x
Thanks Ross, I’m so glad you are finding the site useful!
Super blog! Thanks so much for the helpful ideas and wonderful advice.
Wow, thanks to everyone for the nice comments! I love Joanna’s blog and have been enjoying the posts and information for quite some time. So it’s an honor to see my post here. One of the biggest benefits has been learning about how other authors progress and succeed in all the aspects of a writing career. “Keep Writing” is one of the smaller sections in this post, but it might be the most important. It sharpens our skills, gets more books out there to reach more readers, and it’s why we’re doing this in the first place, right? Best of luck to everyone with their writing!
{ 4 trackbacks }