At this week’s meeting for my local writing group, I presented on the topic of marketing for writers with a focus on readers. Here are my notes.
RARE – respect, authenticity, reciprocity, expertise – FROM THE READERS’ PERSPECTIVE
Why focus on marketing:
- Short-range – sell books
- Mid-range – get reviews
- Long-range – build a fanbase to sell more books
Who to market to:
- Family and friends
- Pros: feel happy/obligated to buy your stuff
- Cons: Amazon cracking down on reviews by people you know, not as believable because people think they’ll be positive no matter what
- Other writers – very common
- Pros: often reciprocity with reviews, sales, and promos
- Cons: hard to jump from writers to readers with content, reciprocity expected even if you don’t like what they write/different genre
- READERS!!
- Pros: readers want to read good books
- Cons: hard to find, already bombarded by tons of ads/spam
Where to market:
- In person
- Direct sales to family and friends
- Book fairs and readings
- Online
- Social media
- Followers – real vs numbers
- Comments on other blogs (indirectly only)
- Targeted ads
- Who’s seeing these posts?
- Website
- Newsletters/mailing lists
- Your own
- Group’s
- Social media
When to market:
- Daily – buzz about your books on social media
- 20% formula (only 20% of posts about your books)
- 5-3-2 formula (5 should be content from others, 3 should be content from you, 2 should be personal status updates)
- Pre-launch
- Snippets
- Cover reveal
- Pre-orders
- Sale
- Acceptable to buzz more frequently
What to market:
- Your books
- Snippets/excerpts
- Random facts/research relating to your books
- Links to purchase
- Yourself
- Blog posts
- Social media posts that show your personality
- Other people’s stuff
- Reciprocity principle
- Set your own personal guidelines for what you’ll share
How to market:
- Social media
- Twitter – quick status updates, links
- Facebook – longer posts
- Pinterest – images related to your works
- Other sites – Google+, Tsu, etc – who’s there??
- Website
- Central place to send people to
- Include link in signatures and blog comments
- Provide meaningful content for your target audience
- Ads
- Newsletters/mailing lists
- BookBub, Ereader News Today, etc – how big is their reach vs price
- Facebook
- Who are you targeting?
- Impressions vs sales
- Goodreads, Amazon
- Expensive
- Check conversion rates
- Giveaways
- Rafflecopter
- Multi-author vs one author
- Cost of prizes related to how many people enter
- Goodreads giveaway – lots add to TBR, but few reviews
- Rafflecopter
- Mailing list
- Frequency
- set number vs something to share
- too often = annoying, too infrequently = forget who you are
- Mailchimp
- Frequency
- Book fairs
- Very low RTI – cost vs books sold; publicity?
- Iowa City Book Festival, Midwest Writing Center events
- Swag
- Bookmarks
- Business cards
- Trinkets/widgets related to your book
- Free books
- Pros – new readers, possibly more reviews, push you up in rankings for later
- Cons – too many free books to read, don’t see a bump later, only one book out
- Most common with series book #1, short stories
- Newsletters/mailing lists
Branding
- Consistent look
- Same picture for everything
- Same bio
- Similar color schemes/layouts on covers and across online
- Tagline
- “Writing stories of love and betrayal, sacrifice and redemption”
- “Adventure romance”
- Similar genres/themes
- Pen name
Role of reader
- “Don’t be a dick.” – Will Wheaton
- How is your content benefiting them?
- Entertainment
- Information
- Free stuff
- Not annoying
- Engagement
- Social media – conversation
- Ask them what they want – survey/poll
- #QOTD
Resources