Book Marketing for Authors: Finding Your Target Market
Transcript
The goal for authors: Find people who are most likely to BUY your books
Today we’re going to talk about how to determine your target market as an author. The goal is to find people who are most likely to buy your books. This task is on almost every list of book-marketing tips, and for good reason.
If you estimate it even kind of accurately, you get a much better idea of how much you should budget for marketing activities, where to invest your time, and even what kind of sales you can expect, assuming you wrote a riveting page-turner, and if you’re watching this, I am absolutely confident that you have.
So how do you find your target market? This guy (online marketing guru) doesn’t know. If he did, he wouldn’t be working in the basement of an abandoned post office.
Unfortunately, this task belongs in the category of marketing advice that I call, “things everyone tells you to do, but no one tells you how to do them,”
Or, TETYTDBNTYHT D…T.
Wait. That won’t work.
We could call it “Marketing Myths and Folklore,” which is easier to understand and already has a logo from my other blog. But that’s not really accurate either, because unlike Marketing Myths and Folklore, this advice is good. It’s just not useful if you don’t know how to do it.
So I’m going to call it, “Survivor Advice,” because someone gives it to you then drops you in the middle of the desert to figure it out for yourself.
A better marketing alternative than jumping straight into social media
It’s common for people who are new to this to begin finding their target market by searching in a place that they already know. Someplace they understand, and where they can start marketing immediately, with no special skills and no cash. In other words, social media.
But we’re going to start from the other end. The Great Unknown. By the time you finish watching this video, you’ll understand why.
This is the total universe of adult readers in the United States. I know looks like just an empty green circle. It doesn’t look much like a universe. Maybe this will help. (Video background of moving stars in space.)
Better?
OK.
Diving into the total U.S. book market, and the market for book genres
To give us some manageable constraints, we’re going to use my comic novel, Mary Frances O’Halloran Discovers Sin, as an example. I’m going to look for adult book buyers who like both women’s fiction and humor. To keep it simple, I’m going to stick with U.S. statistics. For those of you who want to jump into the numbers later, I’ll include sources in the description below.
This universe represents 258 million adult readers in the United States. 65% of them, or 167.7 million, read at least one book in the last year. But they didn’t all finish the books they started, which is interesting, and important. Those who did finish a book, and who enjoyed the experience, are thirty-nine times more likely to read another one, and more likely to go from being readers to being buyers. So authors, don’t complain about pass-along or borrowed copies. They’re a gateway drug to future sales.
A certain number of these readers are already book buyers. What is that percentage? As of this moment, I don’t know. That’s because the public data that Becky and I could find is reported as apples and oranges. And sometimes the numbers are so weird that they’re less like apples and oranges and more like apples and imaginary alien fruit.
For example, I found out how many print books were sold in the U.S. last year—767.36 million—but not how many people bought them. That figure doesn’t include ebooks, and it does include all printed books, including those for children, textbooks, and motel Bibles. We don’t even have a definition for what constitutes a “book” in this statistic. Suffice it to say that there is some, non-zero number of book buyers in the United States.
What we do know is that about 52% of book buyers buy fiction. Of those, a significant number of fiction buyers read women’s fiction. What’s the number? Again, I don’t know. Genre numbers drive authors crazy, because data that’s reported is often wildly contradictory, sometimes within the same source.
These numbers must exist—publishers decide how many books to publish, booksellers decide how many to buy—but they’re hard to find, and even the expensive data is inconsistent and difficult to verify. And don’t get me started on the blogger who wrote a lengthy article that sounded really convincing—and it turned out that all she did was count fewer than 250 hashtags in a month’s worth of Tweets.
That’s not research. That’s spending an hour avoiding cleaning your oven. Don’t get me wrong. Avoiding cleaning your oven is a laudable goal on its own. It’s one I am proud to say I achieve brilliantly for months on end, but it does not help your fellow authors.
The surprising value of narrowing your target audiences
Short answer, I want people who buy women’s fiction books. Why women’s fiction? Don’t I think that men would like Mary Frances O’Halloran Discovers Sin, as well? So far, they have. Of my early readers who are male, all but one liked it very much. But they all read it because they know me. Do I think that a random man would pick up a book by a woman author, with a female protagonist, told from a woman’s point of view, in a bookstore, and buy it?
Statistically, that’s less likely. And since right now I’m trying to concentrate my marketing effort on most-likely buyers, I’m not going to include men now. If the book builds momentum with male readers, I can absolutely expand my target markets later.
Targeting audiences for multiple genres
Because my book is a comic novel, I also want people who buy humorous fiction. There’s a relatively small overlap between women’s fiction and humor. In this case, gender is not a factor. Instead, it’s because most humor books that are traditionally published are written by comedians, and aren’t always novels. That isn’t necessarily because readers prefer books written by comedians. It’s because popular comedians are presumed to have ready-made audiences for their books, making them more attractive to publishers.
For example, P. G. Wodehouse has been a best-selling author since 1909. His writing style inspired generations of columnists, novelists, screenwriters, and Monty Python. The torch he left was picked up and carried onto a spaceship by Douglas Adams. He passed the 100-million-books-sold mark at the turn of the millennium, and his books continue to be popular fifty years after his death.
He launched his career in popular magazines that were read by millions of people every month, but we don’t have that platform anymore. Today, Wodehouse might find it hard to get a second look from a publisher without a tight five and a comedy special on Netflix.
For writers like me, who are humorists but not performers, that means that I have to carve out my expected audience from a much smaller piece of the market.
Targeting influencers with massive power and reach: book clubs
Book clubs are the world’s best referral system, so I definitely want book clubs that include women’s fiction and humor in their selections. Online book clubs collect data about their members, but clubs that meet in person don’t, so it’s very difficult to find and reach them. But it’s not impossible, as you’ll see later.
The joys and challenges of marketing to the online book community
Now, at last, after several steps, we’ve come to the place where most people begin: people who are interested in books and who are active online.
This includes all digital platforms: BookTube, BookTok, Threads, Instagram, Goodreads, book reviewers, book bloggers…you get the idea.
But we don’t want to target all of them. We just want to target those who are interested in our genres. In my case, again, that’s women’s fiction and humor.
Some people say there’s no real harm in going outside of your genres, but you’ll have to spend more money and much of it will be wasted. More important, your test data will be skewed, so you might draw incorrect conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. If you plan to market more than one book in your lifetime, incorrect information will make future campaigns more expensive and less effective, so you want to stay focused on what matters right now.
Targeting other authors
For one audience, genres don’t matter as much. That’s authors. In general, authors who are active online are very good at supporting other authors. They’ll often do this even for genres they don’t normally read. They’ll promote authors they like, and frequently even buy their books. Yay, us!
So even though the reach of an individual author may be small, together authors’ influence can provide a nice boost.
When you’re deeply invested in this community, especially if you have a lot of engagement, it’s easy to imagine that you can rely on the writing community as much for sales as for encouragement, especially for early goals like pre-orders.
That would be lovely, because it’s so much easier to talk to people who know you and who share your passion than to reach out to strangers. But other authors are individuals, just as you are, with their own priorities, challenges, and book-buying budgets.And as you can see, authors are not a big enough audience to sustain a career.
Besides, unless you’re an author who wrote a book for authors about how to be an author, you probably would like lots of people to read it. If we all just wrote our books only for other writers, it would start to feel like living in an echo chamber, and no one needs that. That’s what AI is for.
So now let’s come back down to earth and talk about what all this means and how to use it.
Identifying and targeting Passionate Influencers with different versions of your message
Here’s my total target audience for sales: book-buying adults in the U.S. who enjoy women’s fiction, humorous fiction, and members of communities who like those things: book clubs, authors, and the online book community.
This diagram, which looks like a cross between a rocket ship and a failed balloon animal, shows the segments with the most crossover — the most commonality. I call these people Passionate Influencers, because they’re most likely to get excited about your work and most likely to share about it.
This group includes a few people, like all the authors, who may help me promote Mary Frances O’Halloran Discovers Sin, but who may not buy it. And that’s OK.
Because most of them belong to more than one group, it should be easier and more cost-effective to reach them with multiple touches.
For example, suppose I create a digital ad from a chapter in my book. I choose a chapter that’s a funny conversation among three women, and their conflicting opinions of it afterwards.
Maybe I create one version of the ad that emphasizes the humor in the chapter, and place it where I think most humor fans are likely to see it.
The three women are a mother and daughter, and two best friends, so maybe I create an ad that emphasizes the relationships, and place that one where I think there are most readers interested in women’s fiction.
Then I do a third one and one that emphasizes the conflicts in the chapter.
Depending on where I place them, the ads have the potential to reach several of my audiences. Because of the overlap, some of them will see more than one ad, and get more than one impression, and that’s a good thing.
These audiences converge in the middle of the diagram. Right about where you see the yellow triangle and the dark blue-purple triangle. It includes audiences for humor, women’s fiction, book clubs, and book community members.
It won’t reach all of the members of each of those groups, but it will reach those who have the most intersection of interests.
The advantages and drawbacks of marketing to Early Adopters
Our next diagram is this cute little fish. These are Early Adopters. It takes work to get their attention, because everybody wants them, but if you do, they can be very helpful, especially in the early days of your launch.
What’s different about Early Adopters is that they are more willing to take risks on a purchase. They don’t need fifteen blurbs by famous people, or a 4.5 ranking on Goodreads or Amazon by at least five hundred other readers, before they decide to buy a book. They might make their purchase decision because they’re intrigued by a premise, a title, an excerpt, a cover, a recommendation, or some quirky story element.
The author Marc J. Gregson told a story on Threads about pitching his book, Sky’s End, to a stranger at a bookstore event. The shopper had no interest until Marc said, “It has giant monsters,” whereupon the man picked up a copy, bought it, and got it signed. That’s classic Early Adopter behavior.
Early Adopters don’t expect to love everything that they try, and aren’t particularly distressed if they don’t—the novelty and risk are part of the fun. They are less likely to need the predictability of a series, but will welcome a series if they enjoyed the first book in it.
They’re the book buyers who can help you get early sales, when nobody knows you. If you can engage with them, they may be the source of blurbs and reviews you need to help attract a wider audience.
Moreover, it’s a pretty small group, and as you can see, many of them intersect with the online book community, so they should be pretty easy to find and to reach.
So why do you even need to bother with anyone else?
Because early adopters also tend to be fiercely independent. They might need special attention and persistence to entice them to write and post reviews, or to share your book in other ways. Some early adopters are simply uncomfortable with that process.
And for small-ticket items, like books, Early Adopters prefer instant gratification, so are less likely to do pre-orders of books they don’t know from authors they haven’t read. You’re more likely to get an early adopter to buy after you’ve launched.
When talking to Early Adopters, there’s a special pitfall to be aware of s. Because they think differently than general audiences, some of the strategies and tactics that work gangbusters for early adopters won’t work at all when you move on to larger audiences.
And you have to move on to larger audiences, because, well, they’re larger. Early adopters alone won’t sustain you.
BTW if you want to know more about the differences between early adopters and general audiences, and how to convince them to do certain things—like buy stuff from you—I have an article on my advertising blog with more detail. I will link to it in the post.
The Online Book Community—the market that’s easiest to reach—is the most dangerous one for authors interested in unit sales
Finally, we come to the most dangerous segment of your entire target market. They’re the ones that are the easiest to reach, because they live more or less online. You don’t need special skill, or a lot of money, to talk to them. You might need an exhausting amount of time, and virtual truckloads of content, and a consistent presence, but if you’re willing to do that, you’re there in front of them.
Here’s why this is dangerous.
First, “being there” is not the same as selling books, and it doesn’t always lead to selling books. That’s a lot of painful effort to put forth if you’re not seeing sales at the end of the rainbow. Second, if you do this without planning, it’s all too easy to lose focus. Finally, this audience is tiny compared the the wider world of book buyers. Authors who focus 100% of their marketing efforts on those who are in the online book community risk being invisible to a much larger percentage of their potential audiences.
What you want is this: to reach the whole enchilada.
That’s your target audience: people who can buy your books. ALL people who can buy your books.
While this looks like a bigger task, it’s actually a much more manageable one. It still requires planning and thought, and, to be honest, at least some investment of cash. But it also frees you from the frenetic pace and personal interaction that traumatizes as many authors as it energizes.
Once you’ve identified your target audience, it’s time to think about strategies and tactics to reach them
So now I’ve identified my target audience. The next step is looking at this information and brainstorming strategies and tactics I might use to reach them.
Just doing this exercise for you is already giving me some ideas for how to market Mary Frances O’Halloran Discovers Sin that I hadn’t considered before. I’ll go into the process and the possibilities in more detail in a follow-up video. But here are a couple of examples to get your creative juices flowing about your own project.
Let’s start by thinking about all of the people who are in the very big circles outside of the online book community. Everybody to the left of the center. Believe it or not, there are millions of people who share book recommendations, buy books, and talk about them with their friends without even knowing that BookTube or BookTok or Goodreads exists. They live happy lives completely ignorant of in-depth trope discussions, author scandals, awards intrigue, or the fact that you’re not allowed to be a video book reviewer unless you have a set of [these] white Ikea shelves, with the corner thingy. Don’t blame me. I didn’t make the rules. Maybe it’s a union thing.
Talking to them requires a little creativity, imagination, and out-of-the-box thinking. But who’s better to do out-of-the-box thinking than authors?
It’s also a little more planned, a little more thoughtful, and a little more leisurely than the machine-gun pace of social media. That’s a necessary function of the strategies and tactics that you’d use to reach them, but it also gives you breathing room.
PR is the obvious way to reach all these big circles on the left of the center. There’s a reason so many authors and publishers rely on it when it is well-done by a trusted expert. But that’s just a start, and doesn’t work by itself.
Here’s my last example, and then we’re done for today.
Looking at this makes me think about the problem of book clubs. I actually contacted a list broker about renting a list of book club members in the U.S. The results weren’t encouraging, unless there actually are eighteen book clubs in Alaska that each only have one member. But now that I see this all laid out, looking at that medium-sized purple triangle at the bottom of my diagram, I can see that it’s at the intersection of book clubs, humor, and women’s fiction.
Do you know what else is at that intersection? The Signals catalog. Its demographic is mostly female. It skews older, just like my protagonist. It attracts people with a sense of humor. And judging by the t-shirts they sell, their audience really likes books. It’s a safe bet that at least some of them belong to book clubs. I don’t know if I can rent the Signals mailing list, and it’s certainly not the only tactic I’d use, but it’s worth exploring.
Thinking about that possibility—the potential for something outside of the online digital world that is a way to reach my target markets—will open up my thinking to other avenues, other strategies, other tactics to explore. I’ve gotten a lot of other ideas from this exercise. which we’ll talk about in a future video.
Conclusion/About This Video/Next Steps
For now, thank you for watching to the end. My name is Michelle LaPointe. Becky Remy assisted with the statistical research. Steve Stanard created the Mary Frances book cover. Stock images, music, and video clips are from Envato Elements. Images from Ikea and the Signals catalog are used as fair use examples only, and their copyrights belong to their respective owners.
All other content in this video was created by me, and I own the copyright.
This has been part of “Assume A Spherical Cow”, a transparent experiment in book marketing.
If you’re not already watching this on our site, please check it out at the link below, and pass it along to anyone who you think might get something out of it.
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Thanks again for watching. Becky is going off to look for better data, and I’m going to go `interview a filmmaker about trailers. We’ll report back.
Additional credits:
Photo of Wodehouse books by Adam Brody, via Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/adambowie/46517416182/in/dateposted-public/. Used with permission under the following Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/
Photo of P. G. Wodehouse is in the public domain.
Additional Resources
Early Adopters vs. General Audiences: When Your Best Advertising Arguments Fail: Overcoming Resistance To Change
Strategy vs. Tactics: Why It’s Better To Be Eisenhower Than Batman
Data sources
NOTE: The two words I would use to describe the numbers from these sources, especially in aggregate, are “muddy” and “inconsistent”. Partly that’s to be expected. The data comes from different organizations, which were measuring different things. It’s not their job to care about what we want to know.
That said, it may be possible to ferret out better information from a careful comparison or meta-analysis of these sources, or from entirely different sources. If you are a person who enjoys such endeavors, or who has better information you can share, everyone with interest in the Assume A Spherical Cow project would be very grateful. (If your name is Nate Silver, we will also ask you to sign our dog-eared copy of The Signal And The Noise while you’re hanging around.)
YouGov: 54% of Americans read a book this year
APEX: 90+ Reading Statistics, Facts, and Demographics
Wordsrated: Global Book Sales Statistics
Gitnux: Statistics About The Most Popular Book Genres
Wordsrated: Number Of Books Published Per Year
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