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Your cover is one of the first things that a potential reader will use to decide if they want to read your book. Writer, writing coach and blogger Lauren, over LaurenSapala.com gives it to you straight on how to get the best book cover. My personal tip, if you are not a graphic designer trained in covers, don’t do it yourself. It shows.
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Marketing for Writers Who Hate Marketing
What Self-Pubbing Authors Need to Know about Getting the Best Book Cover
20 April, 2016
Lauren Sapala
Studies have proven again and again that humans make purchasing decisions based on emotional factors. This probably happens most frequently in the glittering online jungle known as Amazon.com. I read recently that Amazon is the only search engine people use with the mouse in one hand, and a credit card in the other. For me, a regular Amazon customer, I don’t even need my credit card. The site has my payment information recorded and it’s as simple as one click to send a new book to my Kindle.
If you’re a writer, and a reader, I know this is true for you too.
Emotional decision making + split-second purchasing power =
You better have a damn good book cover.
Too many self-pubbing authors have book covers that get lost in the deluge of 99 cent Kindle deals. The cover might be too generic, too bland; it doesn’t stand out when potential readers are skimming through hundreds of titles. Or the cover is too bright and the colors are all wrong; it comes off as gaudy and garish and turns off otherwise loyal fans of a genre. The key is balance. Your book cover should speak volumes with one fantastic image, and draw in die-hard followers as well as those readers who didn’t even know they were your audience.
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Jane Friedman always has some good posts, and I know this is going to be a big hit. This guest post from author and publicist Fauzia Burke has a lot of great information for authors who are trying to get their book noticed. What are your online book publicity tips?
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How to Save Money and Do Online Book Publicity Yourself
Helpful hint, it goes faster if you use all your fingers and put the laptop down.
Fauzia Burke
There are two ways to go about getting attention in the media: one is to hire experts to help you reach the media, and the other is to do the legwork yourself.
I’ll be honest: publicity is not rocket science. If you are committed to the process, you can do it yourself. It will take you longer, and you will certainly spend many hours chasing opportunities, but you’ll save money. When you hire a PR expert, you are hiring them for their time, expertise, and contacts. Unfortunately, results are not guaranteed. Trust me—that fact is as frustrating for us in the field as it is for you.
There’s another thing to consider, and this may be difficult to hear: if you are self-publishing your book, you will probably get fewer reviews than if you were published by an established publisher. This is simply the truth. I totally understand the reasons to self-publish, but it’s important to be aware of the implications of that decision on your publicity prospects. It definitely means that you’ll have to focus more time on guest blogging and interviews.
Focus on Online Opportunities
If you decide you want to do the publicity work yourself, focus on the internet. Traditional media (newspapers, magazines, TV, radio) require great contacts and long lead times. It’s easy to make mistakes, and you certainly want to avoid those when it comes to publicity.
For busy authors, online publicity will be a lot more effective. Online publicity, however, is not for everyone. It takes patience and a thick skin, since you may face rejection and silence.
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One of the nice things about eBooks is that it is very easy to make changes, especially if you are self published. On Elizabeth S. Craig‘s site, she discusses the different times you would want to update your eBook.
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Making Changes to a Published Book
by Elizabeth S. Craig
One of the things that delights me about self-publishing is the ability to go into a published book’s files and make changes.For my traditionally-published books, I can’t do a darn thing with the files. I’ve alerted both Penguin Random House and Midnight Ink to reader-reported problems with both digital and print files that have resulted in missing pages, duplicate pages, and–in one particularly horrifying example–a completely different book from a completely different author that Penguin Random House implanted in the last half of one of my mysteries. Problem at the printer? I’ve no idea, but I knew that the chance that I could get it fixed was iffy. I ended up sending these readers signed copies of the book from my personal stash at home.
For my self-published books, I’ve made changes to the finished files quite a few times and for different reasons.
Changing a cover. I’ve learned that the most important thing we can do to brand a series is to have covers that clearly show a connection between the books. I had one book in my Myrtle Clover mysteries that definitely didn’t look like the others. There was nothing wrong with the cover, it just didn’t fit in. I was in-between designers and couldn’t really articulate to the new designer what I was looking for.
Finally I decided to make a change. I contacted my current cover designer, Karri Klawiter and asked her to recover the book for me (which she did…new cover is above). Once I’d changed it, I wished I’d taken care of it earlier because I had no issues at all involving customer confusion. That’s mainly due to the fact that Amazon will not allow us to purchase the same book twice without alerting us that we already own the title in question.
But there were several things I did to try to avoid reader confusion. For one, I didn’t announce it on my newsletter, or call attention to it in any way. And on Amazon and my website, I noted that the book had a new cover.
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What is a media kit? Do authors really need one? (Spoiler alert YES!) Over at All Indie Writers you can find out everything you need to know about media kits. A big thanks to Jennifer Mattern for writing such a great post!
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Media Kits for Writers: A Beginner’s Guide
April 18, 2016
Jennifer Mattern
One of my current projects is assembling a new media kit.
As you might know, I have a background in public relations. So I’m keenly aware of the importance of earned media, and have been securing coverage for my clients for quite some time. While I’ve also secured my fair share of coverage for myself, with changing professional ambitions in my future, doing even more of that is going to be essential.
That’s where a media kit can come in handy.
I have a rather diverse business on the publishing side of things, so I plan to create a new site to host this (along with other information about me and my various projects). This way I can link to it from all my blogs, author sites, and freelance sites — though pen name author sites will get their own when appropriate.
Right now I’m in the process of digging up my media clips because I haven’t done the best job maintaining a list of them over the years. It’s a fun process where I’m discovering some pretty significant citations I wasn’t even aware of (mostly in relation to my public relations work).
But is it worth the effort? Do writers really need to have a media kit?
Let’s explore media kits for writers and how they might be helpful to you in various types of writing and publishing work.
What is a Media Kit?
A media kit, in its simplest sense, is a collection of information that tells members of the media why they should care about you. It answers questions such as:
Who are you?
What have you done or accomplished?
Why are you newsworthy?
Why are you an expert source I should cite or interview?
How can I reach you if I want to cover, quote, or interview you?
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Branding and marketing. Ugh! Writing can be an introverts dream, but if you want success you have to be able to deal with both marketing and branding. What is the difference? Stephen King has a brand. You know what to expect when you see a title with his name underneath. Marketing is what you do to promote yourself. At Standout Books, Robert Wood has a great post about both. Oh and “bête noire” means something you don’t like doing. I had to look it up.
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Why You Need To Brand Yourself As An Author, And Exactly How To Do It
by Robert Wood
Branding is the bête noire of the modern author, an often frightening necessity that can mean the difference between worldwide recognition and total obscurity. It’s an aspect of business that has grown more and more important as social media has become the norm, and the days where it was a possible route to success rather than an outright necessity have ended.
If you think that all sounds a bit gloomy, you’re not alone. This is the attitude with which most authors approach their branding and marketing. Cultural norms can take a long time to catch up to economic realities, and many authors long for a time when they didn’t need to deal with the marketing side of publication. It can feel like a difficult job that you shouldn’t have to do, but there is another way to look at it.
Building a brand doesn’t have to be an awful task, in fact it can be an incredibly creative endeavor. Not only that, but it can put you in total control of your financial future. There are a lot of advantages to establishing your own brand, but this is perhaps the most immediate: you become the boss.
How brands work
A brand is more than a mark of quality; it’s a simple, direct expression of the many things customers can expect from a product. Eugene Yiga put it fantastically when he said:
Broadly speaking, a brand is a set of hooks the mind uses to organize its experience of a commercial offering.
These ‘hooks’ are the concepts that customers associate with your brand, and they’re surprisingly varied. Stephen King has one of the strongest, most effective author brands in the world; the hooks on which readers hang his work include ‘high quality’ and ‘horror’, but also include less definable features such as his individual style and the specific feelings readers experience when they engage with his work.
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Happy Friday! Today’s post has Rachel Thompson aka BadRedhead Media giving some tough love on why your book isn’t selling. There is some really good marketing advice and encouragement. When do you decide if it is time to give up?
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This is Why Your Books Aren’t Selling: 4 Ways To Improve Now
By Rachel Thompson
Your Books Aren’t Selling
“My sales are awful, and I’ve done everything. I give up.”
I heard this from three authors this week, and it’s not an uncommon sentiment right now. As an imprint director, book manager and book marketing consultant, my first questions are always:
What do you mean by everything?
How do you define “awful?”
What do you mean by ‘giving up?’
Let’s deconstruct four ways to improve on that!
1) What Is ‘Everything’ RE: Book Marketing?
Your definition of ‘everything’ and my definition are probably quite different. When I asked one of these authors what he’d done, he said he’d:
placed a few Facebook ads,
sent out a bunch of tweets during his free days,
placed a FreeBooksy promo (cost: $45). That’s about it.
To me, that’s barely scraping the bare minimum of ‘hardly anything,’ but in his mind, that’s more than he’d ever done! When I asked him what he had achieved in his marketing plan, he replied: what marketing plan?
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You can have the best story in the world, but if your cover isn’t good not many people will pick it up. So it should come as no surprise that I agree with Joanna Penn at The Creative Penn that investing in a fabulous cover is a must. In one of my paying jobs, I see a lot of covers that should have never made it to Amazon. What is your best tip for getting a great cover?
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How to Sell More Books with Great Book Cover Design
Joanna Penn
Investing in professional book cover design is non-negotiable for indie authors who want to make a living with their writing. Readers DO judge a book by its cover, and they won’t read your blurb, download a sample or buy now without connecting to your cover somehow. In short, you’re unlikely to sell many books unless you have a great cover design.
There’s a constant debate about the relevance and importance of cover design, whether you’re a self-published author, part of a collective group of authors, an independent press, or even a large publishing house. If you are publishing your book to give away as Christmas presents, or you only expect a few members of your family to buy them, then the cover is as important as you consider it to be.
But if you are a professional writer and you intend to earn a living or be taken seriously in the literary world, then the book cover is as important as the copy editing, the proofreading, the story and the characters.
It is a part of your marketing … and it’s there to attract the right kind of readers.
So let’s assume you already deem a book cover to be important and I don’t need to convert you. How can you make your cover work for you and sell more books?
(1) Target your audience
Your book cover MUST be targeted at the right audience. How do you find out who that audience is?
Research.
Check out the bestselling lists in your genre, whether that’s crime fiction, women’s fiction, young adult etc. Pick out books by authors who you feel write similarly to you, whose readers you know will enjoy the genre you write in, your style, tone, characters.
This is really important. Do you write like Mark Billingham? Then you want to attract his fans. Do you write like Philippa Gregory? Then you want to attract her fans. That’s not to say you want to copy their covers, but you need to have a similar feel, and to present your book with visual clues that scream ‘you enjoyed this bestselling author’s book so you’ll enjoy mine’.
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Continuing to dig deeper into social media, specifically Facebook, what do you do if you already have a personal Facebook page. Do you use it as your author page as well? Or would it be better to create a separate “business” page? On her site, Jane Friedman talks about her experiences and the solution she finally arrived at. What have you done? I struggle with the same issue for a future Publetariat Facebook page. It could be a lovely way to connect. But it is also like a puppy, you think you want one but once you have it you have to feed it and clean up after it.
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The Pros and Cons of Using a Facebook Profile But Not an Official Page
by Jane Friedman
One of the first marketing tasks given to authors by agents, publishers, and publicists is: Start an official Facebook page.
So far, I have not done this for myself. Instead, I use my Facebook profile with the “following” function turned on. That means I have private friends, but also public followers.
I want to discuss the pros and cons of this choice, but first I’ll describe the history of my experience and how I ended up in this situation to begin with. (Scroll down to the pros and cons if you’re impatient.)
2006–2009: “Real” Friends Only
I joined Facebook in 2006. At first, I only friended people I knew well and had met in person—and I rarely received requests from strangers. These were the days (hard to imagine now) when few people used the site.
As I started speaking and meeting writers at conferences, and especially once I started blogging, I tentatively started friending people I had virtual relationships with, but had not met. It felt a little dirty, because at that time, Facebook used to ask for confirmation on how you knew someone, and if you couldn’t verify it, you received an informal reprimand.
Then I noticed that some of my colleagues with even more liberal friend policies had engaged communities of people around them, and valuable discussions were happening in the comments. So I decided to open the door to anyone who asked. (At this point in the game, Facebook didn’t offer a way for people to “follow” you.)
2009-2011: Everyone’s a Friend!
My Facebook use has been fairly conservative when it comes to the private details of my life. Probably the most personal things I share are travel photos and cat pics.
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A hodgepodge of assorted tips to help you max out your social media reach brought to you by Shayla Eaton and the Curiouser Editing website. Please share any hints you have with hacking social media in the comments below. Mine is to figure out which social media platforms are right for you and focus your attention on one or two of the big ones.
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20 Fresh Social Media Tips for Authors
Shayla EatonAs an author, you already know the importance of being active on social media to help sell books and build a fanbase, so I didn’t list tips for beginners. I have a few ideas to help you market yourself—and your book—better on social media. These are tips and tricks I often share with my authors and use for myself.
Pin posts to Twitter, your Facebook page, and your Facebook group (you do have your own Facebook group, right? Because I’ve only been preaching about this for a million years, give or take). Ensure the pinned post has some type of opt-in for a freebie so they’ll subscribe to your emails. If you’re pinning a post, then it should tell them to do something.
Add emojis to your Instagram bio to catch attention. I like to use the pointing finger right above my freebie opt-in so that it’s the first thing they’re directed to. Use emojis in your posts too!
Update your LinkedIn title with stronger keywords. Your title shouldn’t say, “Jane Doe, Author.” It should say, “Jane Doe, Romance Author of [Title], Part-Time Nurse, Full-Time Mother, Oil Painter.” For example, mine says, “President of Curiouser Editing, Author of the Pre-Publishing Checklist, Editor, Writer, and Coach.” If you need more help with LinkedIn, I highly recommendThe Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business.
Like as many Instagram photos as you can under relevant hashtags (#bookstagram, #bookish, #indieauthor, #writercommunity, #writerlife, #bibliophile, #amwriting, #amreading) to gain more followers. I like to time myself for ten minutes so that I’m not spending a ton of time on it, but I’m still seeing results.
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I know that no one likes rejection, but some people bounce back from it better than others. I don’t. I am one of those horrible people who wants everyone to like them, although I am trying to grow out of this. Sarah Callender has a great post on dealing with submission rejection. The post goes beyond the whole “X number of famous people got rejected so you should feel fine” fluff and gives some really good points. Head on over to Writer Unboxed and check it out. If you feel like it, leave a comment on your best tip for dealing with rejection, I promise not to judge.
In the late 1990s, I wrote a short story—my first ever—and submitted it to The New Yorker. It was a really amazing piece of fiction, one that reflected dozens of minutes of toil and revision. I do not remember the plot (which suggests there was none) except for one detail: the female character sits on a therapist’s couch, and, wrapped in a blanket like a burrito, floats into the air and–poof!–vanishes.
I am certain this 7,000-word work of art was roughly 7,000 words too long.
More than fifteen years later, I see how many things were wrong with that experience. First, the piece was a piece of garbage. I did not know how to write a story, and I had no one guiding me through the process. I should have sought advice from someone, if not another writer, than at least a friendly barista or the wine guy with the radio voice at the Safeway where I buy cheap Riesling.
Wrong thing #2: I had the gall to submit to The New Yorker. Sure, I had read The New Yorker, usually while waiting for my dental appointments, usually looking at the pretty cover or the cartoons because the stories were, well, a little uppity in my opinion. Perhaps I thought that the inclusion of my story would endear me to the other works of fiction. But certainly, even if my story had been an actual work of art, I was not familiar enough with the publication to know whether it would be a good fit.
These days I am a better writer with a better understanding of story structure, and yes, I carry around suitcases of humility. I have given up trying to like The New Yorker’s fiction and instead peruse People while waiting for my dental checkups. And when I submit an essay or a story, a grant proposal or retreat application, I do so in a much smarter way.
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Not everyone does Kindle Countdown Deals, or KDP Select. But if you are among those who do, there’s one little thing that could make a big difference in your efforts to get the most out of a Kindle Countdown Deal.
When you set up a Kindle Countdown deal, the KDP system allows you to set a beginning date on a screen that looks like this one:
It’s easy to miss the fact that this screen’s default starting time is 8 amPacific Standard Time.
And if you are trying to coordinate a promotion campaign that starts on the same day as your Kindle Countdown Deal, that 8 am Pacific time could be a disaster. As an example, promotions at BookGorilla and Kindle Nation generally have a copy and pricing deadline of 6 am Eastern, which translates (for the time-zone challenged) to 3 am Pacific Standard Time. (And we’ve heard that the folks at BookBub try to get up early, too.)
One thing you can do, of course, is to have coordinate your promotion so that it starts on the second day of your Kindle Countdown Deal. But you may feel like you’re giving up critical promotional time if you delay your promotion that way.
But here’s how to fix it:
There’s an easy to miss time-of-day pulldown menu on that same screen that we showed you above. Just click on the default time and the pulldown will appear, as in the screenshot below. Select 12 am Pacific and you should be fine for all purposes … as long as the KDP gremlins cooperate!
Please note that while this article is targeting eBooks, there are still some great tips for print covers. However, print covers are more complicated and will be addressed in a future post.
You are not suppose to judge a book by it’s cover, but that is exactly what people do. In the post Categories, keywords, Amazon, and you. How to get the most out of your choicesI showed you how to use categories and keywords to help your book rank higher in Amazon’s search. Now that your book is showing up in front of more potential buyers, you need to make sure you grab their attention. How? With an awesome cover.
You need awesome, because there are a lot of other books competing with yours. You have about 6 seconds to grab potential customer’s attention, and let them know that their next great read is your book.
There is a lot of information that goes into a great cover: color theory, font choices, layout flow, and more. If you can, you should hire a professional. If you can’t hire a professional, don’t use MS Word to create your cover. Use a better program such as Canva, which is free, and will at least give you an option of professional layouts. Either way the tips below will help you.
Size – A good cover will look great even in thumbnail size. Readers should still be able to get the gist of the book and at minimum be able to read the title. A lot of dedicated eReaders are in grayscale, so make sure you check that your cover works for them. The ideal height/width ratio is 8:5 (1.6). See the screen capture of the recent book list I got from Goodreads on the right for some examples.
KISS (Keep it simple silly) – Simple is better, especially if you are designing your own cover. A simple design sizes better and is easier to convey information to the reader. This doesn’t mean your cover needs to be boring, far from it. A simple design can be very powerful. Covers with more details need careful handling, and are best managed by a professional. You don’t want to overpower your reader or loose the essence of your story with too many details.
Title – Make it stand out. This means good space around the title, a readable font, and a good size.If you have a long title, take the best part and make it the focus. Have the less important parts be, well, less important. For example:
THE AMAZING TRUE STORY OF BELA LUGOSI AND HIS WONDER RACING LLAMAS: PART ONE – BELA LUGOSI IS ALMOST KILLED AS A CHILD BY A RUNAWAY RACING LLAMA (PART 1 IN THE RACING LLAMAS SERIES!)
It is a bit much for a cover. The eye is overwhelmed. Try instead:
The Amazing True Story Of Bela Lugosi And His Wonder Racing Llamas
Part One – Bela Lugosi Is Almost Killed As A Child By A Runaway Racing Llama
(Part 1 In The Racing Llamas Series!)
The bold part is still long, but it gets the title and general story across. The rest can be moved to other areas of the cover, breaking up the text into nice bite size bits. Notice the natural breaks, which happen where there is punctuation. Each section can stand on it’s own.
Story – Does your cover convey a general sense of what your story is about and the genre? Your graphics should match the mood and fit your story. If your story is a regency romance then having a woman on the cover in a modern slip dress doesn’t fit, no matter how breathless and heaving her bosoms are.
Invest – Resist the temptation to be cheap. It is OK to want the best value for your dollar, but I guarantee I can spot your MS Word clip-art a mile away and so can potential readers. If you go to a site where you can hire someone cheaply, be aware that they are probably working off a template. Your cover will look a lot like a bunch of other ones. There are places where you can get good images or artwork for a decent price. A true professional will take time to understand your story and make the cover match.
Image Effects – There are a lot of fun tools you can play with to create rainbow gradients, text outlines, and embossing effects. Go nuts and have fun! Then delete all the effects and put those tools away.
Color – Most website’s backgrounds are white. So if your background color is white, you will fade away. Even using a few shades different from white will make a big difference. Don’t use a big black frame to fix this.
Your cover will look better if you use color judiciously. This doesn’t mean that you have to use boring colors. If you use colors that are harmonious with each through color theory, it will be more pleasing to the reader’s eye. There are tools that will help you pick out a palette of colors that looks good together. I like the one at Adobe. It is free.
Fonts – Fonts are like spices. A few mixed together is yummy, too many a disaster. Pick two or at most three that look good together and stay with them. Google Fonts are free and offer a wide variety of choices. Make sure you pick one that matches the mood of your story, but is not so fancy it can’t be read. If you have one “decorative” font, pick a simpler one to match. Avoid Comic Sans or Papyrus like the plague. No seriously, don’t use them – ever.
Flow – The eyes can only look at so many things at once. Your layout should be set up to guide the reader to the main points you want to convey. You can use position, size of elements, and even your graphics to lead the your reader down the path that communicates your story.
Symbolism can be very powerful. Instead of using a literal part of your story as the cover, use symbols to convey the main point or mood. This attracts your reader but can also leave a little mystery to the reader. No matter how you feel about the story, The Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer, have wonderful covers that use symbolism in a very powerful way.
Review – Have someone you trust look at your cover. Someone who will tell you the truth. Then get a second opinion. Get lots of opinions, lots of eyes, to look at your cover fresh. Be open to feedback, but don’t start changing everything based on what individual people say. If you can manage it, get a couple of different covers and hold a contest where people can vote on the best.
Look for unintended consequences. I recently came across a wonderful story, very well written about the power of family and a group of sisters. The cover was well done with one exception. The graphic was a pair of shoes, positioned on the top, with the title below. They symbolized the need to see other people’s perspective. Very nice. Except, they still had legs in them. Dangling from the top, with no body. Like one of the sisters made the mistake of using the Comic Sans font and couldn’t face the consequences any more. How more powerful would it have been to just have a pair of shoes, waiting to be stepped into, so that the reader could figuratively walk in the characters footsteps?
Brainstorm what emotion, concept, key thing about your book you want to get across to your readers. Take a look at the screenshot above from Goodreads. What books stand out to you and why? Go to Amazon and do a search on your genre and ask the same questions. While you can’t copy another person’s cover you can see what elements seem to work for them and apply those elements to get your own awesome cover. A great cover is the next step in connecting with your ideal reader.
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Interested in guest posting to promote? Jillian Petrova should know what she is talking about as she guest posted on Writers And Authors with her tips on how to make your guest posting opportunities work for you. If you are interested in guest posting on Publetariat let me know in the comments or send an email to paula@publetariat.com.
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6 Tips for Writing Wildly Successful Guest Posts
Bloggers often write hit guest posts without knowing what made it oh-so-popular. For them, writing guest posts that were good, not-so-good, great, or mediocre is quite routine. Very often, they’re not even worried about the quality of the guest posts and they just keep cranking out new ones everyday to meet the “quantity” standards of the blog.
However, doing so often results in a blog with a lot of potential, but limited content to meet that potential. By “potential” we mean more visitors, page views, leads, subscribers, and benefits for the audience.
By now, you’re probably wondering what it takes to meet that potential and the quality standards of any blog. So we pretty much summed it up for you:
1) It fits the niche: I’ve seen so many guest posts that seem like the writer had no idea whatsoever who they were targeting. I’m not just talking about the topic of the guest post. I’m also pointing towards the needs, interest, habits, and language of the audience. The more niche-oriented your guest posts, the more likely they are to succeed. If you’re hiring a writer, write specific guidelines. Whatever you do, keep the audience in mind!
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Your ideal reader represents the core person who will buy your book. While you want to sell as many books as possible, getting your title in front of the people who will actually read and buy your story is the real goal. So sitting down and setting up an ideal reader profile or profiles can help you in many ways. Such greats as Stephen King use them and he talks about using ideal readers in his book On Writing.
By identifying and figuring out who your ideal reader is, you can then focus your story and your marketing to that target audience. Yes, you should have an ideal reader while you are writing. A hot sex scene would not do well in a story that is written for a fan of young christian romance. Knowing who you are writing for helps you to keep boundaries, which improves your writing.
Raising Llamas for Profit – Chapter One – Watch out, they spit!
So someone who only likes gritty noir detective stories will not be the right person for your regency bodice ripper romance beach read, nor will someone who is looking to raise llamas for profit. What seems obvious in that example becomes more difficult in real life. So how do you narrow your ideal reader down.
What is your genre?
The first step is to know what your general genre of book is. You probably already have an idea, but you should still go to Amazon and looked for books that are like yours in terms of content. Scroll down the book details page until you find “Look for Similar Items by Category”. That category is your genre.
You want to balance becoming too specific in your genre search vs too broad. Romance is a perfect example. The romance genre is so broad that it could mean a wide variety of choices. You have everything from dinosaur shifting romance (yes that is a thing), to step brother fantasy (yes still a thing), to innocent sweet valley high romances. But by going down a category level on amazon you can narrow it down. So paranormal romance is better than general romance, but don’t make your focus so narrow that you block readers. If you only focus on velociraptor shifting love stories, your ideal reader pool is going to be pretty small.
Non-fiction vs fiction vs kids
There is a difference with your ideal reader profile depending on if your title is non-fiction, fiction, or kids.
Kids books are more defined by age than genre, at least until you get to young adult. Your ideal reader might be male or female or not be gender based at all. Your ideal reader could also be an adult who is trying to get the child to bed, or to learn how to read.
With non-fiction titles, you are generally looking to solve a problem or focus on a particular subject. How-to books are a good example for solving problems. For example a how-to on setting up a budget is solving a problem. Instead of your ideal reader being someone who needs a budget, try focusing it a little more. So your ideal reader is a small business woman who is trying to manage both her personal and business finances. That would provide a better focus. A biography is a good example of a focus on a subject but is too broad a category. Narrowing your ideal reader down to someone who likes to read about politicians is a good compromise, while narrowing it down to corrupt politicians in New York during the during the 1860s is going too far.
Because fiction encompasses such a large variety of stories, doing your research can really help define who your ideal reader(s) are and help you to stay focused.
Research
Once you find your genre, you can try to google your broad genre and demographics. For example, if my genre is romance then I would google “Romance demographics” and I find the Romance Writers of America Romance Reader Statistics.
You can also go back to Amazon and find the books that are similar to yours. Go down and look at the reviews and the reviewers. You can get a general sense, for example, on how many reviewers are men vs women. Click on the individual profiles for more details. Most of the time there is not a lot more information, but you can see what other books the individual feels passionate about enough to write a review.
Check out the author. Do they have their own author site? If so, go look and see who they are marketing to, and check the comments there. Do they have a Facebook page or Twitter account. Who follows them there? All of this will give you a general idea of who your ideal reader(s) are.
Brainstorming
So now what? Write it down! Compose a couple of sentences on one or a few different ideal reader types. You can make it as simple as writing the demographics down, or even create personas with names.
Are they male or female? How old are they? What is your core story? If you had one minute to talk about your story what would you say to get the gist of your story across? Who would that appeal to?
You don’t need to worry about blocking a reader out if they don’t fit your general demographics. If there is a gentleman who loves Christian romance, he will still find you if you write for the demographics for that genre.
Using Your Ideal Reader
In your writing – If your story is about a plucky woman who is in charge of a military campaign in space but studied and applies the theories of Sun Tzu in great detail then you might have a few different ideal readers. They could be sci-fi fans, military fans or even history fans. Address your ideal readers needs. Perhaps you put a quote from “The Art of War” in every chapter header, provide campaign maps, and have your protagonist get more conquests and less romance.
Targeted marketing purposes – By knowing your ideal reader you can then find out where they are located and can talk directly to them. With our example above, you could start by looking at historical military groups, science fiction fans, or strategy buffs. When you write your copy, you can address their particular needs. This way you are focusing your valuable time and attention on the people most likely to become your fans and buy your book.
Another bonus is that if you decide to find an agent or sign with traditional publisher, they are going to want this information and will be impressed that you already have it figured out.
By finding and addressing reader needs, you improve your writing but also improve your ability to focus your marketing on the people most likely to become your fans and buy your books. We are told that writers should write for themselves, but the real satisfaction is finding a true fan to share your story with. Ideal reader profiles help you to recognize who it is you are writing for and increase the chances of finding your true fans.
BooksGoSocial has a great post about pricing for self publishing authors. Please note that this a business blog. I have no affiliation with them and am not endorsing their services since I have no experience with them, but agree with Laurence O’Bryan‘s take on optimal pricing. It is a really good read and matches my experience. If you have ever done business with BooksGoSocial please let us know how you liked their services in the comments below.
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What Is The Best Price For An Ebook?
At BooksGoSocial we have promoted over three thousand books in the past three years.
2016 is likely to be a year of real growth for indie authors and for trad published authors who gain some control over their pricing. Ebook sales for indies (what used to be known as self published authors) are up, and traditional publishers are pricing their ebooks high to stop Amazon becoming their number one channel and then eating them for lunch.
By pricing ebooks high (above $10) traditional publishers are leaving a gap in the market for indies to fill.
Here’s our recommendation on how you should price your Kindle/ebook to take advantage of this gap:
Free
Only if you have a closely linked series and book number one can be priced at free to get readers started on your series.
.99c
If you are a new author and you want make it easy for people to buy your book, and you want to increase your total earnings. This price can be used for a short period to get your book onto a best seller list and then you can move the price up. When deciding a price do not consider the effort put in to write and produce it, consider what total earnings you want. By pricing at .99c, and then increasing the price you can achieve higher earnings. I have seen this working.
If you liked this article, please share. If you have suggestions for further articles, articles you would like to submit, or just general comments, please contact me at paula@publetariat.com or leave a message below.
Lauren Sapala
by Elizabeth S. Craig
Jennifer Mattern
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As an author, you already know the importance of being active on social media to help sell books and build a fanbase, so I didn’t list tips for beginners. I have a few ideas to help you market yourself—and your book—better on social media. These are tips and tricks I often share with my authors and use for myself.
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Flow – The eyes can only look at so many things at once. Your layout should be set up to guide the reader to the main points you want to convey. You can use position, size of elements, and even your graphics to lead the your reader down the path that communicates your story.
Bloggers often write hit guest posts without knowing what made it oh-so-popular. For them, writing guest posts that were good, not-so-good, great, or mediocre is quite routine. Very often, they’re not even worried about the quality of the guest posts and they just keep cranking out new ones everyday to meet the “quantity” standards of the blog.
Using Your Ideal Reader
At BooksGoSocial we have promoted over three thousand books in the past three years.