Sizing Up Your Audience

By Elaine L. Orr

Authors think about their audiences from several perspectives. Yes, we want a lot of readers. But we have to write (and market) to a type of reader or our fans will be limited to friends and family. 

That doesn't mean we only write to please readers. But we have to decide who those readers are as we start a book. Then we can write something that we, and they, like. 

Audiences can be stratified by age, interests (including hobbies), sex, marital status, occupation, residence, and more. Picking an audience is important, affecting everything from vocabulary to book length to types of sexual interactions. Unless you're writing for pleasure and not income, you need to target a given audience.

You aren't writing to readers' characteristics, you're writing to their interests or preferences. In mysteries, is a lot of violence okay? Do they want fast-paced action or prefer to focus on background and/or the sleuth's internal thought processes? Do they want to escape the real world or read about crimes that sound like something that could be on the news each night? 

I believe a fiction author writes more easily if something interests them. That's possibly why many mysteries deal with a sleuth's occupation or hobbies. I was an economics minor, so one of my sleuths is a real estate appraiser and pays attention to business interests and community development. (Plus you can find bodies when appraising houses.)

On the other hand, I like to garden so another sleuth is a gardener. I've spent a lot of time on genealogy research that I could have spent writing, so I finally made a sleuth a family historian. In both professions you dig up stuff. (Lame joke.)

There are writers whose writing is so diverse they use pen names -- that's generally because the audiences for the two types of writing can be very different. The person who picks up a cozy mystery (no on-stage violence, usually small towns, and amateur sleuth) might not like a faced paced international thriller whose hero kills people in varied ways, which may be described in detail. That reader could be really annoyed to pay for a book from a cozy author that's not at all like that genre.

Yes, they can read the book blurb carefully, but if a reader likes an author they may automatically buy anything they see. (That's the hope!)

There are authors who appeal to diverse audiences. I'm thinking of how Kirkus Reviews characterizes author Carolyn Haines. “Stephanie Plum meets the Ya-Ya Sisterhood...featuring sassy Southern private investigator Sarah Booth Delaney." Haines also write's other series under her name, including Pluto's Snitch books, but uses a pen name (Caroline Burnes) for a romantic suspense series Harlequin publishes and R.B. Chesterton for some stand-alone thrillers.

If we don't use separate series by pen name, how do let readers know they may like some of our books better than others? I'm not talking so much about advertising as describing a book accurately so readers know what they're getting.

I try to write the blurb soon after I start writing the book. It keeps me from meandering as I write, but it also helps me know what more I need to tell prospective readers. I ask members of my critique group for comments, and revise the blurb as I write more. I generally don't look at it for weeks before publication, so I have a cold eye review. 

With electronic sales (which includes paperbacks advertised on retail websites) the keywords matter, and it's up to the author to use the right ones. I look at what authors who write similar books use, and I hope they feel free to consider mine. What you can't do (really) is use keywords bestselling authors use if those descriptive terms don't truly apply to your book.

I sometimes put "Cozy Mysteries With..." in the Amazon search box. There's a fairly new category -- Cozy Mysteries With a Little Paranormal Help. This describes my family history series perfectly. There's a ghost, but he's more a character than a spooky element. The new phrase is not an option for categories to select when entering or updating the book, but I now have it in each of the books' keywords. Great.

On the other hand, I found Appraisal for Murder (first Jolie Gentil book) on the site and looked at the book rankings (just below Product Details). All of the terms were related to real estate! None for cozy mysteries. I went to that book's KDP page and changed some keywords and (since I had not updated categories recently for this 2011 book) changed some of those.

It would be more fun just to keep writing and not think about how to describe books, but in this age of search engine optimization (SEO) it's essential to stay current.

It also helps you describe your books and think about ideas for future ones.

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Is it Book Marketing or Relating?

By Elaine L. Orr

It's been a while since I've written a post about marketing books. I let readers know about what I've written, but because I have a consistent audience (after twelve years), I pay less attention to it. That needs to change.

The most important thing I've learned is that an author isn't selling her books, she's selling herself and developing relationships with readers and other writers. That takes more time and (dare I say it) sometimes it's inconvenient.

In the "old days," people interested in your work would write you a letter. (That's the piece of paper you have to send with a stamp.) You could answer them every week or two -- I'm not saying I've had tons since 2010, but I always admired how my author friend, Leigh Michaels, stayed in touch with the many fans who wrote to her. She even did a short book in which she answered the questions fans asked.

That takes a lot of time, you say. True, but you could schedule it somewhat. Now, if someone sends an email or message on social media, they expect a response fairly soon. I don't check my LinkedIn account too often, and that has irritated a few people. My bad.

I recently read Krystal Craiker's blog post on marketing tips. Three paragraphs are worth quoting directly.

[Book marketing expert Jean Hanson-Depaula] says, “I think the biggest difference is that book marketing has to show readers that their book is worth their time. Readers have no shortage of options when it comes to books—and other entertainment for that matter.”

Books are a time commitment for readers. For most people, it takes a lot longer to read a book than to stream a movie on Netflix. With so much quick entertainment at our fingertips, authors must show people that their book has value.

Book marketing coach Monique Mensah agrees: “My number one tip for book marketing is to stop selling the book and start marketing the value.” For fiction authors, what experience are you providing your readers? What problem are you trying to solve if you write nonfiction?

These concepts are not fully implemented by sending tweets or buying ads -- not that either is bad. I tweet every day because it's something I can do in five minutes. While I mostly tweet about books I have for sale on varied sites, I also regularly post links to my blog and books of other authors.

The most important thing is to write a really good book. That doesn't happen if you rush through your drafts -- emphasis on drafts, not one-and-done. 

It's exciting to finish a book, especially the first one. But it needs to sit quietly for at least a week or two so you can read it with a less enthusiastic eye and make improvements. And then have others read it (not just friends!) and possibly work with an editor. There are lots of freelance editors and proofreaders today.

Mark Dawson of the Self Publishing Formula says, "“Make sure everything—from the manuscript, the cover, the blurb to the ad copy—all dovetails. In other words, every part of your book needs to fit together and be high quality to convert your readers." (Convert? That's a marketing term that means making it easy for someone to get from thinking about a book they see on a shelf or retail website to actually reading it. And then your next book.)

The best thing I've done in terms of marketing was to have all of the covers redone so the twelve books and shorter novellas in the Jolie Gentil mystery series have the same look. When I started the series, I envisioned three books. Ha! Readers now recognize the series before they read the title of a new book.

The best advice I could give is to do at least some marketing every week. It's easy to focus on writing (and the rest of your life) and not consciously look for new readers. You'll find good suggestions in Craiker's article or look for marketing in the index to this blog.

Krystal Craiker, "Book Marketing: Fourteen Strategies." You can find this excellent article at https://prowritingaid.com/book-marketing 

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