3 Marketing Distances All Digital Authors Must Bridge

Part 1 — Identify Your Audience Segments

For authors tasked with marketing their books, it can seem like a daunting task to find your audience. For many authors, the work of book marketing can seem like shouting across a vast, desolate ocean.

“Hellooooooo?” you call, cupping your hands around your lips, “is anyone out there?”

Your friends, family, writing buddies, and social media connections may hear you. But they are not your real audience. Your true readers lie somewhere in the vast beyond. It’s your job to figure out how to capture their attention.

How do your reach people who have no idea your book exists?

Many writers think the answer is simply to shout louder or get a bigger megaphone.

“Hellooooooo?” they call, using their new amplifying devices, hoping that will carry their message across the vast divide. “Is anyone out there?”

These writers may set up fancy book signings and large kick-off parties. The effort and expense of these activities can reach more people. Sadly, these events often reach very few numbers of new people. Too many authors’ public launches and readings are still only attended by friends and families — those same people who already know about their books.

Still, many, many unknown people out there are interested in your book. The problem is… they’re unknown. The distance between your book and this audience remains enormous. Gaping.

How to bridge this gap? The key is to reframe the way you look at book marketing.

Stop thinking about book promotion as a loud shout across the vast ocean that separates you from your audience. Instead, consider your book marketing effort as building a series of small bridges. Define the people who are ready and primed to buy your book. Then create a smooth passageway between them and your book.

Instead of broadcasting your message into the unknown, take a close look at the places where your audience already may be already interacting with your book and work on smoothing out that journey. Think about closing the gaps between your book and its audience. If you look at marketing this way, it’s all about improving connections and communications.

Reframe your book’s audience

The first step in reframing the way you think about marketing is to reframe the way you identify your audience. Instead of defining your audience based on their own intrinsic qualities (mystery lovers or history buffs, for example) define your audience according to their relationship to your book.

Place your potential readers in the following three categories: Customers ready to discover your book; customers ready to buy your book; and customers ready to spread the word about your book.

Three Goals For Three Segments

The first segment of customers who are ready to discover your book are those who are actively looking to read something in your genre or subject or style. The problem is, they don’t yet know it exists. Your goal here is to get them to discover your title. You need to move them from a search engine to your book’s website or online sales page.

Once your audience has found its way to your book’s online sales page, they become categorized as you second segment of customers. This group is looking around at your book’s description, cover, and reviews. But they haven’t made a decision to buy yet. You could still lose them as customers if what you’ve got on your sales page doesn’t meet their needs. So for this group of people, your goal is to motivate them to click the “buy” button and complete the purchase.

Finally, we come to the third segment of your audience: Customers who have read your book and are ready to spread the word about your book. These are the best customers of all. They have enjoyed your book therefore they would be amenable to spreading the word. Your goal is to encourage them to verbalize the things they liked about your book and promote it. The actions you want them to take is to either talk share your title with their circle of friends by word of mouth. Another activity you’d like to encourage is to post a review online.

Now that you see your book’s audience in these categories, marketing suddenly seems like making connections instead of broadcasting, shouting, or bragging.

All you have to do is fill the gaps that may be preventing each of these groups from taking action.

In the second article in this series, I identify several ways you can reach these categories of book buyers and build bridges that link your books with these potential buyers. Read on, then go forth to make connections with your audience!