by Erin Mitchell
Happy New Year! Are you all recovered from the celebrations? Ready to charge into 2014 with both barrels blazing?
Great. I’m a year older (perils of being almost a New Year baby), and much to my chagrin, don’t feel a whit wiser. But that’s ok. I still have a thought or three to share, and I’m grateful to the Dead Guy crew and you (yes, you) for allowing me to do so.
That said, I’ve been pondering priorities, and the one single marketing imperative I’d like to pass on for the year ahead. The thing is, it’s not peculiar to 2014, but without it, all marketing efforts are destined to fail miserably. So here goes:
Know your readers.
Seems simple, right? I mean, unless you’re writing for yourself alone—and if you’re publishing your writing, you’re not—you are thinking about your readers all the time.
Too often, though, when it comes to book marketing, one forgets his or her audience. Neglects to consider how readers hear about books these days. What motivates them to purchase one story over—or in addition to—another. This apparent transgression is easy to forgive, though, because there is no reliable or conclusive data to tell us why and how book consumers behave the ways that they do. No pie chart of bar graph that tells us the most important communication venues…or rather, far too many of them. Think Facebook is crucial? There’s a study to confirm you’re right. Certain that blogging is the key to book sales? Plenty of authoritative-sounding organizations agree with you. Convinced that without an active Twitter account, you’re sunk? Proof is easy to find.
But the truth is, the correct “marketing mix” for your book won’t be found in any formula. It lies only with your readers, both current fans and those who have yet to discover your stories.
And where are they? I can’t tell you that. I can tell you that you need to pay attention to all the places where people talk about and look for information on books to figure it out. You need a website, yes, and that website needs to be up to date, but you don’t necessarily need to blog regularly. Or maybe you do. I think every author should have a Facebook page, but how much attention you need to give it depends on how active your readers are there. Having a Wikipedia page is desirable, but you might or might not fit their draconian definition of notable. Twitter is a valuable traffic driver, but using it as more than that is time consuming indeed.
The only thing I can tell you for sure is that your readers are in more than one place. They’re getting marketing messages through multiple venues (including, gasp, ads). And chances are good that you have readers who would be happy to tell you where and how they heard about your books and what incited them to buy the first one. And if not, you can still find out, by testing different marketing tactics and doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Because, after all, 2014 is, just like every year before and after it, The Year of the Reader.
Hear, hear! Not enough writers are always considering their readers. (And happy belated birthday, Erin!)
Posted by: Jeff Cohen | January 03, 2014 at 03:41 PM