When it comes to selling and promoting a book one of the 1st things authors need to understand is how to develop raving fans.
I call it audience building!
You may be asking “What is audience building and how do you do it?
Audience building is developing a group of people that follow you as an author and who eagerly want to read your book. Over time, as you build relationships with the people in your audience, they start caring more about you the author, than your book. Your book is how they connect with you initially, but ultimately they want to know about you.
Audience building is just like building relationships in real life. The main difference is we can communicate on scale. What does communicate on scale mean, you may be asking?
Communicating on
Email Newsletters are awesome for communicating on
Each day you should be growing your audience.
Growing your audience online can include:
• Growing your social media channels
• Getting more people to your website
• Having more people purchase your books on Amazon.
• Hosting online events and more people attend.
• Increasing the size of your email list.
Offline ways to increase the size of your audience can be:
• Getting more people to attend in-person events.
• Increase the size of your snail-mail database.
• Start an offline newsletter and send it to people you already know you and people you want to get to know.
Each of these can increase the number of people who will purchase your book.
3 Steps to Build Your Author Audience.
1) Identify the people who may want to purchase your book (potential customers).
This is the most important part of audience building. Identifying who is going to read your books and why is critical to selling books. In previous articles, I have talked about ways to identify your ideal customer. Identifying your ideal customer is the most important part of any marketing campaign. You have to know who is most likely going to read your book and why they will purchase.
2) Determine how to reach potential customers to let them know about your book.
The next step you must do is determine how you are going to let people know about your book. Today, there are so many ways to communicate with customers and for customers to communicate with you. So when you are first starting out, it’s best to choose a couple of channels to communicate. Here are just a few ways you can communicate with potential customers.
– Facebook pages, – blog posts, – Twitter, -Videos on YouTube and your website, – podcasts, – guest blog posts, – guest speaking on podcasts, – speaking at events, -hosting your own event.
These are ways to communicate with your audience. My favorite way though is through email. What makes email, so incredibly valuable is twofold.
a. With email, you control the channel. With every way of communicating with your audience that I listed, except for your website and your email list, you are building an audience of people that follow you on a platform that is owned by someone else. If another company owns the channel, then your ability to communicate can be affected by new rules, algorithm shifts, or a host of other reasons your ability to communicate can be affected.
With email, you can back up your email list. So even if something happens and for some reason, you lose your email account, you can always signup with a new service and import the names and email addresses, and boom! You’re back in business!
b. Email allows you to communicate with your audience as often as you like. Every other marketing channel, there is a cost associated with communicating with your prospects and customers. With email, once someone is on your list, you can communicate with them as much as you want until they unsubscribe. No other marketing channel allows you to communicate with customers like email.
Simply stated, email is one of the most powerful ways that you can communicate with your customers.
3) Create the right message to promote your book to potential customers
In step 2, I listed some of the ways that you can communicate with your audience.
Now that you have determined the way you are going to communicate, what are you going to say?
If you decide to send emails each week what content is going to go in the emails?
If you are going to promote your book, what are you going to say to promote it?
What words are you going to use on the back cover of your book?
If you are going to write a blog post, what are you going to say?
Knowing how to communicate with your audience is important.
There you have 3 specific steps you must do to promote and sell your book.
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