A novel is born – part 4
In this series, I assume that you write and publish the book yourself. If you use a publisher and maybe even a ghostwriter instead, different terms apply. The processes are the same, but the division of responsibilities between you as the author and the publisher as rights holder and publisher will result in a different division of labor and dynamics.
I also write from the premise that you want your book to be a commercial success. That it must sell more than 3,000 copies. And I assume you don’t have a huge budget.
The articles start by describing how to create an outline of your upcoming book before you write a single word on the manuscript.
The summary contains the following twelve elements:
- Title, subtitle and cover (front, spine and back of the book)
- Purpose
- Summarizing
- Target group
- Similar books
- Magnets
- The manuscript process
- The publishing process
- Marketing and marketing
- Format, prices, ISBN and categories
- Timetable and finances
- About the author
In the previous article, I discussed points 10, 2 and 3. In this article, I only look at the target audience.
Target group
On the first page of every book on effective marketing, it’s emphasized that you need to choose your target audience carefully, you need to know them well and you need to know how big they are.
This also applies to books.
Your book is not for everyone. If you think it does, I can reveal that it’s not aimed at anyone at all.
Target groups can roughly be described from two angles:
- Demographics
- The situation
The demographics angle uses criteria such as age, gender, marital status, position, number of children, residence, education, income, occupation, interests, reading habits, travel habits and many other criteria.
The situational angle uses all other criteria, which can be permanent or temporary. It could be a job change, divorce, bereavement, unemployment, infidelity or other conditions that can’t be read in the demographic data, but that affect a person’s focus.
If you cross demographics with situation, you can achieve a very close match between what you write and something the reader wants insight into or experience with.
Who needs to find who?
For those of you who aren’t already a household name or sitting on a large marketing budget, it would be beneficial to choose which of the following two statements best fits your situation.
A. Want readers to find you?
B. That you need to find the readers?
My own expectation is always that I’m the first one to find the readers. Once I’ve achieved a certain momentum (I’ll come back to how to do that), more and more readers will find me.
In my definition of target audience, I therefore make a lot of effort to find searchable criteria. Since I have chosen to write for a business audience, I can use LinkedIn as my primary data source. Around 1.4 million Danes have a profile here and I can find them on a wide range of criteria.
Facebook is bigger and has more search criteria available. In return, I have to pay every time I want to post a message in their feed.
Genre readers as a target audience
If you want to write a crime novel, it can be tempting to define the target audience as anyone who reads that type of book. A biography is then aimed at anyone who reads biographies. Children’s books are aimed at adults who read to children.
Target groups are not as homogeneous as they sound, and they are almost impossible to identify.
The only area where it makes sense to think about genre readers is if you want to invest in marketing activities together with a book portal. Here you can expose your book to readers who buy similar books. I’ll come back to that possibility when I discuss marketing.
When 1.4 million adult Danes have a profile on LinkedIn, a large part of your target audience will also be among them.
The question is, what search criteria should you use to identify them? The next question, how do you get them talking, I’ll get to in the discussion of marketing.
I started my career as an author by writing non-fiction books in English. That’s why I subscribed to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which gives me access to a wealth of search criteria and the ability to write personalized messages to each one.
According to Statistics Denmark’s Cultural Habits Survey, 66 percent of adult Danes (over 20 years old) read novels or other fiction. At 34 percent, the crime genre has a large share of the population, but reading historical novels shows the biggest growth.
The Henrik Bertelsen series, a business-related contemporary chronicle, is aimed at a broad target audience. I estimate that about half of the 66 percent, which is about 1 million people, could be interested in the topic.
The series will be most relevant for people who work with or have worked with management and sales tasks. In Denmark, this group on LinkedIn alone amounts to approximately 750,000 people. If we assume that the 66% rule also applies here, that’s almost half a million people whose names and contact details I can find on LinkedIn.
You can imagine the huge benefit your marketing efforts can have when you can identify your target audience as named individuals.
Reviewers and book blockers
When I discuss marketing in later articles, I’ll write a lot more about reviews, but here I just want to emphasize that reviewers, book bloggers and other influencers are not your target audience. Of course you want their attention, but they’re not the ones who are going to buy 3,000 copies of your book.
There’s a big difference between the motives that make a reviewer invest in a review of your book and the motives that make a reader buy it.
Reviewers, book bloggers and other influencers are communication channels. How you capture their interest is something I’ll come back to.
Next article: The magnet that attracts readers and reviewers
Tidligere artikler i denne serie:
- Article 1: A novel is born
- Article 2: How to write a good book
- Article 3: The Book’s value proposition
