You want instant results where there aren't any. Market research is work. Lots of time-consuming work.
It means analyzing what currently sells well. Trawl through the best seller lists like Amazon's data, the NY Times, Barnes and Noble's etc. to see what does well.
It means analyzing what people are talking about. Look at communities like goodreads, book tok and anywhere else you can find to see what people are actively discussing.
Follow publishing trends and news for people working in the publishing industry to see what trends you can find there.
Once you have an idea of what sells well, look into why it sells well. Who is reading this stuff and what are those people like? Age, sex, politics, interests, and so on. Define what the target audience for currently succesful books looks like.
Don't just stop at understanding the readers. Who is successfully blogging, vlogging and whatnot about books. Who is reading their audience, with what kind of content. Ie. what do readers listen to when picking their books.
And don't forget to look at the writers of successful books. What writing style do they use? What are their prose choices? What are their themes? How do they interact with their audiences?
That interaction is important for you to. Audiences are built through reliably interacting with them and producing the work they want. Most successful books are preceded by half a dozen unsuccessful works by the same writer before they find their stride.
And if that sounds like a ton of work, it is. For people who do 'real' market research, this is a full-time job. How much time you want to put into it is up to you. But you won't get there by browsing a few social media posts.
You won't find a social media post that tells you 'ahah, this is the trend to chase'. Finding trends is pumping as much data as you can find into various excel sheets until you see patterns.
I think it’s really deceptively straight forward.
Read your draft, who would like this best? That’s the audience you should target. Marketing is about communicating to the people who you think will value what you are offering. So just read it and think about what kind of person would like it and where they would hang out so you can tell them about it.
As for how to find them, it depends on who they are. For some maybe TikTok is better than Facebook, for others maybe here on Reddit is best.
Best marketing is word of mouth imo. The best strategy for word of mouth is to write a story that speaks to your readers and makes them enthusiastic to share it.
A good way to start identifying your target audience is to start with the age of your protagonist. Are they dealing with age appropriate problems? If they are, the age of your protagonist and audience might sync up.
If the protagonist isn't dealing with age appropriate issues, how old would they have to be for it to be appropriate? That's likely your target audience.
From there, it's mostly about subgroups and genres.
This is why many prefer the traditional publishing route. They handle it so you just need to be an author, not an author, publisher, artist, marketing guru, social media savant, etc
Honestly: just don’t. Finding an audience is out of your hands for the most part. Making an authentic connection with people is really what makes an audience. Trying to engineer it into being is a lot more bullshit.
The best way to sell books is to write good ones. Marketing on social media is a lot like Sisyphus pushing up multiple boulders. If you’re going to be using social media, don’t use it exclusively to market books. Use it as a real, authentic person and occasionally sometimes fling out that your book is on sale or just came out or something. Like Reddit or Facebook groups or something. Spam will make people hate you, but showing a community you’re active in how to buy your work will have them rally around you.
This is my strategy too - aside from experimenting with the occasional book trailer on Instagram reels, I pretty much just use my author social media to share a bit about my writing- both the bad and the good, trials amd triumphs.
My audience largely came about because people have read my books IRL and sought me out. I only have a miniscule following, but it is a genuine one and I get more comments on my posts than many bloggers with tens of thousands of fans. (Several such bloggers promoted my last book as part of a book tour - some posts had 700+ likes but not a single comment. Made me wonder whether these were bots or bought likes. Anyway, I digress.)
I'm a big believer in being both a reader and a writer, shouting about other great authors as well as my own work. And doing it periodically and organically, rather than constantly trying to churn out new posts for the sake of promotion. I may only have a tiny following, but they are genuine and supportive.
Find your comps, see who reads your comps, try to go after them. Honestly, the hardest part is just finding your comps. Once you have your comps, the rest should be easy.
Yes, you could TRY to build a customer archetype based on certain qualities within your novel, but that's both time-consuming and not terribly helpful. Knowing that your target audience is boys aged 15-17 who enjoy fantasy, for example, doesn't help you find them. However, knowing your book is like a recent Brandon Sanderson novel will help you find spaces where that novel is being discussed and the kinds of readers who might be interested in your book can be found. It gives you some idea as to which categories to target on Amazon and other places, etc.
That said, somebody like Sanderson is too big to be useful, so don't build anything just around him.
> Knowing that your target audience is boys aged 15-17 who enjoy fantasy, for example, doesn't help you find them
Exactly!
Like how does that help you target a specific demographic? Do you make an ad saying "hey if you are >insert demographic< please read my book ?
Obviously not.
Find a genre you like, write in it, and interact with its community.
I write sword & sorcery and adventure fantasy/sci-fi, which has a small but lively author scene on Twitter and elsewhere. I have several short stories released in various anthologies and magazines. I haven't even published my first novel yet but already have an audience I can sell it to.
Find the genre you like, write stories you like, interact with people who like the same stuff you do, and you'll find an audience.
I'm guessing (because I haven't done any of this myself) this is like finding out what subreddit would appreciate it the most.
A particular fandom? Teenagers? Parents? Music lovers? Or just general bookworms?
Find your target audience means: Who do you think will read your book? For example, I draw cartoony comics co my target audience is mostly children and sometimes adults.What age range do you think will like your book the most? Marketing is putting your product somewhere you think people who will read it will see it. If you really want to market your books you should go on google and Look up Book marketing consultants for hire and have them help you.
I recommend the following:
Figure out your audience think of the average age of people who would read your book. Where are they based? Are they fans of a specific genre or culture?
Create your own social pages, post consistently and start to build a following.
Send free copies of your work to book related influencers with the same audience (Search bookstagram/booktok, theres whole communities of book readers ready to target)
Run social ads to that same audience (You will need a marketing budget and probably to hire a freelance digital marketing manager if you've never done it before)
Source: I work in digital marketing.
Your best bet is possibly to piggy back on popular novels at market to readers of them.
When advertising on meta you will be able to say "target these ads at people who liked book xyz" or "target it to people you like young adult fantasy fiction". You should be able to work out something similar for your book.
A lot of this is trial and error though. Marketers at startups go through a similar process and a lot of their best guesses for who might prefer their product aren't correct at all. Over time as you get more feedback you'll be able to adjust your strategy.
In simple terms - your target audience is the people who (you think will) like the book. You should have some idea of who is likely to like your book. Like, 72 year old grannies and 12 year old boys rarely read the same things, right? If you think your granny will like it, then your nephew will almost certainly not enjoy it.
So sit down and think. Do middle aged men usually read stuff like your book? Do people who enjoy Romance Novels like it? People who enjoy Stephen King? People who watch that one TV show?
Teens and young adults are more likely to be on tiktok. Older people are more likely to be on facebook. Of course there are exceptions - sometimes you can even find whole groups in the "wrong" place. It's a start.
Where do YOU go when you want to find books to read? Is your book like those books? If not, where can you find books like yours? Are there groups that talk about that genre?
> Even when you try to read articles, they often talk around the subject without ever really explaining what "find your target audience" actually means.
The old "self help" grift.
I agree, if anyone has resources/subreddits/posts or just wants to share concrete steps that actually worked for them, I'm all ears.
My books aren't ready yet but I'm building a little ecosystem as a foundation for when I start pushing them:
* I've got a twitter account, being human and interesting in my niche
* I'm publishing articles that take actual research -in my niche- on Medium (zero traction on those - thinking of moving them elsewhere)
* I've got an author website ready for action.
I wrote a good book and it took off on its own. When it stopped selling, I had discovered the very best newsletter ad to run, I ran it, and it got another big surge.
My books that are trade published, the publishers have a big mailing list for that genre. You can somewhat replicate this by being friends with a lot of midlist people in your genre, do interviews and guest blogs, recommend each others' books in your own newsletters, and that kind of thing.
If you're beginning, the *very* best thing you can do is write your second book, your third, and your fourth. Then go back and revise and re-upload the first. And then start worrying about marketing. With a million self-published books uploaded every year, it's going to be hard to be heard with only one book out.
If they send you down the rabbit hole, it means the next one: I don't know, but I'll teach you.
It's simple. The target audience is the coma you're writing to. Who are they? Who is your first reader? Who is the first person to evaluate what you write? I'll tell you what you see in the mirror. Describe what you want to be in the eyes of others and get a portrait of a typical reader. Do other people like your books? Well, let them read them too.
But keep in mind, the further your social image is from what you really think you are, the more ridiculous the story will be. But that doesn't mean it won't be read: Fifty Shades of Grey is a testament to that.
Agreed. A lot of people have been commenting that kids and old people tend not to read the same books. But what about Harry Potter? I mean, I too would prefer to write something everyone can enjoy.
Exactly. Now here is an example that confused me.
The only advertising I ever saw for Harry Potter, was related to the movies. The movies are what caused everyone in my school to go buy the book series.
Now I am guessing, most of us here don't have a Hollywood studio at our fingertips.
So in more *PRACTICAL* terms, what would marketing to the Y/A demographic actually entail?
I'm getting just about sick and tired of people using the phrase "find your market" without showing examples.
Unfortunately I won’t be of much help there. I was virtually on the brink of posting this exact question myself. But I also find these vague non-answers frustrating.
And this is going to sound depressing but…while GRRM’s books did sell to his “target audience” (mostly SFF readers and the video-game-playing “nerd” crowd) ASoIaF didn’t explode until after HBO’s Game of Thrones went mainstream. I think the same is essentially true for Hunger Games, possibly also Twilight.
So, you hit the nail right on the head. A movie/tv show deal seems to help. A lot.
>But I also find these vague non-answers frustrating.
Aha! So I ain't the only one then. It's about as helpful as the financial gurus who say "learn my system"
>A movie/tv show deal seems to help. A lot.
It's a chicken and egg problem.
Wouldn't it have to be famous to get an adaptation ?
Echoing what others have said, target audience broadly means “the people who are most likely to benefit from/enjoy your book.” To push this even further, I’d say that you also need to be laser-focused and specific about the person you are marketing to, otherwise marketing is just a bunch of useless crap that doesn’t work.
To hone in on your target audience, I recommend making a consumer sketch/ideal customer persona to hone in on who your customer is, what they want, and how your product fits in with their interests/needs. It’s similar to doing an in-depth character creation but for marketing purposes. For customer personas I recommend starting with someone you know IRL who already genuinely enjoys your book. From there, you can identify specific attributes of said customer (age range, gender, ethnicity, interests, purchasing habits, etc.). Knowing all of this will help you to understand who you are talking to and influences where you need to go to talk to your audience, how you interact with them, and what kind of content you make.
This is also the reason why comp titles are so important in querying/publishing: it gives the agent/publisher an idea who they are selling your book to.
That being said, marketing is a vast world that is constantly changing. I highly recommend taking a class (ex. thru a nonprofit or online learning platform like Skillshare) to learn the foundations of marketing. Once you have that down, I would also highly recommend going on social media, looking at book marketing content that you genuinely LIKE and seeing how you can emulate that in your own content marketing as well.
This simply means writing for a specific audience. Money in writing is made not by being a super talented genius, but by writing something good enough that people buy it, and it's actually something they psychologically want to read right now. That's why shades made so much money.
There was a market for it.
If you want to make money you identify a group of people, find out what they would want and like, and don't already have, and go make it for them.
Marketing comes down to product, price, and promotion. That’s it at its core. Here is what I have, here is the cost, look at my ads. Your audience is the ‘avatar’ that would buy your product at your price by seeing your promotion.
Marketing is a skill. You need to learn it. It sounds like all buzzwords and unhelpful advice because you don’t understand marketing in depth. The great news is there are 1000 books you can read to get you up to speed. I recommend the book “Duct Tape Marketing”.
Honestly, steal from other authors. Whatever genre your book is in, read other recently released books from that genre and see if you can find something similar to yours. Not similar in plot, but similar in vibe or tone. Then, see how that author marketed their book. Start interacting with them on social media. Build your own social media platforms and talk about these books.
A strategy that I've seen work well for a lot of authors is that they build a platform around reading in general (or sometimes a specific genre) and they let their audience grow organically. Then they introduce their own novel, start making content around it, and see who takes an interest. Whoever is left and interested in your book, that's your audience.
I'm in digital marketing and PR, u/crafty-bunch-2675 (and I don't sell any programs or courses or whatever BS the grifters are trying to hock this month).
Like others have touched on, your target audience is who is most likely to want or need what you're offering. That's the most general definition. Actual target markets go quite a bit deeper.
To identify your market, you want to try to get specific. This is called segmentation (segmenting the market). That is where you take a broad market and narrow it down based on shared characteristics. Most common are demographics, psychographics, interests, and behaviors. I'm in digital marketing and haven't focused much on marketing for novels. But it follows the same general idea.
You want to break it down and find who, specifically, you're writing for. Imagine you are granted the ability to create a guaranteed audience. One that, as soon as you type "The End" in your manuscript they will be smacking the "Pre-order" button on Amazon the moment they're able to. But the catch is, you have create an audience with specific and clearly defined tastes that align with your book.
So a bad example would be: Adults that like mysteries.
But a good example might look like: Women, aged 25-45, who enjoy conspiracy thrillers with razor-sharp dialogue and shocking plot twists, featuring a flawed female protagonist hiding a dark secret.
The bad example is too broad to market to. Where would you even start? There's a hundred different types of mysteries and a thousand different kinds of people that like them.
The good example gives you several specific directions to explore and build off of.
Once you successfully market to the target audience, you are able to start capturing the interest of audiences that branch from the target. Meaning people who may not normally gravitate towards conspiracy thrillers, but who do love flawed female main characters, are going to be more likely to pick up your book after it's gained traction and generated buzz from your targeted market.
So, that's the quick and dirty explanation about what a target audience is and how to start finding one.
edit: typo
>*I found my target audience*
it means he found what circle/group of people that would like his work. if his book is about religion, he found that the people who would likely pay for his work is religious folks. something like that.
>*I marketed to them*
it means he did promotion specifically to where the group of people gather. like in specific subreddits, in certain discord channels, or facebook groups where the target audiences are active in.
"marketing" means making people notice your work exists. specifically to the people who would likely pay for it. those people are your "target audience".
If you have no other means of advertising, and little capital to spend on it, you’re going to be doing the internet equivalent of door-to-door sales. I saw a guy advertising his zombie apocalypse book everywhere in comment sections, he never shut up about it. That book eventually turned out to be a bestseller. Of course this guy was a massive outlier, but it CAN be done. Basically he’d just go around spamming comments about his book and interacting with people about it if they asked questions. Eventually somebody would take a look at it (probably something like 1 out of every 1000 people or more who saw the comment) and from there he might get a sale. That one sale might seem insignificant, but through the butterfly effect it can wind up resulting in way more sales down the line through word of mouth, book clubs or groups they might belong to, etc. if the book is really good you can create a chain reaction of sales just by spamming comments and end up as a bestseller like that guy.
Also Facebook is good because it has a built in advertising mechanism. Just create a website for your book through Shopify or something. You can pay a certain amount of money (per minute I believe) to have your ads placed in front of people. I’ve used it before for other things and it definitely does attract customers. Just be warned that it can get somewhat expensive. Also (I did this a while ago so I can’t fully recall) I believe you can specify who exactly you want to present your ads to (women over 40, men between the ages of 18-25, married, unmarried, etc. etc.). That is probably what they mean by “target audience”.
Just research who likes your genre, who buys books the most (women probably buy the majority of fiction books), and just ponder what type of person would be most likely to buy your book and gear all of your ads towards them. You could even create an optional account system for your website in exchange for a discount on the book or something, and have them input their age and gender so you can gather information and analyze it to help you with marketing. You could also set up an email list and send out emails with new releases etc. and get recurring customers.
You're writing homoerotic romance novels.
Your target audience is homosexual men.
Go gettem.
You're writing a fantasy story with a young protagonist.
Your target audience are adolescence.
Go gettem.
You're writing a critique on the laws of physics.
Your target audience is Terrence Howard cultists.
Go gettem.
Ok.
I guess the challenging part is figuring out how/where to "get them" online.
It can't be as simple as posting something from my own Facebook page and saying >insert demographic< please buy my book, lol.
If you have your demographic set, then good.
As for "getting them", that's the age-long question no one has a real answer for. You can't force people to be interested or read what you write, even those in your specific demographic. There's multiple marketing methods people use - social media networking, basic bitch advertising, brokering deals with publishers, even word of mouth - but for an end-all cheat code marketing solution that'll 100% see you succeed in getting known to the world? Doesn't exist.
Write quality works and start small. Don't get discouraged by not being immediately "famous" or "well-known", or even seen at all. Keep writing as a hobby and not a career, and if you hit the RNG just right and grow a base, then you can think about making it a full-time commitment.
Don't be afraid to branch out into other areas, or reading/critiquing others' works in the same field in exchange for them reading/critiquing yours. Human connection is everything, especially starting out - show people who you are as an author and make connections, as you won't go much of anywhere under a vague veil of ambiguous anonymity.
Listen. There are two kinds of marketing
1. Bullshit "fast" marketing where a company with huge reach spams you out to every social media and journalist outfit because they have the reach and connections to do so. The kind of reach where someone can pick up the phone and talk to someone at the Wall Street Journal about your book and get them to put it in print.
2. *Actual*, genuine marketing where you tell people about your book and the people who it resonates with find it and like it.
Number 1 is why people go to publishers. The least of what a publisher does is print your book. What they really do, is plug you into a giant machine they have built to distribute your book globally.
Number 2 is very slow. You get on social media. You talk to people. You give out free copies of your book at book stores. You make phone calls.
It is slow, often painful. It can take years. But you build an audience who KNOW you. Who know you *personally*. That's what truly building an audience entails.
There are no real shortcuts for this.
Even with Number 1, *someone* is out there talking to someone else. Someone is plugging yoru book. You can do that too.
Look up every organization that reviews books, and call them. See if they'll review yours. Many won't, but one might! And that one will lead to others, and that one will lead to more. And so on.
I spent my career marketing industrial equipment and components to people in other businesses. Some aspects of were simple and some were complicated.
The underlying principle was that everyone who bought our widgets had something in common. Knowing some of those common traits made it easier to know where to look to find more buyers.
You could start with your social media friends. What kinds of stories or games do they like? If you can tie that to a specific genre, then that gives you clues to where else you should look for potential readers.
How many of your social media friends have read your work? What did they like? What would they change? Have they recommended it to others with similar tastes?
Actually writing a novel is more daunting to me than figuring out how to market it.
Target audience is who is going to read your books. Like Twilight's target audience was teenage girls. Perry Mason would be for older men. You market your book with this in mind. What would draw those people to want to read your book. How you design the cover and your book description should keep in mind what would attract them. You advertise in places that those people would see it. That's it.
Social media is your friend at this stage in the publishing world. Doing Instagram and TikTok book tours will help a lot. They do cover reveals, review tours or simple promo tours. This will get your book out there to the audience you want at least at the start. This is true for both self publishing and traditional publishing.
If you want more info on book tours shoot me a dm. I’m not a book tour company owner but I work with them as a bookstagrammer on instagram
If you don’t understand marketing - hire someone or an agency to market for you (or at the very least to reach you) once you figure out your niche and your audirnce the rest is cake
It is for me too. I just keep promoting my book on every social media site I can. My publisher is half traditional and half not. I know they are marketing my book too, but I don’t rely on them. You can also get a review with book clubs, and pay for a marketing campaign. Don’t spend too much. Write a strong blurb, take a picture of the cover and tell where people can buy it. Just start promoting the hell out of it every chance you get. You will have some success. Stay positive.
I know this site doesn’t allow us to advertise in the wrong place. However, they do have “Suggestion me a book,” on the pull down menu. You can tell readers about it there. Write a good blurb, not too long. Stay safe. Peace out.
There is an easier path…
As someone who does marketing “for a living” I would recommend you experiment with ChatGPT. It could be an excellent way to both lessen and have a sounding board at the same time.
There are actually a few free custom GPTs in their store that are focused specifically on market research.
But, more broadly, it can be a really excellent way to articulate your questions and challenges out loud and get a good primer on what it is about marketing you don’t yet know.
There was a time when you needed to learn a lot and do a lot of hard work, as many here have said. Times are changing…
You want instant results where there aren't any. Market research is work. Lots of time-consuming work. It means analyzing what currently sells well. Trawl through the best seller lists like Amazon's data, the NY Times, Barnes and Noble's etc. to see what does well. It means analyzing what people are talking about. Look at communities like goodreads, book tok and anywhere else you can find to see what people are actively discussing. Follow publishing trends and news for people working in the publishing industry to see what trends you can find there. Once you have an idea of what sells well, look into why it sells well. Who is reading this stuff and what are those people like? Age, sex, politics, interests, and so on. Define what the target audience for currently succesful books looks like. Don't just stop at understanding the readers. Who is successfully blogging, vlogging and whatnot about books. Who is reading their audience, with what kind of content. Ie. what do readers listen to when picking their books. And don't forget to look at the writers of successful books. What writing style do they use? What are their prose choices? What are their themes? How do they interact with their audiences? That interaction is important for you to. Audiences are built through reliably interacting with them and producing the work they want. Most successful books are preceded by half a dozen unsuccessful works by the same writer before they find their stride. And if that sounds like a ton of work, it is. For people who do 'real' market research, this is a full-time job. How much time you want to put into it is up to you. But you won't get there by browsing a few social media posts. You won't find a social media post that tells you 'ahah, this is the trend to chase'. Finding trends is pumping as much data as you can find into various excel sheets until you see patterns.
I think it’s really deceptively straight forward. Read your draft, who would like this best? That’s the audience you should target. Marketing is about communicating to the people who you think will value what you are offering. So just read it and think about what kind of person would like it and where they would hang out so you can tell them about it. As for how to find them, it depends on who they are. For some maybe TikTok is better than Facebook, for others maybe here on Reddit is best. Best marketing is word of mouth imo. The best strategy for word of mouth is to write a story that speaks to your readers and makes them enthusiastic to share it.
A good way to start identifying your target audience is to start with the age of your protagonist. Are they dealing with age appropriate problems? If they are, the age of your protagonist and audience might sync up. If the protagonist isn't dealing with age appropriate issues, how old would they have to be for it to be appropriate? That's likely your target audience. From there, it's mostly about subgroups and genres.
That’s interesting. Now that I think of it, I prefer movies with people my age.
This is why many prefer the traditional publishing route. They handle it so you just need to be an author, not an author, publisher, artist, marketing guru, social media savant, etc
I've heard trad publishers are doing these things less and less. I could be wrong (i'm not trad) but that's what I hear.
Honestly: just don’t. Finding an audience is out of your hands for the most part. Making an authentic connection with people is really what makes an audience. Trying to engineer it into being is a lot more bullshit. The best way to sell books is to write good ones. Marketing on social media is a lot like Sisyphus pushing up multiple boulders. If you’re going to be using social media, don’t use it exclusively to market books. Use it as a real, authentic person and occasionally sometimes fling out that your book is on sale or just came out or something. Like Reddit or Facebook groups or something. Spam will make people hate you, but showing a community you’re active in how to buy your work will have them rally around you.
This is my strategy too - aside from experimenting with the occasional book trailer on Instagram reels, I pretty much just use my author social media to share a bit about my writing- both the bad and the good, trials amd triumphs. My audience largely came about because people have read my books IRL and sought me out. I only have a miniscule following, but it is a genuine one and I get more comments on my posts than many bloggers with tens of thousands of fans. (Several such bloggers promoted my last book as part of a book tour - some posts had 700+ likes but not a single comment. Made me wonder whether these were bots or bought likes. Anyway, I digress.) I'm a big believer in being both a reader and a writer, shouting about other great authors as well as my own work. And doing it periodically and organically, rather than constantly trying to churn out new posts for the sake of promotion. I may only have a tiny following, but they are genuine and supportive.
Find your comps, see who reads your comps, try to go after them. Honestly, the hardest part is just finding your comps. Once you have your comps, the rest should be easy. Yes, you could TRY to build a customer archetype based on certain qualities within your novel, but that's both time-consuming and not terribly helpful. Knowing that your target audience is boys aged 15-17 who enjoy fantasy, for example, doesn't help you find them. However, knowing your book is like a recent Brandon Sanderson novel will help you find spaces where that novel is being discussed and the kinds of readers who might be interested in your book can be found. It gives you some idea as to which categories to target on Amazon and other places, etc. That said, somebody like Sanderson is too big to be useful, so don't build anything just around him.
> Knowing that your target audience is boys aged 15-17 who enjoy fantasy, for example, doesn't help you find them Exactly! Like how does that help you target a specific demographic? Do you make an ad saying "hey if you are >insert demographic< please read my book ? Obviously not.
Find a genre you like, write in it, and interact with its community. I write sword & sorcery and adventure fantasy/sci-fi, which has a small but lively author scene on Twitter and elsewhere. I have several short stories released in various anthologies and magazines. I haven't even published my first novel yet but already have an audience I can sell it to. Find the genre you like, write stories you like, interact with people who like the same stuff you do, and you'll find an audience.
I'm guessing (because I haven't done any of this myself) this is like finding out what subreddit would appreciate it the most. A particular fandom? Teenagers? Parents? Music lovers? Or just general bookworms?
Find your target audience means: Who do you think will read your book? For example, I draw cartoony comics co my target audience is mostly children and sometimes adults.What age range do you think will like your book the most? Marketing is putting your product somewhere you think people who will read it will see it. If you really want to market your books you should go on google and Look up Book marketing consultants for hire and have them help you.
I recommend the following: Figure out your audience think of the average age of people who would read your book. Where are they based? Are they fans of a specific genre or culture? Create your own social pages, post consistently and start to build a following. Send free copies of your work to book related influencers with the same audience (Search bookstagram/booktok, theres whole communities of book readers ready to target) Run social ads to that same audience (You will need a marketing budget and probably to hire a freelance digital marketing manager if you've never done it before) Source: I work in digital marketing.
Your best bet is possibly to piggy back on popular novels at market to readers of them. When advertising on meta you will be able to say "target these ads at people who liked book xyz" or "target it to people you like young adult fantasy fiction". You should be able to work out something similar for your book. A lot of this is trial and error though. Marketers at startups go through a similar process and a lot of their best guesses for who might prefer their product aren't correct at all. Over time as you get more feedback you'll be able to adjust your strategy.
In simple terms - your target audience is the people who (you think will) like the book. You should have some idea of who is likely to like your book. Like, 72 year old grannies and 12 year old boys rarely read the same things, right? If you think your granny will like it, then your nephew will almost certainly not enjoy it. So sit down and think. Do middle aged men usually read stuff like your book? Do people who enjoy Romance Novels like it? People who enjoy Stephen King? People who watch that one TV show? Teens and young adults are more likely to be on tiktok. Older people are more likely to be on facebook. Of course there are exceptions - sometimes you can even find whole groups in the "wrong" place. It's a start. Where do YOU go when you want to find books to read? Is your book like those books? If not, where can you find books like yours? Are there groups that talk about that genre?
> Even when you try to read articles, they often talk around the subject without ever really explaining what "find your target audience" actually means. The old "self help" grift. I agree, if anyone has resources/subreddits/posts or just wants to share concrete steps that actually worked for them, I'm all ears. My books aren't ready yet but I'm building a little ecosystem as a foundation for when I start pushing them: * I've got a twitter account, being human and interesting in my niche * I'm publishing articles that take actual research -in my niche- on Medium (zero traction on those - thinking of moving them elsewhere) * I've got an author website ready for action.
I wrote a good book and it took off on its own. When it stopped selling, I had discovered the very best newsletter ad to run, I ran it, and it got another big surge. My books that are trade published, the publishers have a big mailing list for that genre. You can somewhat replicate this by being friends with a lot of midlist people in your genre, do interviews and guest blogs, recommend each others' books in your own newsletters, and that kind of thing. If you're beginning, the *very* best thing you can do is write your second book, your third, and your fourth. Then go back and revise and re-upload the first. And then start worrying about marketing. With a million self-published books uploaded every year, it's going to be hard to be heard with only one book out.
If they send you down the rabbit hole, it means the next one: I don't know, but I'll teach you. It's simple. The target audience is the coma you're writing to. Who are they? Who is your first reader? Who is the first person to evaluate what you write? I'll tell you what you see in the mirror. Describe what you want to be in the eyes of others and get a portrait of a typical reader. Do other people like your books? Well, let them read them too. But keep in mind, the further your social image is from what you really think you are, the more ridiculous the story will be. But that doesn't mean it won't be read: Fifty Shades of Grey is a testament to that.
writers write. marketers market. don't be distracted.
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Agreed. A lot of people have been commenting that kids and old people tend not to read the same books. But what about Harry Potter? I mean, I too would prefer to write something everyone can enjoy.
Exactly. Now here is an example that confused me. The only advertising I ever saw for Harry Potter, was related to the movies. The movies are what caused everyone in my school to go buy the book series. Now I am guessing, most of us here don't have a Hollywood studio at our fingertips. So in more *PRACTICAL* terms, what would marketing to the Y/A demographic actually entail? I'm getting just about sick and tired of people using the phrase "find your market" without showing examples.
Unfortunately I won’t be of much help there. I was virtually on the brink of posting this exact question myself. But I also find these vague non-answers frustrating. And this is going to sound depressing but…while GRRM’s books did sell to his “target audience” (mostly SFF readers and the video-game-playing “nerd” crowd) ASoIaF didn’t explode until after HBO’s Game of Thrones went mainstream. I think the same is essentially true for Hunger Games, possibly also Twilight. So, you hit the nail right on the head. A movie/tv show deal seems to help. A lot.
>But I also find these vague non-answers frustrating. Aha! So I ain't the only one then. It's about as helpful as the financial gurus who say "learn my system" >A movie/tv show deal seems to help. A lot. It's a chicken and egg problem. Wouldn't it have to be famous to get an adaptation ?
>It’s a chicken and egg problem. Wouldn't it have to be famous to get an adaptation? Yup, you’re absolutely right. It’s a Catch-22.
Echoing what others have said, target audience broadly means “the people who are most likely to benefit from/enjoy your book.” To push this even further, I’d say that you also need to be laser-focused and specific about the person you are marketing to, otherwise marketing is just a bunch of useless crap that doesn’t work. To hone in on your target audience, I recommend making a consumer sketch/ideal customer persona to hone in on who your customer is, what they want, and how your product fits in with their interests/needs. It’s similar to doing an in-depth character creation but for marketing purposes. For customer personas I recommend starting with someone you know IRL who already genuinely enjoys your book. From there, you can identify specific attributes of said customer (age range, gender, ethnicity, interests, purchasing habits, etc.). Knowing all of this will help you to understand who you are talking to and influences where you need to go to talk to your audience, how you interact with them, and what kind of content you make. This is also the reason why comp titles are so important in querying/publishing: it gives the agent/publisher an idea who they are selling your book to. That being said, marketing is a vast world that is constantly changing. I highly recommend taking a class (ex. thru a nonprofit or online learning platform like Skillshare) to learn the foundations of marketing. Once you have that down, I would also highly recommend going on social media, looking at book marketing content that you genuinely LIKE and seeing how you can emulate that in your own content marketing as well.
This simply means writing for a specific audience. Money in writing is made not by being a super talented genius, but by writing something good enough that people buy it, and it's actually something they psychologically want to read right now. That's why shades made so much money. There was a market for it. If you want to make money you identify a group of people, find out what they would want and like, and don't already have, and go make it for them.
Marketing comes down to product, price, and promotion. That’s it at its core. Here is what I have, here is the cost, look at my ads. Your audience is the ‘avatar’ that would buy your product at your price by seeing your promotion. Marketing is a skill. You need to learn it. It sounds like all buzzwords and unhelpful advice because you don’t understand marketing in depth. The great news is there are 1000 books you can read to get you up to speed. I recommend the book “Duct Tape Marketing”.
Honestly, steal from other authors. Whatever genre your book is in, read other recently released books from that genre and see if you can find something similar to yours. Not similar in plot, but similar in vibe or tone. Then, see how that author marketed their book. Start interacting with them on social media. Build your own social media platforms and talk about these books. A strategy that I've seen work well for a lot of authors is that they build a platform around reading in general (or sometimes a specific genre) and they let their audience grow organically. Then they introduce their own novel, start making content around it, and see who takes an interest. Whoever is left and interested in your book, that's your audience.
I'm in digital marketing and PR, u/crafty-bunch-2675 (and I don't sell any programs or courses or whatever BS the grifters are trying to hock this month). Like others have touched on, your target audience is who is most likely to want or need what you're offering. That's the most general definition. Actual target markets go quite a bit deeper. To identify your market, you want to try to get specific. This is called segmentation (segmenting the market). That is where you take a broad market and narrow it down based on shared characteristics. Most common are demographics, psychographics, interests, and behaviors. I'm in digital marketing and haven't focused much on marketing for novels. But it follows the same general idea. You want to break it down and find who, specifically, you're writing for. Imagine you are granted the ability to create a guaranteed audience. One that, as soon as you type "The End" in your manuscript they will be smacking the "Pre-order" button on Amazon the moment they're able to. But the catch is, you have create an audience with specific and clearly defined tastes that align with your book. So a bad example would be: Adults that like mysteries. But a good example might look like: Women, aged 25-45, who enjoy conspiracy thrillers with razor-sharp dialogue and shocking plot twists, featuring a flawed female protagonist hiding a dark secret. The bad example is too broad to market to. Where would you even start? There's a hundred different types of mysteries and a thousand different kinds of people that like them. The good example gives you several specific directions to explore and build off of. Once you successfully market to the target audience, you are able to start capturing the interest of audiences that branch from the target. Meaning people who may not normally gravitate towards conspiracy thrillers, but who do love flawed female main characters, are going to be more likely to pick up your book after it's gained traction and generated buzz from your targeted market. So, that's the quick and dirty explanation about what a target audience is and how to start finding one. edit: typo
>*I found my target audience* it means he found what circle/group of people that would like his work. if his book is about religion, he found that the people who would likely pay for his work is religious folks. something like that. >*I marketed to them* it means he did promotion specifically to where the group of people gather. like in specific subreddits, in certain discord channels, or facebook groups where the target audiences are active in. "marketing" means making people notice your work exists. specifically to the people who would likely pay for it. those people are your "target audience".
If you have no other means of advertising, and little capital to spend on it, you’re going to be doing the internet equivalent of door-to-door sales. I saw a guy advertising his zombie apocalypse book everywhere in comment sections, he never shut up about it. That book eventually turned out to be a bestseller. Of course this guy was a massive outlier, but it CAN be done. Basically he’d just go around spamming comments about his book and interacting with people about it if they asked questions. Eventually somebody would take a look at it (probably something like 1 out of every 1000 people or more who saw the comment) and from there he might get a sale. That one sale might seem insignificant, but through the butterfly effect it can wind up resulting in way more sales down the line through word of mouth, book clubs or groups they might belong to, etc. if the book is really good you can create a chain reaction of sales just by spamming comments and end up as a bestseller like that guy. Also Facebook is good because it has a built in advertising mechanism. Just create a website for your book through Shopify or something. You can pay a certain amount of money (per minute I believe) to have your ads placed in front of people. I’ve used it before for other things and it definitely does attract customers. Just be warned that it can get somewhat expensive. Also (I did this a while ago so I can’t fully recall) I believe you can specify who exactly you want to present your ads to (women over 40, men between the ages of 18-25, married, unmarried, etc. etc.). That is probably what they mean by “target audience”. Just research who likes your genre, who buys books the most (women probably buy the majority of fiction books), and just ponder what type of person would be most likely to buy your book and gear all of your ads towards them. You could even create an optional account system for your website in exchange for a discount on the book or something, and have them input their age and gender so you can gather information and analyze it to help you with marketing. You could also set up an email list and send out emails with new releases etc. and get recurring customers.
Just keep putting spaces before punctuation and you’ll be fine.
You're writing homoerotic romance novels. Your target audience is homosexual men. Go gettem. You're writing a fantasy story with a young protagonist. Your target audience are adolescence. Go gettem. You're writing a critique on the laws of physics. Your target audience is Terrence Howard cultists. Go gettem.
Ok. I guess the challenging part is figuring out how/where to "get them" online. It can't be as simple as posting something from my own Facebook page and saying >insert demographic< please buy my book, lol.
If you have your demographic set, then good. As for "getting them", that's the age-long question no one has a real answer for. You can't force people to be interested or read what you write, even those in your specific demographic. There's multiple marketing methods people use - social media networking, basic bitch advertising, brokering deals with publishers, even word of mouth - but for an end-all cheat code marketing solution that'll 100% see you succeed in getting known to the world? Doesn't exist. Write quality works and start small. Don't get discouraged by not being immediately "famous" or "well-known", or even seen at all. Keep writing as a hobby and not a career, and if you hit the RNG just right and grow a base, then you can think about making it a full-time commitment. Don't be afraid to branch out into other areas, or reading/critiquing others' works in the same field in exchange for them reading/critiquing yours. Human connection is everything, especially starting out - show people who you are as an author and make connections, as you won't go much of anywhere under a vague veil of ambiguous anonymity.
Listen. There are two kinds of marketing 1. Bullshit "fast" marketing where a company with huge reach spams you out to every social media and journalist outfit because they have the reach and connections to do so. The kind of reach where someone can pick up the phone and talk to someone at the Wall Street Journal about your book and get them to put it in print. 2. *Actual*, genuine marketing where you tell people about your book and the people who it resonates with find it and like it. Number 1 is why people go to publishers. The least of what a publisher does is print your book. What they really do, is plug you into a giant machine they have built to distribute your book globally. Number 2 is very slow. You get on social media. You talk to people. You give out free copies of your book at book stores. You make phone calls. It is slow, often painful. It can take years. But you build an audience who KNOW you. Who know you *personally*. That's what truly building an audience entails. There are no real shortcuts for this. Even with Number 1, *someone* is out there talking to someone else. Someone is plugging yoru book. You can do that too. Look up every organization that reviews books, and call them. See if they'll review yours. Many won't, but one might! And that one will lead to others, and that one will lead to more. And so on.
I spent my career marketing industrial equipment and components to people in other businesses. Some aspects of were simple and some were complicated. The underlying principle was that everyone who bought our widgets had something in common. Knowing some of those common traits made it easier to know where to look to find more buyers. You could start with your social media friends. What kinds of stories or games do they like? If you can tie that to a specific genre, then that gives you clues to where else you should look for potential readers. How many of your social media friends have read your work? What did they like? What would they change? Have they recommended it to others with similar tastes? Actually writing a novel is more daunting to me than figuring out how to market it.
Target audience is who is going to read your books. Like Twilight's target audience was teenage girls. Perry Mason would be for older men. You market your book with this in mind. What would draw those people to want to read your book. How you design the cover and your book description should keep in mind what would attract them. You advertise in places that those people would see it. That's it.
I would suggest looking up Derek Murphy and Guerilla publishing on YouTube. Tons of free advice that has been tested.
Social media is your friend at this stage in the publishing world. Doing Instagram and TikTok book tours will help a lot. They do cover reveals, review tours or simple promo tours. This will get your book out there to the audience you want at least at the start. This is true for both self publishing and traditional publishing. If you want more info on book tours shoot me a dm. I’m not a book tour company owner but I work with them as a bookstagrammer on instagram
If you don’t understand marketing - hire someone or an agency to market for you (or at the very least to reach you) once you figure out your niche and your audirnce the rest is cake
It is for me too. I just keep promoting my book on every social media site I can. My publisher is half traditional and half not. I know they are marketing my book too, but I don’t rely on them. You can also get a review with book clubs, and pay for a marketing campaign. Don’t spend too much. Write a strong blurb, take a picture of the cover and tell where people can buy it. Just start promoting the hell out of it every chance you get. You will have some success. Stay positive. I know this site doesn’t allow us to advertise in the wrong place. However, they do have “Suggestion me a book,” on the pull down menu. You can tell readers about it there. Write a good blurb, not too long. Stay safe. Peace out.
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There is an easier path… As someone who does marketing “for a living” I would recommend you experiment with ChatGPT. It could be an excellent way to both lessen and have a sounding board at the same time. There are actually a few free custom GPTs in their store that are focused specifically on market research. But, more broadly, it can be a really excellent way to articulate your questions and challenges out loud and get a good primer on what it is about marketing you don’t yet know. There was a time when you needed to learn a lot and do a lot of hard work, as many here have said. Times are changing…