I don’t know many authors who are 100% satisfied with the number of books they sell.

In most cases, it’s because they don’t know the simple formula for more book sales

When you understand the formula and put it to work, you’ll hit your sales goals sooner because you’ll be reaching the right people where they are with the right messages.

You’ll be wasting less time and become far more effective with your marketing.

Your audience isn’t “everybody”

The formula for more book sales starts with understanding that the audience for your book isn’t “everybody.”

There are few books available that appeal to all readers. A how-to book on healthy eating probably should appeal to “everyone,” but doesn’t. And how many 15-year-old boys do you know reading hen lit?

It’s super important to determine the small subset of “everybody” that will want to read your book. While it’s counterintuitive, fact is, the smaller your audience, the more successful you’ll be.

That’s because of how the formula for more book sales works.

Formula for more book sales

Here’s your formula for more book sales:

Narrow target audience + discoverability = book sales

Why does it work this way? It starts with really, truly knowing who will buy your book.

Narrow target audience

Success starts with a narrow target audience. I realize that sounds limiting. You’re probably thinking that if your audience is smaller, you’ll sell fewer copies than if the audience is “everybody,” right?

Nope.

This idea of “less is more” really does make sense when you think about it.

If you wrote a handbook on accounting for small businesses, would you try to sell it to “everybody,” or would you focus your marketing efforts on small business owners with no in-house accounting staff?

Of course you’d focus on the people who are most likely to buy it – small business owners without that capability in-house. Welders, human resource executives, or engineers who aren’t self-employed don’t need or want it, so why waste your time trying to get your book in front of them?

Some books appeal to more people than others do. Still, even when you dig into a popular category like thrillers, you’ll be able to narrow down your audience. Some thriller readers want domestic stories. Others don’t like graphic violence. Still others prefer political thrillers.

The more specific you can get about your audience, the more likely you are to sell more books because you’ll be going after only the right people. It keeps you from wasting your time while it helps you make the right marketing decisions.

Narrow target audience specifics

To get your book discovered, you want to know your specific target audience’s:

• Demographics
• Psychographics (life stage, lifestyle, culture, religion, etc.)
• Book buying habits or preferences

Nobody presents you with that information, though. You have to do some work to get it.

But once you have that knowledge, you’ll be able to select the book marketing tactics that will help you reach and connect with the readers who will buy your book.

For example, when you know that your target audience is book-loving females between the ages of 18 and 34, you’ll see that TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat are where it’s happening in social media and that you might reach them on Wattpad. More women than men use Wattpad and 67% of the site’s users are in that age range. 

Need help with that? In my video training program, “Who Will Buy Your Book? How to Figure Out and Find Your Target Audience,” I teach you exactly how to identify your book’s target audience and where to find them so you sell more books.

Discoverability

Discoverability, the second piece of the formula, describes how likely people are to find your book when they’re not specifically looking for it.

Maybe they ask Facebook friends to recommend a cozy mystery with a little romance thrown in.

They might use Amazon’s search box to find books on a nonfiction topic and yours shows ups in the search results.

Or they see the title and a description in Entertainment Weekly’s “top summer beach reads” article.

You already know that your target audience won’t discover your book if you aren’t promoting it. And, unless you know your narrow target audience and where to find them online and offline, you won’t be promoting your book in the right places.

That’s why “narrow audience” improves your “discoverability.”

Look for your niches

When you go from “everybody” to a more niche, narrow target audience, you make smarter marketing choices. You waste less time, energy, and money while you do more of the right things that lead to book sales.

That formula again is:

Narrow target audience (the people most likely to buy your book) +

discoverability (promoting your book in the right places) =

book sales

Applying the formula for more book sales

Set aside time to work on your formula. Write down:

• Your description of the single person most likely to love your book
• Why they will love it
• Where you will find that person online and offline
• The book marketing tactics you can use to reach them in those places
• The book marketing messages that will resonate with your narrow target audience

Record this information in your book marketing plan, then take action. You’ll find that you’re far more focused and less overwhelmed.

And you’ll probably move forward faster, too.

Remember: Narrow target audience + discoverabilty = book sales.

Do you know your book’s target audience? What is it?

(Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2016. It has been updated and expanded.)

Targeting a niche book audience

By Brette Sember

I’ve written niche books before, but The Gluten-Free Guide to Travel might just target the smallest one so far! Writing an e-book for such a small audience actually makes promoting it easier, because my audience is so small and so very targeted.

Think in circles

It helps me to organize my promotion by thinking about circles of people and organizations. I start at the center, with those closest to me, and work my way outward. My first order of business was to write a blog post for my own blog and to post on my personal and blog Facebook pages. I paid to boost the post from my blog Facebook page, increasing the number of people who would see the post. I tweeted, pinned and Google+ed about the book myself. I posted on LinkedIn.

Next I moved to my friends. I asked them to share my book on Facebook. I asked them if they wanted review copies for Amazon reviews and if they would do blog posts on their blogs. I’m fortunate to know so many wonderful writers who believe in supporting other writers because I received a lot of publicity this way.

Use your organizations

Next I looked to organizations I belong to. Because this book is about travel, I updated my profile with both the North American Travel Journalists Association and the International Food Wine and Travel Writers Association and submitted the publication as member news with one of the organizations (the other does not have a member news section). I updated my bio on GoGirlfriend, one of the travel sites where my work appears. I belong to a large group of women writers on Facebook and I posted there asking if anyone would like a review copy and several members invited me to do guest blogs or interviews for their sites. Still on my to-do list is to update my American Society of Journalists and Authors profile and post on the forums there about it. I will send a press release to my hometown paper about the book and I’ve already sent a review copy to my alumni association’s magazine, which has promoted several of my other books in the past.

Target pubs and groups

Although all of the work I had done so far got the word out, I still needed to hone in on my very targeted audience, so I sent press releases to Living Without’s Gluten Free and More magazine and Gluten Free Living magazine. I contacted my local celiac association branch and asked if they would list the book as a resource. I plan to spend some time contacting national celiac and gluten-free support groups. I will then move to contacting bloggers in this area, offering them review copies and guest posts.

Although a niche audience makes it easy to know who will want to read your book, I believe it is still important to start with the people closest to you and work your way out as you consider getting the word out.

What tactic works best for you when trying to reach a specific niche audience?

That’s what President Barack Obama did today when he appeared on the fake online talk show, “Between Two Ferns,” with host Zach Galifianakis.

As he struggled not to laugh, President Obama eventually pitched the Affordable Care Act to the show’s fans — the young viewers who need to sign up for health care coverage so the system works properly.

He took his marketing message directly to the people he needed to reach where he knew he’d find them — at FunnyorDie.com.

“The point is, a lot of young people, they think they’re invincible,” President Obama told his host.

Authors can learn a lot from this brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny interview:

Your goal with book marketing is the same as the president’s for healthcare.gov: You want to get your book title in front of your target audience.

Follow the White House’s lead: Use the media outlets, social networks, websites, and events that your audience uses to get your book title in front of them. You’re wasting your time if you’re not where they’re at.

What’s your book’s version of Funny or Die? Where is your book’s audience spending time online?

Know your target

By Jennifer Lawler

A martial artist must know what he is trying to achieve with every technique.

When he trains, he doesn’t just slice the sword through the air, but he practices against a target so that his aim is true. When he delivers a kick, he knows whether he’s aiming for the knee or the ribs.

He knows what he hopes to accomplish with a specific fight or a specific battle—he knows what his objective is. In a sparring match, it might be to score more points than the opposing fighter. It might be to pin the opponent to the mat.

The martial artist also knows the vulnerable points or weak spots on an opponent’s body. The martial artist always considers his target as he trains.

And so must the writer

The writer must be the same way. You must understand what you’re trying to do and what you hope to accomplish.

This goes beyond “I want to make a living with my writing” or “I want to publish my first (or tenth) novel by the end of the year.” It means if you’re writing for an audience of mystery fans, your novel should have some mystery in it. If you’re writing nonfiction, you need to know what your audience wants from your article or book. If your audience is young adults, you’ll use different language than you would for older adults.

If your audience is technically proficient in the subject matter, you’d probably use more jargon and define fewer concepts than if you were writing an introductory piece for people with no background in the subject matter.

In short, you must know your target to write effectively.

Here’s an exercise for you

For the next piece of writing you do, create a profile of your target.

To whom will you be writing? Don’t go with the vague, anonymous, “general adult reader.” What are their specific characteristics? Will your readers be men or women, adults or children? What are their ages? If they’re adults, are they married, single, divorced? Do they have children? What ages are their children? What are their interests and hobbies? Where will you find them?

This profile can be extremely difficult for beginning writers to envision, but since the target shapes your writing, it’s important to have clear, precise knowledge of the target.

Having created this profile, you can then use it as a guide to reaching the audience. You can use techniques that show the audience you know their problems and concerns and that you identify with them. If you’re writing a magazine article on health care, and you know that your target audience is married women with children, you can connect with them by mentioning your own husband and daughter and your concerns about their health.

Having this specific audience in mind also helps you write to them in a way they will find meaningful and accessible.

If you write for a living — or plan to — grab your copy of Dojo Wisdom for Writers, Second Edition. For more information on target audience, read “How to find your book’s target market” and “Finding your novel’s target market: 7 keys hidden in your story” on this blog.

Is it easy or hard for you to identify your book’s target audience?

Editor’s note: I’ve received so many requests for a copy of this article from the September 12, 2012

Our recent newsletter survey revealed that finding your book’s target audience is a big problem for many of you.

It is absolutely crucial that you know who is most likely to buy your book. It doesn’t matter how well-written it is if the people who should buy it don’t know about it. And for them to know about it, you have to know who they are and how to get in front of them.

Finding your target audience is often more challenging for fiction writers than it is for nonfiction writers because so many novelists write for the joy of it instead of writing for a specific market. I don’t know if that’s right or wrong from a creative perspective, but from a business view, if you want people to read what you write, you need to write with your audience in mind.

Here’s how fiction and nonfiction writers alike can zero in on who will buy their book.

What’s your book’s personality?

Marketing professionals often assign personalities to their brands because that helps them better understand and reach the consumer who will be attracted to that brand. The person who will buy a product that seems playful, for example, might not be the same person who is attracted to a brand with a more scholarly personality.

It works this way with books, too. Your first task, then, is to determine your book’s personality. Is it male or female? Humorous or serious? Edgy or conservative? Mysterious or straightforward? Sexy or not sexy? Shy or friendly?

Well, you get the point. If your book was a person, who would it be?

Create a persona for your audience

With your book’s personality in mind, figure out who would be attracted to it by asking yourself more questions. I really like those presented in my friend Jan Bear’s e-book, TARGET MARKETING FOR AUTHORS: How to Find and Captivate Your Book’s Target Audience. In her book, Bear uses these topics to guide us through the process:

• Demographics: What is your target audience’s gender, age, race or ethnicity, family structure, household income, employment, and education level?
• Geography: What is that person’s location, language spoken, dialect, and climate?
• Life cycle: What about lifestyle and life stage?
• Culture: What is your reader’s urban/rural/suburban/small town, work habits, religious observance, holidays and festivals, activities, recreation, entertainment, and volunteerism situation?
• Motivation: What are your target audience’s beliefs and desires?

Take the answers to those questions and use them to create an imaginary person – a persona – that represents your target audience. For nonfiction, certain specifics, such as profession or health issues, might be more important than gender or income level. Regardless, when you know whether the person who will like your book is married or divorced, in her 20s or his 40s, blue collar or white collar, Catholic or Jewish, and so on, it will be easier for you to find that person in both the real and virtual worlds.

The good news is that with so many people spending time online, it’s easier to connect with your book’s target audience – or audiences, in some cases – than it was pre-internet. This is especially important for e-books. It’s important to understand, though, that your audience might not be online. You won’t know that unless you take the time to create that persona for your book’s audience.

For more information on how to determine your book’s target audience, I highly recommend Bear’s book, TARGET MARKETING FOR AUTHORS: How to Find and Captivate Your Book’s Target Audience. It’s thorough, but not long, because it’s so focused on its topic.

(Photo by Racineur via Compfight)

What’s your take on this — is it important or not?  

Finding your novel’s target market: 7 keys hidden in your story

By Jan Bear

Finding the right target audience for your book can make the difference between bustling sales, excited readers, and a burgeoning writing career versus the loneliness, discouragement, and wasted effort of trying to sell your book to people who don’t want to buy it and never will. Here’s why:

• If you go the traditional publishing route, knowing the target market for your book helps you to talk like a savvy marketer to agents and publishers deciding whether to publish your book.
• If you know your target market, you can speak directly to the people who already want your book, saving time, energy, and money in wasted advertising.
• When you speak directly to your target market, you don’t even have to “sell.” You only have to let them know that your book exists, and they’ll be ready to buy it.

Planning for your novel’s target market

When you’re writing a book, you’ll want to consider your target market –

1. During the planning phase — to decide whether the effort will be worthwhile
2. During the execution — to shape the book to talk in the language of your target audience
3. After the book is published — to find and engage your ideal readers

For many novelists, though, it just isn’t practical to focus on a target market before the book is done. As useful as it is to plan ahead for the target market, the novel is so personal that they’re essentially writing at least the first draft for themselves.

Clues to your target audience

So let’s say you’ve got a novel in hand and you feel too close to it to find its target audience. Here are a few clues hiding in the pages of your book.

1. Genre: This might be the clearest path to your target market, especially if your book sits comfortably within a recognizable subgenre of one of the big categories: mystery, romance, science fiction, and fantasy. The audience for a cozy mystery is very different from the audience for a hardboiled detective story. If you’re writing within those conventions, some quick internet research will tell you all you need to know about your target audience.
2. Problem: Maybe one of your characters is dealing with a problem faced by real people: autism, cancer, schizophrenia, homelessness. Anything that has a foundation or nonprofit organization dedicated to it can be a source of sales for your novel. If you approach the problem with sensitivity and compassion in the context of your story, and especially if you offer help or inspiration in dealing with it, those organizations might sell your book to their members.
3. Setting: If your setting is a loving tribute to a real, recognizable place, the local color in your book can be a way to get the book into local newspapers (articles, not ads), book stores, gift shops and tourist attractions.
4. Milieu: Some books explore a specialized world within the setting, and people read the book as much for that world as for the plot. It might be a 12th-century Benedictine monastery or a Navajo reservation in 20th-century USA. Linda Kuhlmann, an independently published author I know, wrote a murder mystery that involved horse racing. She contacted her local horse racing arena for a book signing and sold out all the hardbacks she brought to the event. If you’ve written a book that involves some special field of interest, you may have a hook for a target market there.
5. Theme: Who would resonate with the life lesson your novel teaches? The answer may give you some good places to make contacts. For example, if your theme is that the simple things in life are the most important, you may be able to promote your book through the simple-living blogs. Or if it’s about the importance of family, you might find allies among the mommy- or daddy-bloggers.
6. Character: Getting the reader to identify with your protagonist is essential to telling a great story. Your protagonist might represent your target market. So if your protagonist is a college graduate trying to work her way out of a dead-end job, a similar person outside your book may turn out to be your ideal reader.
7. You, the Author: If you bring a specialized knowledge to your story or if you belong to some identifiable group, readers might like your book just because you wrote it. Are you a schoolteacher? A member of a tight-knit religious or social community? Part of the appeal of medical and legal thrillers is the writer-practitioners bringing their inside knowledge to an exciting story of what’s it’s “really” like. So think about your affiliations.

Speaking to your people

Writing for a specific target audience is as important for novelists as for anyone else who communicates. But novels offer a different set of target-marketing challenges compared to informational nonfiction.

You’ll be way ahead in your book’s success if you craft your target marketing through the whole process, from planning to selling. The clues I’ve given you might not all work for your book, and any one might not represent your whole audience. But if you look for opportunities in them, you might find that a simple tweak in your story or a new direction in your promotion can bring your target market into focus and help you sell more books.

Do you struggle to find your book’s target audience? Tell us why.