Target Marketing for Authors
Updated: Nov 30, 2020
Book marketing is hard work. It can be a strain on your budget of time or money or both. It takes you away from writing the next book. Many authors find the need to go out and constantly sell, sell, sell to be embarrassing and dispiriting.
It doesn’t have to be that way if you find the right audience.
Let’s face it. Some people are never going to want your book. It’s nothing personal. There’s never been a book in the history of the world that everyone wanted.
What happens, then, if you give yourself permission not to sell to those people who don’t want it and instead focus on the people who do?
You don’t have to “sell” your book. You just tell them about it, and they want to buy it.
You get to stop annoying people with a constant and pathetic refrain of “Buy my book. Please buy my book.”
You get the encouragement of talking to people who are grateful that you wrote it.
You sell more copies, more easily, at less expense.
Target marketing doesn’t replace the basics of a well-written, professionally edited and designed book. But it is the key to communicating your message in the right way to the right people, who are already in your audience, but just don’t know it yet.
What Others Say about Target Marketing for Authors
I’ve known Jan for years. She’s one of the smartest and most analytical writers I know. This is must-read stuff for writers who are looking to build an effective platform. Which we must if we’re serious about selling what we write.
-Larry Brooks, Storyfix.com
Understanding your target market is essential. It’s the starting point. If you don’t know who is most likely to buy your book, you are really going to struggle to market your book. And to sell it, you’re going to have to market it.
-Sandra Beckwith, BuildBookBuzz.com
It’s absolutely critical [for an author to know the target market of a book]. No book is for everyone, and few authors have the resources to go out and market to the world in general. So you have to focus on the niches that the book was designed to serve. But I think it’s also important to remember that most books have multiple target markets.
-Dana Lynn Smith, SavvyBookMarketer.com
I have done a lot of writing and speaking on book promotion and identifying your target audience. I found this book interesting, refreshing, and certainly highly useful to authors who want to understand more about book marketing and want to sell more books.
-Patricia Fry, Small Publishers, Artists and Writers Network
