Find Your Audience!!!

Marketing as an Author, especially an Indie-Author

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

You get bombarded with all kinds of advice when you're a writer. Much of it is advice that other writers want to sell to you. Some of this is good advice that teaches you what you need to know. But I’ve found that there are equal amounts of advice that we could all do without, or the advice is so vague that it doesn’t help…at…all.

For instance, one of the things everybody tells us as writers is to…

Find your audience.

It’s very important to find your audience. Don’t talk to the wrong people. Don’t waste your time. You need to know your audience or find your audience.

Also, other than through advertising, how do you reach folks that would like to read your book?

• Go into groups where people like your niche genre? But then they’ll be annoyed that you were recommending your own book. How selfish of you. Recommend other people’s books all day long, but not yours.
• Find folks to FRIEND on social media that are your audience? However, if Amazon/Kindle finds a friend has reviewed your book, they will refuse to allow it, even though they really are a fan of your writing. So we have to be careful of that.
• Try to find readers of your niche genre through co-oping with other authors on some newsletters or cross-promotion? Maybe. But often, the readers focus only on their favorite writer’s words and updates and not on your offer.
• Put out an all-call with as many hashtags as possible to get the attention of as many readers as possible? You can. But when I’ve done this, I’ve gotten very little response.

Many people who read books don’t realize how much time, work, and money goes into publishing a book. Especially for those of us who are indie authors trying to make our books good enough to compete with traditionally published books — or hopefully, our quality surpasses traditional.

Think about everything we’ve already put into this endeavor:

We’ve possibly been through college or taken classes to help us with our craft. We’ve often put years of effort into honing our skills and writing a book. Then we have readers look over it, and editors…