Selling Your Book

So you’ve finished writing your science fiction novel and now you’re ready to release it to the world. The good news is that for the most part, it’s an end to long hours spent checking for problems with grammar, spelling, continuity, plot holes, POV, and the like.

The bad news is that the REAL work is just starting.

For your book to be anything more than a vanity project, you’ll need to attract a specific type of reader who likes books like yours and sell the book to them. Not to put too fine an edge on it, but attracting readers and selling the book are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS: specifically, marketing and sales.

Sales vs Marketing

Don’t confuse the two. If you do not market your book, it will not sell. If you market your book but make no effort to enable people to buy it, it will not sell.

Despite popular opinion to the contrary, marketing is the art and science of determining who your ideal audience is and how to communicate your book’s value most effectively to them. Sales, on the other hand, is about nurturing that curiosity, making it easy to answer any questions preventing your prospective reader from buying, and then getting out of the way.

Marketing your book involves answering these questions:

• Who’s my typical reader and what interests them the most?
• Where do I find my ideal reader?
• How can my ideal readers tell if my book is right for them?
• What provokes additional curiosity about my book?
• What are the best ways to tell those people I have a book?

Selling your book involves providing solid answers to a different set of questions posed by readers:

• How can I find out more about the author and other books (s)he’s written?
• Beyond genre/subgenre, what’s the story basically about?
• What do other people say about the author and his/her books?
• How can I get the book?
• How much does it cost?
• What are the reasons I might NOT want to buy the book?

Let’s dive into each of those in detail.

Marketing

Who’s my typical reader?

The best way to answer this question is to start with the genre or subgenre. Within Science Fiction alone there are close to sixty defined subgenres, and not all subgenre compilations agree. Here are a few of the more comprehensive and self-consistent lists:

https://bookriot.com/science-fiction-subgenre-primer/

http://www.worldswithoutend.com/resources_sub-genres.asp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Science_fiction_genres

But let’s say for sake of argument that your book is the tale of a handful of individuals, each with different backstories, struggling to adapt to the dystopian future thrust upon them suddenly after a terrorist nuclear attack levels most of the major metropolitan centers in the U.S.—a theme dealt with admirably by the Netflix series Jericho.

Who reads (or watches, or listens to) that kind of stuff?

When I let that thought roll around in my brain, I come up with:

• People who liked Terminator 2
• People who like stories of self-reliance and grit
• People who like dystopian fiction
• People who like hard-science, near-term, it-could-really-happen stories
• People who like political thrillers with shadowy agencies and forces acting against each other

The list could go on, of course, but the idea is to translate the vague notion of who reads your book into information you can use to find those people. That means the subjects they search for, the topics they’re interested in, the products they buy, and so on. Having that information makes it easier to target them in your advertising.

Other options are to manually poke around in places you think you’ll find your audience, or to connect up with people who know your audiences well—typically book publishers, reviewers, publicists, editors, and the like.

If you’re not sure who your audience is and what else they like, find a few friends who enjoy that sort of story and ask them what else they like to read and why. If you don’t have an audience like that at your disposal, look for groups that contain people like them on social (we’ll get to search terms and hashtags later). If you can’t get such a list, talk to a book agent or publicist and ask them about such audiences. Worst case, pay an agency to get together a focus group or just knock heads amongst their staff about who would buy a book like yours and what’s going on in their heads.

Your target audience is NOT the entire world or even everyone who reads science fiction. The more you focus on the specific people who like stories like yours, the less it will cost to market your book, and the better your sell-through rate will be.

Where do I find my ideal reader?

If you understand your ideal reader and their likes, dislikes, and affinities, what social media groups they belong to, and so on, the more you will have defined what marketers call an “affinity audience.” An affinity audience is a set of interests and demographics who are more likely to become your customer/reader than the general public.

Marketers target affinity audiences with a tailored message carefully designed to nurture a likely interest in a specific set of products or services—in this case, your book.

Let’s go back to our profile of the typical reader of your dystopian SF book. We already know they like self-reliant, survive-against-all-odds heroes, dying earth and apocalyptic themes in fiction, and so on.

One way to find where those readers are is to go to a social media site like Facebook and search for “apocalyptic fiction.” I just did that and a number of groups popped up where one might reasonably cultivate interest in such a book.

Keep in mind that most FB groups don’t appreciate folks joining just to pitch something and if you do that you could get banned from the group pretty quickly. But joining the groups is a start. Once you do, FB can connect you to similar interests, sites, and feeds that will help you tap into interest themes related to your novel. In the meantime, hang out and get to know your potential readers as well as you can.

Another thing you can do is to use Facebook Ad Manager to pull up a list of predefined affinity audiences. All you have to do is pretend you’re running an ad, and when it asks what aligned interests you want to target, start typing obvious terms like “apocalyptic” and audiences will pop up. Even if you don’t run ads (and this should NOT be the first thing you do!), you’ll be smarter.

Your ideal audience might also be searching for YOU, and it pays to understand the search terms they are likely to use. If you’re already using a tool like Google Ads (it’s free until you actually run ads), you can create a mock-up ad and enter a few keywords you think might be used in searches by your readers. Google will suggest related keywords and pretty soon, you’ll have a rich set of ideas for what people who like books like yours search on.

At this point, you know both your affinity audiences and the search terms they probably use to find books like yours.

You’ll want to target a message that appeals to that audience, using the words they would use to find you.

Next, you need to think about where they’ll find you and what that experience will be like. Will it reinforce the idea that your book is a good choice? Confuse them? Fail to answer questions that keep them from buying? Or just flat turn them off?

It’s super-important that you have a professionally produced website for both you as an author and for your book(s). The same goes for your author and book info on Amazon, your social media profiles (don’t forget LinkedIn!), and so on. Your site’s copy should contain search terms likely to be used by people looking for a book like yours. The copy you use to describe you and your book should clearly identify what sort of reader it’s best suited—that usually starts with the genre and subgenre—and tease a little about your book while managing to drop a few search terms here and there that increase findability.

That’s why your blurb can’t just be something like: “When James and his alien friend Smerloff escape the hands of the Growlethian pirates, they find themselves hopping from the frying pan into the fire.”

Nobody searches on that stuff.

It’s better to say, “In his galaxy-romping, comedic sci-fi pulp send-up, author Dinky Wojchek puts his protagonist, Detective James Spiff, in yet another impossible situation: tracking down a terrorist cell that contains his own mother.”

If I’m looking for a serious hard-SF take on global power conspiracies, I’ll know that books by Dinky Wojchek are not for me. And that’s a good thing! When the people who see your book’s info area ALREADY just the folks who like that sort of thing, they’re what are called “qualified” prospects, and qualifying prospects means getting rid of the folks who just won’t be happy when they pick up a Dinky Wojcheck book. Don’t try talking them into it. It won’t work.

What about other places, like conventions, bookstores, etc.?

Well, you might somehow find an audience like yours at ComicCon, movie-related conventions, or some other SF geek hangout; but to be honest, depending on your genre, it’s not going to get you very far. Unlike the situation with paid ads, you don’t already have an affinity audience or any evidence of purchase intent, so you’re basically looking at junk mail conversion rates on your book sales.

How can my ideal readers tell if my book is right for them?

Whether it’s paperback or Kindle, it doesn’t matter—when purchasing fiction, your typical reader looks at just a small number of things before deciding whether to CONSIDER buying your book:

• The cover art: The main purpose of the cover is to give the reader a visually arresting sense of the mood and theme of the book. If your novel is a dark exploration of how the vast loneliness of space echoes the voids of the human soul, the cover should transmit that feeling to your audience. If it’s all about the space battles, then show some ships firing at each other. If it’s trippy and mind-expanding, it should at least suggest some of those themes. Extra points if you can include some of the story elements on the cover because that helps draw the reader in.
• The title: In most cases, your title needs to be readable from a medium distance. If it’s a very quiet type of book, sometimes you can get away with a softer, more delicate font. It all depends on the “feel” you’re trying to create. You don’t want a bold 1960s neo-Russian typeface on a book about fairies and elves—unless the elves and fairies are the descendants of an advanced technological civilization that’s rekindling the space race after a thousand-year slumber.
• The blurb: Your blurb MUST make it clear who the book is for and why it’s worth buying instead of flipping the first few pages and walking away. That means you need to combine a little bit of search terms, genre-subgenre, log line (those are the short descriptions of TV shows and episodes you see on your TV’s browser), and elements of what would have been your pitch letter if you had gone the traditional publisher route.
• The author bio: If you’re written other books, mention them here. If you’re writing hard SF and have a technical background, mention it here. If your life story includes anything weird or interesting enough that you’d mention it at a party, mention it here.
• The reviews: If you’ve had the chance to get an influencer or other important person to review your book, be sure to include reviews on your cover. If you’ve already published your book using CreateSpace or a similar tool, take a look at any reviews people have written online. Update your cover and front matter to include those reviews.
• Other books by this author: If you’ve written anything else, don’t forget to include it in the front matter for your book. It’ll help sell it.

One last thing: each one of these has to carry its own weight in selling your book, so don’t just take a flying swipe at any of them and move on, and if you don’t do that sort of thing for a living, please don’t choose now as the time to learn.  Hopefully, once you’ve written your book, you’ve hired a professional to help get those together before you start pitching your book.

Keep in mind that marketing your book is just about getting the message right. But what happens when people who actually want to read it show up on Amazon, your website, or other places where you're promoting your book?

That's sales, and we'll talk about that in a different segment.

(continued next week in Part 2 of Selling your Book)