Before you get too far in writing, it is a good idea to identify your Target Reader. That’s the person (singular) you have in mind when telling your story. It’s always easier to picture one individual as your reader…and you can just sit down and tell them what you want to tell the whole world. That’s what you write…just as if you were face to face with them…keep it casual and don’t try to impress them with your vocabulary. For the first few stories I wrote down, I pictured my kids. Of course, those stories started off as bedtime stories to those kids, so it was easy to keep them in mind as I put it all down on paper.
Who is Your Target Market?
There are a LOT of people out there…and some of them don’t care to read what you’ve written, but there’s a fragment of them that would dearly love to read your stuff…so how do you find them? In the marketing world, a differentiation is made between a Target Market and a Target Audience. I’ll try to explain the difference…and why it’s important.
Your Target Market are folks who might be interested in your product (your book). They tend to share attributes that you can identify: age, location, interests, available time, etc. If you’ve written a book about the origins of the street names in Sacramento, then you’d be aiming for 40-60 year olds, living in or around Sacramento, with an interest in history, who have plenty of spare time to go exploring the city. On the other hand, if you’ve written a Sci-Fi adventure book, your market would include 15-30 year olds, living anywhere in the US, who find escape in reading, and have time during a commute to read a chapter a day.
You probably are included in your own Target Market…because you’re writing what you like to read, right?
Who is Your Target Audience?
Your Target Audience are the folks that you can send your message to. You couldn’t possibly tell all the folks in your Target Market about your book…you only have so many resources. Most first-time authors (especially self-published ones) are likely to do their own marketing, so they have to use the methods available to them. (Yes, you could hire a company to blanket the world, but could you really afford it at this point? And what would the payoff be?)
Using social networking to share info about your book is a typical approach. You could even set up an author page (besides your personal page) to focus your efforts. Other ideas include bookmarks or info cards that you could drop off at local libraries or bookstores. If you manage to join in a multi-author book signing or have a big release party for you book, you might want to invest in a full-sized poster to stand next to your table.
Any way you get the message out will help with sales.
The Overlap
Those sales come from the overlap between your Market and your Audience. When you send out your adverts, you’ll be aiming for your Audience, but there will be some folks in your Market who won’t get the message…and there will be others, in your Audience, who will get your message but aren’t in your Market. Your objective is to widen your Audience enough to encompass as much of your Market as you can.
Analysing your Market and your Audience may be tough, but once you start getting sales, you can check to see how accurate your predictions are…and adjusting either could result in more sales…always a good thing!