I'm not going to talk about the obvious demographics or genres etc. Sometimes when defining out audience we need to look a little closer to home. The question is are we ignoring our local roots?
We all live somewhere. I am Welsh. Wales is a small country. Washington State is almost nine times larger in terms of land mass. The Welsh Valleys where I live is almost a small country within a country.
People are proud of where they live and will most often want to support local writers and artists. Local newspapers have frequently run stories and featured my latest books or venture. This is invaluable free publicity. My local library is also very supportive and happily displayed posters I ran off my printer publicising my books. My latest novel 'Jack's High' is set around a bowls club. I play bowls myself and the local indoor bowls club also allowed me to display posters on their notice boards. I also created a website called Tales From Wales to emphasize the Welsh dimension.
See www.talesfromwales.net
Radio stations are another potential outlet. Maybe some actually run features on books and are actively looking for local authors. This happened to me. I simply emailed a local radio station and ended up spending an hour on national radio talking about my books to a national celebrity. If you don't ask you don't get.
Is there a niche embraced by your book that you could target? This can be an effective way of getting your book 'out there'. The obvious route for me was to target bowls clubs around the world by email and alert them to the fact that a new book related to bowls is available. This can be time consuming but worthwhile. You only need to create a generic message and simply change the name of the person or club you send it too. This once led to one of my books being given a staged reading in Manhattan during Christmas 2012. Google is an invaluable search tool!
Hopefully I have given you a few useful tips to kick start your book promotion.
Over the next few weeks we will continue to explore how to create a Facebook Page for your books and make it somewhere potential readers will want to return to.
I created one for Jack's High. Take a look and if you like it then please LIKE it.
Jack's High Facebook Page
We will consider the use of videos on your Facebook Pages in future posts.
Here are the posts so far:
How and Why Authors Should Create a Facebook Fan Page
Authors - Are You Unleashing The Amazing Pulling Power of Facebook Pages?
How To Add Custom Content To Your Facebook Fan Pages
No comments:
Post a Comment