Finding Your Readers

Selling books is, in the beginning, about building buzz for your book. Later on, as your book builds momentum, you won't have to work so hard to tell everyone about it. In the early stages, though, you need to get that elbow grease (or the scroll-y ball in your mouse) working for you.

Building buzz for you book means building up a network of people who are interested in you, your topic, and finally your book.

This is true for fiction and nonfiction.

It's more obvious with nonfiction because your book is specifically about a topic we can point to: bridges, bottles, sales, education, etc.

With fiction it's about the themes of your book.

Let's say your book is about keeping cockatiels as pets. Where do you begin finding people who might want to buy your book?

The easiest place to begin is online. It's fast, it's inexpensive, it never closes, and it doesn't require assembling people in a physical room at a particular time.

Using online opportunities like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter is the best way to find people who are talking about cockatiels.

You can do this by simple keyword searches: on Google, you can search cockatiels (and specify to only search blogs if you want), on Facebook you can search specifically for groups to join, and on Twitter, you can search at search.twitter.com for the phrase cockatiels.

As you find virtual sites that talk about cockatiels, begin joining in those conversations. As you grow relationships there, you can begin to say things like,

"in my book that I am just finishing, I talk about certain feeds that have shown to cause kidney trouble with them. I'd say, my advice, is to stick to low-fat seed-based diets."

Does it say to read your book? Nope. Is your book out yet? Nope. Did you offer valuable information to people who may in the future want to read your pending book and establish trust with them? You betcha! Did you leave room for more questions like, What kind of feeds can cause kidney trouble? Aha! Yes, you did, you wily commenter!

With all of these networking forays you want to establish certain things.

• you are not ONLY trying to sell them something
  
• you DO have something you might want to sell them
  
• you HAVE the information they are interested in
  
• you ARE TRUSTWORTHY and HELPFUL
  
• you ARE AN AVAILABLE RESOURCE that has MORE TO SAY
  

There is nothing more irritating to a blogger, groups on Facebook, or those following you on Twitter than to be deluged with comments that are only aimed at selling something. You'll be blocked, unfriended, and removed from comments with a swift kick as a spammer.

So how do you go about selling them your book? You provide a link to your website or blog that has lots of information available on it about cockatiels. And there just happens to be a link on that website or blog about your book coming out soon. And you can even write stuff on that website or blog where you mention your personal excitement about your upcoming book release.

This accomplishes a few things:

• establishes that you are an information source freely available
  
• gives readers a chance to experience your writing style
  
• gives readers a chance to be converted into book buyers without the hard sell
  
• makes them feel like you are a cohort or friend
  

In the end you want to establish a report with interested communities that are using the web to discuss the topics you've written about. They will be a key ingredient to spreading the word about what you've said, your writings, and most importantly, your book when it happens to be for sale!

After the Blog

You've set up your blog, you've put up a post or two. Now what?

How do you find people to read your blog? And just as importantly, how do you find other blogs to read to help you generate traffic?

There are several ways. One is by hunting Google and blog rolls on other blogs.

Finding Blogs

Google has a drop-down menu of alternative search options. Instead of simply Googling, "spy fiction" and getting the millions of links that will come up, you can specify "blogs" and it will only show you blogs that contain your search phrase.

Another way you can look for blogs to read and comment on is by looking at blogrolls. A blogroll is a list of links on the side the author of the blog page you're on has added as favorites of theirs. As you develop your own blog, you'll want to add to your own blogroll. It is a simple way to provide other readers links to information that you yourself enjoy and it is a great way to find other blogs you may like from other people's pages.

Another way to find blog is to find a retail or organizational site that is involved with the topic of your book. More and more these days, these sites will also include a blog tab somewhere on the home page. This is another place to find like-minded readers as well.

Most comment sections of blogs make the commenters fill in a registry. As part of the registry there is usually a place to read the person's bio and find their blog or website as well.

By clicking those links, you can travel to new blogs and new places to leave comments and thus find a new slew of blogs to read and virtual friends.

How do you keep track of it all?
There are different ways to monitor your blog reading. You can simply bookmark them in your browser favorites, but that can get unwieldy and it doesn't let you know when there are new posts.

Most blogs take advantage of RSS feeds.

An RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication) is something you can subscribe to on a blog. The logo looks like this most often:


This will appear either along your browser bar or where you decide your feeds should go.

One way to collect all your RSS feeds and other Web feeds is to use a reader like Google Reader.
This is an easy way to see all of the posts to all of the blogs when they are put up. You can even add blogs to this that don't have feeds by adding the URL link to the reader's memory! Also, it's free when you sign up for a free Google account.

Just remember, to drive traffic to your own blog, it helps to read and comment on others. How many times has a stranger commented on your blog, you clicked on their name, and ended up at another blog? It's a great way to navigate your interests and a wonderful way to find other people that want to share and talk about the same things you do...including your next book!

Twitter: You Have an Account, Now What?

You've figured out how to tweet. You've found some people to follow. And maybe, if you are interesting, they'll follow you back.

How on Earth are you supposed to want to sit at your desk always refreshing your browser window to see the updated tweets?

It isn't fun. I went looking for some other solutions. And looking through the pages on Google, there are a lot of options.

This particular blog offers a great synopsis of several options of applications to choose from to better use Twitter.

I personally prefer Twhirl. A free downloadable app, it puts the tweets in a feeder form so that the most recent one is on top and as tweets come in, it automatically refreshes the feed. I have mine set to refresh every 30 seconds. It floats on my desktop instead of having a cumbersome browser window open. I also like that I can change the color scheme to separate out my direct messages, my @replies and my basic feed.



After exploring a bit more (there really aren't viable manuals for most of these things that I know of. You just click the button and hope for success!) I found that I could click on a Twitter ID and decide to follow (or remove) them, see their feeds, reply to them and some other handy buttons.

Another that I am poking around at is TweetDeck. Some may prefer the wider layout and the column style separations of @replies, tweets, and direct messages.



Frankly it gives me a headache.

For anything you might want to do, there is a way on Twitter. You just have to investigate.

For example, I didn't understand "hashtags" which look like this: #

What these do is allow twitter users to find others talking about a topic. They act like a search marker for twitter users. So, for example, if I wanted to talk to a group of twitter friends about my love of the movie "Legally Blonde," I could put a tweet up that looked like this:

WheatmarkBooks: Hey, anybody want to talk about #legallyblonde?

And anyone who wanted to would add the #legallyblond in their response. I could then search on search.twitter.com for people who have used that "hashtag" to follow the conversation.

The response might look like this:

@KatMeyer: ZOMG! I love #legallyblonde.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Twitter has a wide variety of uses that can go from simply reaching out to others, to defining entire "cults" as our author, Michael Druxman, put it.

Keep at it and if you have questions, you can DM me at Twitter ID WheatmarkBooks.

Thoughts on Social Networking

"Think of it like a giant cocktail party."

Over at the BookSquare Blog, the brilliant Kassia Krozer has written a wonderful post about social media and social networking that not only does an excellent job of explaining what socia media and social networking are, but why they are so important for book marketing.

As Kassia so eloquently puts it,

Social networking means that the book club is online — and the participants range from people who’ve read the books, people who want to read the books, people just passing through the conversation, people who sell books, people who sell books to people to sell books, and, yes, people who acquire, edit, market, and distribute books.

I urge you to read her post, and also to sign up for information about her upcoming BookSquare University - designed to help authors build relationships on Facebook, and which Kassia describes as "a gentle introduction to social media for non-technical authors."

Happy Book Marketing!