Finding Your Audience

From all corners of the industry, I keep hearing that the Internet is the way of the future, and that the future of publishing is in ebooks. Everyone warns that they’re not a phase, and we’d better get around to accepting them. To which I say: I joined Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2009, and have been reading books online since I was in college. This stuff isn’t the future—it’s now.

Where to go from here?

As Seth Godin said, “The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you’ll need later.”

It all begins with your willing commitment: how much free time do you have each week? How much of that precious time can you spend building your platform?

The number one cause of blog deaths is an overly-aggressive editorial calendar. Wherever you start participating on the Internet (as an avid commenter, tweeting, facebooking, or blogging) will be your base level, and your audience’s expectations will grow from there. So if your first blog post is a well-researched 1,500 words on a recent advancement in your field, illustrated by a flowchart you spent ten hours putting together—you’d better have something comparable for tomorrow. And the next day. (And the following 778 days, if you’re going to be building your platform for three years… do you see where I’m going with this?) Or maybe you’ve just set up an account on twitter, and you’re JUST SO EXCITED that you tweet 37 times before dinner. Any followers that join your high-energy conversation will be waiting for you tomorrow, ready to unfollow at the first sign of tweet lag.

While these efforts are not going to appear between the covers of your book, they are just as important as the efforts spent writing. One of the first few questions from any agent or publisher who is interested in investing in your book will be “who can you reach?” or “what are your plans for marketing and promoting your book?” Having something to show (cold hard numbers) can be the difference between gaining their support or not.

How could anyone join in and actually be heard?

The best way to begin building your Internet presence is to start following what is already happening. There are some agents (Nathan Bransford, Janet Reid) with extensive blog archives that stretch into many aspects of the writing industry. There are some writers (Tawna Fenske, Heather Armstrong) who share daily anecdotes; simply by providing consistent, insightful writing, they are promoting their books every day.

There are some big publishing sites (Publishers Weekly, Galley Cat) that will clue you in to the larger-scale, million dollar happenings. Spend a week or two reading these sites (and others—each of these sites often link out or have blog rolls) and you will get a much clearer picture of what the Internet expects from an author. 

Your publisher is online, your agent is online, your bookstore is online, and your readers are online. What are you waiting for?

The Internet and beyond.

Examine the people you know to already be within your target audience. How do they communicate? Where do they find their information, and how do they learn about new books? In addition to building an online campaign, you should be pounding the pavement to explore niche audiences in your area:

• If you are writing a religious text, seek out the places of worship in your town. Inquire about their newsletters, community message boards, or mailing lists.
• If you are writing a cookbook for the organic “locavore” crowd, consider visiting the farmer’s markets in your state to hand out recipe cards, offer tips, and invite people to your cooking events
• If you are writing a YA book about racism, consider contacting local guidance counselors or an education center in your town. 
• If you don’t have an industry or a center devoted to your subject or genre, check out advertising opportunities at community centers. Privately-owned bookstores and neighborhood libraries are usually quite supportive of local writers. If you can break into the book club network, consider offering to visit, sign books, and answer questions about your writing process.

Once you have your book in hand, whether self- or commercially published, tap the conference network of your subject. Don’t have a niche industry? See if you can speak about your writing process.

While you are exploring the physical opportunities to increase your audience, search blog directories like Delightful Blogs Directory or Google’s behemoth Blog Search. Research the content, the replies, and the networks that exist between users, and approach bloggers for the opportunity to write guest posts. Maybe you will have a place for those extra scenes, after all.