Julie Broad walks through five tools authors can use to understand their readers: Soovl for autocomplete suggestions, AnswerThePublic for visualized search questions, QuestionsDB for topic generation, Quora for reader questions and influencers, and Goodreads/Amazon reviews to spot gaps and reader language. Use them to shape chapter topics, hooks, and marketing language.
Chapters
I just finished reading Ryan Holiday's perennial seller and he says you can't afford to wait until after it's finished to figure out who what you're making is for. Why? Because too often the answer turns out to be no one. Well, he's a man after my own heart as we constantly talk about how you need to figure out who your reader is and how you're going to help them. But maybe you're struggling to figure out how do you get to know your reader and you want to do some research to learn about them. Well, if you want to uncover some research tools that will help you find out more about your reader, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, a full service self publishing services firm and we also have a couple of courses to help you. One is our self Publish and Succeed Live, which is a 12 week course to help you write a book that will sell. And one of the big pieces of writing a book that will sell is knowing who your reader is. And your reader is not everyone. It's not people who need hope and it's not people who need inspiration. So who is your reader? Well, if you're struggling to know your reader intimately, then there are some really great tools that I'm about to share with you. The first one is called Sooval. What is Sooval? Well, it's a customizable engine that provides the suggestion services from all the major search providers in one place. So let's say you're Rachel Brown and you're working on your book for Fork's A Quick Guide to Healing Yourself and the Planet through a Plant Based Diet. Can we just take a moment to admire this cover? By the way, high five to my team at Book Launchers. But and to Rachel for her great choices. But anyway, let's say you're much earlier in the process than she is and you don't yet know who your reader is. Well, you might head to Suval and type in plant based eating to see what is getting searched and what the results are at a bunch of different places. See how cool this is? You're seeing results from answers. YouTube, Bing, Amazon, Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia all on one page. You can see what is being searched, which tells you a lot and gives you considerations for what you must address regarding your subject. But also when you click through, you can see headlines and common threads. This is where you can start to understand the challenges, the opportunities and the ideas that are already on your reader's mind. If you're early in the process. This can be a great way to brainstorm chapter topics or ideas that you need to cover. You might even uncover a hook idea for marketing or your entire book when you look at what people are saying and searching for. So SOOVL is a good broad reach tool to start to get more connected to the topic from a potential reader's perspective. You can also make a note of the books that show up in the searches as well, because knowing these books will help you later on when you use another tool. I like to use Next tool Questions DB okay, so I like this one for video ideas. Personally, if you want videos on some of the topics you're about to see, well make sure you've subscribed to the channel and turn notifications on so you get notified when I post the new videos. Because I got two video ideas from this search right here, but head in here and type some topics. I started with book writing but what came up was too general so I refined it and put in nonfiction book writing and it got closer to home. You can play with this and come up with again chapters, articles, videos and and ultimately use the wording to get in the head of your reader. Now this isn't as granular as what we will do when we hit up tool four and five, but it's a nice place to do some general research. Next up, Answer the Public Hat tip to the team at IngramSpark for sharing this one with me and our clients in a client only training. I didn't know about this one and it's super cool and can be tailored by country. Answer the Public is a keyword tool that visualizes search questions and suggested autocomplete searches in an image called a search cloud. It has paid tools, but you can get some cool info from the free version as you can see here. So let's say you're Michael Curry, author of Landlord by Design, and you want to get some ideas on what people are looking for answers to as you're doing your book marketing, you already know who your reader is, but you want to meet them where they are right now to get them to see your book as the solution. So type in Real Estate Investing into the box here with Canada selected for your country because that's where he lives now. You can see things like why real estate investing is a bad idea or Real estate investing is hard and there might be other topics that immediately sound like a great article, video or media topic. And there's this handy little feature here. Download CSV so you can download these ideas and create a plan for yourself. Of course I am saying this works great for marketing ideas post launch for Michael, but if you're early on, that's the best time to be thinking about marketing and building that into your book. Nothing like a chapter title that addresses something your reader is thinking or asking right now. Okay, next tool Quora. I've shared this one before, but it's one that I use quite often, especially when I need new ideas or I just want to see what people are thinking about certain topics. So let's say you're Jenna Worthen and you're in the early days of working on your book that will eventually launch as mom who Works the tools to refine what it means to be a working mom in a world without working dads. Anyway, let's say you're Jenna, but you're early in the process and you want to make sure you're connecting with all the feelings and struggles of your reader. You can go into Quora and search for mom who Works or Working mom and see what comes up. When you do that, you start to see themes and questions people are asking. What I love to do is dive into the answers of the questions and see what resources are mentioned, what books, influencers and other ideas that are mentioned and use those things to guide my writing and ideas. Last but not least, my tool for getting to know readers is to read book reviews on Goodreads or Amazon. For the books that I think my book is going to compete with or that my book is similar to, but I want to be positioned differently, that's where that first search with all the books listed might be really handy. I I like to read reviews of books to find those nuggets of I wish this book addressed this or this book was really for the person who I'm not at that point. So this book didn't address my needs. But here's what it said. If there's multiple reviews saying the same thing, there might be a real opportunity for you to find a little gap that you can fill. It might feel like you've struck gold when you find a lot of reviews that say this was practical, but it didn't address the fact that it's really emotional to go through this, or they didn't talk about how the family will react when you do this. Those are nuggets of opportunity for your book and an area where your reader will go, yes, someone who finally is addressing this piece. Ultimately, that's what you want. You want to know the language your reader is using so you can use it too. You want to know what your reader is thinking so they feel like you just made this book just for them and you absolutely need to know where the gaps are in the content that is out there so you can wedge a place for you and your book in that gap and and dominate that space for your success and reader's impact. What's your favorite research tool? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released you get entered to win some sweet noboringbook swag. Now that you know how to connect a little more to your reader, maybe you need a little kick to get that book finished. This video on the five tips to finish writing your book might be just the thing you need. If not, YouTube believes this video right here is what you need. Either way click on over because I'm waiting for you and I don't want you to leave me hanging there. Do you.
