How to Find Readers to Buy Your Book

Hello there. Thanks everybody for joining in. My name is Shane. I am streaming live out of Boise, Idaho, otherwise known as the Gem State. It's not all potatoes out here. We have lots of great gems and mountains and all sorts of other cool stuff out here. But today I'm going to be talking about how to find readers who are ready and willing to buy your book. Obviously this is a pretty hot topic when it comes to, you know, authors, non fiction authors in particular. It's hard to find readers who are how to get in front of the right type of readers. So you can get more sales, you can get more reviews for your Amazon page, you can grow your platforms, expand your reach, all of that stuff. So what I'm going to do is go through kind of like a framework today of what you should do starting out or if you've already kind of been in the weeds with this for a while, I'm going to explain what you should be doing to get in front of the right readers and ensure that when those readers find you, they know what to do. So, yeah, anybody who's tuning in, drop in the comments where you're tuning in from and if you have any questions about selling your books about digital marketing with any part of digital marketing, any part of marketing your book. I'm the head of digital strategy at Book Launcher, so I handle all of our clients, websites, Amazon advertising, email funnels, online courses, all of those pieces. So if you have any questions related to that, I'd be happy to do a Q and A at the end. But yeah, let's dive in and I will talk about how to get in front of those readers and then at the end show you a tool that you can use to actually implement all of these. So say what's up in the chat? And I'll check on some questions a little bit later. So let's talk about finding these readers who are interested in buying your book. Most books out there, most authors, most businesses, they fail not because the book is bad or not because of the overall quality of the book. You can write the best book and nobody will read it. It's not about that. It's about, you know, never finding the right readers for your book. And it's pretty common that people think marketing is just about shouting. The loudest is just putting the most messages out there. Quantity is better than quality. You know, just getting it out there, like showcasing everybody everywhere that, you know, my book is for everybody. This is, you know, I gotta get it out there. But it's really all about speaking directly to the people who already want, you know, what you have. There's plenty of options out there. Everyone's got alternatives to everything. But you need to find and get in front of the people who are already interested in your book. So today, yeah, I'm just going to show you some practical tips and just explain kind of what I would start with in order to. So the first thing I would start with is understand who that ideal reader is. Who is the person who already wants what you have? What are their demographics? What is their age range? Are they male, female? Are they. What kind of hobbies are they interested in? You know, where do they live? Is there a geographical area where this, where your book might be more applicable towards? Is there like an age range of people? Like, what are they doing in this? Are they in school still? Are they in college? Are they retired? Consider, like, who these people are. What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve in their current stage of life? Or more importantly, like, what are their struggles? What are the problems that they're having and how can you help solve them? How can reading your book help these people get to their goals faster? Like, without knowing this information, you're kind of just throwing stuff at a wall and hoping that it sticks. You know, you want to understand who your ideal reader is first before you do all the effort to promote and do the outreach for your book so that you are being very targeted and intentional with what your marketing is. Then the next part is, once you understand who these readers are, is you want to meet them where they are, go to where they listen to podcasts, what influencers do they follow, who is a leader in the space already that you can tap into their audiences, you know, collaborate with them on social media, even just comment on their posts and recommend to other commenters like, that, you know, your book is a better option or your book is, you know, also talks about this, or just contribute positively to conversations being had online. So figure out what influencers your ideal readers are following. Figure out what podcasts are listening to TV shows and radio as well. Like, I'm just kind of trying to get at anywhere where there's already an audience. How can you tap into that audience in a positive way to showcase your book, showcase who you are and why you're here, why you're passionate about what you do about your book itself, and you can even reach out to libraries and bookstores as well. How can you place your book into a physical store and make it stand out amongst the others and make people who are your ideal reader base be interested in and buying it from there. The next part would be positioning on Amazon. So Amazon's obviously the world's largest bookstore and search engine for books. That's where people go to buy stuff. So, and usually exposure on there comes down to like, what keywords and categories you place your book into. And you want to obviously make sure that you put relevant keywords and place your book into those relevant categories for your book so that people searching for these types of topics can find you organically. So, you know, most authors miss ranking opportunities online because they don't know where their readers, what their readers are searching. So I would do some research into, you know, what, what kind of problems people are looking for on that Amazon search bar. Like if you just start typing in a couple words in the Amazon search bar, you'll see all of these suggestive phrases pop up. Those are all previous Amazon search results and what other people are searching on Amazon. So that's a great place to start to find out what kind of questions people are asking. And you can kind of position your book to be the one that's answering those questions with the keywords that you upload, you know, your book to in the back end. So with all of that being said, once you know who your readers are, once you kind of have tapped into where they find their information and who they follow and who they're influenced by, you know, kind of able to tap into all of those, then it's time to use ads. And you could do Amazon ads, you can do Google Ads and Meta as well. So Facebook and Instagram, Amazon and Google is, you're targeting buyers where they're already shopping and they're looking to buy something immediately, especially on Amazon, Google Ads, you know, it captures interest before people even search on Amazon. Just, you know, puts you in front of people searching through Google through same thing with ChatGPT as well, like in Perplexity, Gemini, AI, all of those, all of those tools, you know, you can run ads across Amazon and Google to be recommended in those areas. Plus on Meta, so Facebook and Instagram ads, this is the kind of building awareness phase. This is nurturing readers and letting them know about your messaging and letting them know about your book so that you know, they can understand what it is you're selling, what it is that you wrote about, you know, how your book helps people. Social media is great for just that building awareness piece. And then Amazon and Google Ads will help you get in front of those readers when they're ready to buy. So yeah, I mean, going Back again. So know who your reader is. That's first and foremost, your book isn't for everybody. You know, you may like to think so and I like sometimes you may have a really big audience, like if you have a really competitive space that your book is currently positioned in. But it isn't for everybody. It's. It's for a specific type of person and you know you are. You need to be able to reach those people and speak to them directly because that's where you're going to get the best, most bang for your buck. And you're putting a lot of effort and time into promoting your books. You want to make sure that the right people are getting these messages, not just everybody. So know who your reader is. Go to where they are. Podcasts, influencers, tv, radio, bookstores, libraries. And then position your book strategically on platforms like Amazon and other retailers. On your website, make sure you have a platform so that people can find you and, and then use ads to just accelerate all of your outreach from there. Ads aren't mandatory, they're totally optional. But it just helps you get results a lot faster. So those are kind of the four steps, I guess, the framework that I would outline all the things that should be doing here and what I actually want to do next is talk about a tool that we created here at Book Launchers that you can use to implement all of these pieces really easily. We have a new tool. If you've been around our YouTube lives before, you've seen this already. It's called Author Launch Kit. It is a AI powered tool that has the ability to create all of these pieces for you. An ideal reader analysis. It will create keywords for you. It will. It will. Sorry, I got distracted by a comment. Teo can't hear it. Looks like my, my voice is on, so it should be okay. Yeah. So it'll also do so do the ideal reader analysis. It'll get keywords for you. It will help you rewrite a book description. It'll help you do a media kit. It'll help you do find influencers, podcasts, TV and radio shows. The you can reach out to. And the way it works is here, let me actually share my screen. All right, so this tool that we just launched in June is Author Launch Kit. So it's. This is what I'm looking at right now is author launch kit.com forward/signup. What you do is just enter in your, your information here. So your first name, last name, email password, agree to the privacy policy and terms and then you hit Start your launch assessment. And then once you do that, it's going to take you into a. What we're. What we call a launch assessment. It's going to ask a bunch of questions about your book, about your. About your. You as the. As an author, you know, what your goals are, what who your ideal reader is like, who you envision is the best person to be reading your book through. Three key benefits of reading your book, what kind of marketing help you need the most help with all of those pieces. And it takes all of that information and then plugs it into our Author launchkit dashboard and it'll give you all of these tools. So let me log in and show you what it actually looks like. So the first thing that I talked about was figuring out your. Who your ideal readers are, right? So let me show you this. So inside of Author Launch Kit, we actually have the ideal reader analysis tool that pulls in all of the information about your book and it'll give you. So I entered in all this information about a book called Backcountry Roads in Idaho. And what it did is it generated a reader analysis for me so I can understand really intimately who my ideal reader is and where I might be able to find them. So here I can see target reader challenges, like what pain points they're having. You know, like this is, you know, for backcountry roads in Idaho. They're feeling overwhelmed by the multitude of options for exploring Idaho's backcountry. So emotional challenges, things that they're feeling like internally, practical challenges, lack of reliable guidance to a specific backcountry routes and conditions like, okay, those are pretty simple, but let's drill down a little bit more. We dive into solutions and insights from the book. So this is pulling from that launch assessment. It's giving me more information about how, what solutions I'm offering and insights from my book. And then it gives me an audience targeting strategy. So it gives me age range, it gives me gender, possible occupation, education level, geographic location. Gives you all this information to figure out, like, okay, who are these people and how can I appeal to them? How can I change my messaging to make it seem. Make my book seem very appealing to them? Because it is for them. I wrote, like, this is the ideal audience that I'm looking for. We can also see psychographic profile channel recommendations that you can use to get in front of these people, some engagement tactics. So it gives you, like, this whole analysis of, like, how to reach these people and how to, you know, get to that point of understanding how to get in front of them. The next piece was how to, you know, so start with your ideal reader and then go to where your readers are, right? So I was recommending finding influencers, finding podcasts, TV and radio places as well. So we can find that right under here. We can see other influencers that are relevant to my book in particular. So we can see the influencer name, the reason why this influencer fits with your book, and then the point of commonality, how you can kind of make a reference and introduce yourself and say, hey, this is something that we're both doing together. It also gives you contact information, there's social media links to do some more research on them and actually contact and reach out to these people and say, hey, let's do a collaboration. You know, I wrote a book on this subject. How can we kind of, maybe we can hop on a live like this, or maybe we can share stories on each other's profiles, you know, something like that. Another option could be that, you know, local media outlets, local TV and radio stations that you can reach out to and just, just to promote the fact that you have a book. So you can use these tools in here, and these are all generated for you. It's just researched in your area. And you can use this anywhere. It's not just located in the US or North America. You can, you can do this in any place. And then also to. So we have all this, all these sections divided up into different sections of book marketing Platform Planet is all about building your plat, your platform, your author platform, so where people find you. Media Meteor is how to do outreach to the media. So, okay, now you have influence. You have a list of influencers, you have a list of TV and radio personalities that you can reach out to. Okay, how is it that you reach out to them? I would suggest doing a media kit. So this will, you know, we have examples of what good media kits will look like on here. Plus it'll generate copy that's specific to you, give you an author biography. It'll give you details on the book itself. It'll suggest interview questions for the podcast or for the TV channel that you're going to be interviewed on, and also recommends design recommendations as well. Plus it includes your contact information on there, too. So this author launch kit tool kind of gives you all of the tools needed to do this outreach and get in front of all of these readers who may be potentially interested in your book. So obviously, all of these tools can be. You can Google any of these tools and try and put all these things together online. But Author Launch Kit basically gives you everything all in one place, plus outlines a roadmap of how to get started. And everything is all designed and curated by us at Book Launcher so you know that you're getting quality results as you're going through that software. And there's also a 24.7chat bot in there where you can ask any questions and it'll give you curated answers based on everything that we've seen here at Book Launchers. So I mean. Oh, and you can find this too. Let me put it right here. So Pokemonchers.comalk hopefully that works. Yeah, so here's this link right here if anybody wants to go check it out and learn more about the software. There's a demo video in there that explains everything. And yeah, you can kind of see all the features in there. But again, yeah, recapping everything that we went over today, how to find readers for your book is so it's figure out who your readers are, figure out where they are, where are they finding their information. Position yourself well on your platforms, on Amazon and then you can run ads to actually get the word out there about all of these pieces. So we only have a few people in here right now, but if you have any questions about digital marketing or about anything that I went over today, feel free to drop them in the chat. Otherwise I can just hang around for a couple, couple minutes and see if anybody has anything. But if not, we can close it up and, and move on. So everyone can drop anything in the chat. If you have anything. Hopefully Teo, you can hear. Hey Ellen, thanks for coming in. Just kind of wrapping up here. Actually just finished a four step little presentation here on how to sell books, how to, how to get in front of the readers, in front of your ideal readers and sell more books. If you have any questions, drop them here in the chat. Otherwise I think I will probably tune out here in just a minute. Awesome. Well, doesn't seem like anybody has any questions, so I'm probably just going to call it here. Go check out the link tag right here. Book launchers.com forward/alk to see to learn more about it. Renee, you can go check out this link and, and book launchers/alk and go check out all the plans that we have on there. And yes Richard, this will be, there'll be a recording of this. So this is on YouTube. So once I close this out, it'll just be available there on, on our channel. And yes Tayo, Amazon does charge for ads. It's not like a monthly fee. You just pay to run ads. Like you, you set up an advertising.Amazon.com account with your and you connect it with your book. And whenever you promote on online, you're paying for that reach. So, yeah, you would be charged for ads. And Richard here. Yes. There will be a recording of this. It'll just be available on our channel. So. Awesome. Well, yeah, if anybody wants to learn more about Authenticate, go check out this link and I will see you probably next Friday at my next presentation. Thanks everybody so much for tuning in. And I hope everybody has a great weekend. Bye, everybody.