#095 - How to Start An Audience from Scratch for Marketing a Book

I received a question about how do I start an audience from scratch. My name is Shelley Hitz. I'm the owner and founder of ChristianBookAcademy.com and we have a lesson in Christian Book Academy all about your author platform. Now this word gets thrown around a lot and it's hard sometimes to understand exactly like what is an author platform. It's kind of how you build your audience. However, I recommend that instead of getting overwhelmed with just trying to do everything, to start with a mini author platform. So what is a mini author platform? Well, this would be your Amazon author profile, a BookBub author profile page, and a Goodreads author profile page. All of those, it's free to set up those author profiles. Those are online and they people can find you and find your books through those. And then when and if you ever decide to do ads on any of those platforms, you already have your author platform or your author page set up. So just starting with those pages is a great place to start. But also with your mini author platform, I recommend setting up an email subscriber service. So I recommend Mailerlite. At this time of recording, things change so, so quickly with technology. But currently it's free for up to a thousand subscribers and you get all of the features with like automations and things like that. And so that's why I really recommend Mailerlite. We have a training on this inside Christian Book Academy on how to set it up. And then we also have templates for you on how to write your welcome sequence. So this is a sequence of emails that you would send set up. They would be automated. You would not be sending these out one by one. And every time someone signs up for your email list, they would be getting this series of emails, typically once a week, and getting to know like and trust you. So that is where I would start. If you already have that established, then that's when you can really start looking at other options. Now a full author platform typically includes your email subscriber list, which we already talked about, but it also includes an author website and it also includes something like social media. Now you don't have to go all out and do like just this incredible website and you don't have to blog every day or, you know, blog at all. Sometimes I recommend just having a business card website where you just have your basic information about you, your book, how to sign up for your email list, how to contact you, things like that. You don't need to get started with all the bells and whistles. And when it comes to Social media. Choose one or two platforms that you really enjoy and guess what? You don't even have to do social media. I've really been backing away from social media and I've been spending more, more time and energy on my email list and I still do podcasting. But you get to choose, you get to choose what you want to do. And that's really the beauty of marketing. But I recommend really looking at a five step marketing plan. I have another video that goes in detail on this. But step one is to attract new readers. Step one or step two is to engage them. Step three is to nurture. Step step four is to invite them to buy your book. And then step five is delight. And I'll leave the link to that in the description below so you can really take into account those five steps. And those five steps also include other marketing ideas to get in front of new readers. But again, we're coming back to how would you start an audience from scratch? And that my answer is I would, you know, go three steps back, back to the beginning. Start with a mini author platform. Get your Amazon profile set up. Get an email subscriber list through Mailerlite setup, start with that. Mailerlite even provides free landing pages like, I mean you can just, you can get up, get set, set up simply. And then what I would recommend doing is start with the people you already know. So start, yes, with your friends and family, but also ask them to share with others what you're doing. Share your book or share your email subscriber list. And with the email subscriber list, you know, just having a fun or engaging freebie that they get when they sign up, but having your people you already know engage with you. Those are going to be your first email subscribers, those are going to be your first buyers and then start locally. So in your community. So where are some places in your community that you could maybe connect with? Maybe there's a women's group at a church. Maybe your book is about an animal. And you could connect with some of the animal shelters and some of their patrons or you know, I mean, the sky is the limit. But when you start locally, when you start with people, you know you're gonna have more success in the beginning. And then, you know, you can start doing that five step marketing plan in that attract phase. There's some ideas for collaborations and other things. And so I won't go into that in detail in this video, but know that the first step is to get started. You have to have your book published first to set up anything on Amazon or Bookbub or Goodreads. If your book isn't published yet, set up your email subscriber service. You can do that at any time. You can start building that list of people that you can then share when your book goes live and you you have ongoing access to them. Your email list is something you own. Social media can shut us down at any time. They can say you broke with terms of service. We're shutting your account down for whatever reason and algorithms change all the time, whereas email is still a very, a very established and reliable way to market. I know a lot of you don't like even receiving email or checking your email, but a lot of times you connect with me through email. That's my primary marketing channel. So get your email subscriber service set up, get your first 5, 10, 1500 subscribers by people you know and then start going through that five step marketing plan. We'd love to help you inside Christian Book Academy. We take you through these steps and we have the trainings to help you do it. So I hope that this was helpful and wishing you the the most success.

I haven't said this yet, but I usually try to say this in all my marketing training is make sure you're asking God, having business meetings with him because he's the one that's going to lead you to the most success. All right, I will talk to you next time. Bye bye.