SFA 088 – How to Grow Your Audience as an Author

We’re going back to the basics this week and talking about how to grow your audience as an author. Whether you’re new to the biz, or have been publishing for twenty years, chances are you want more readers. We all do!

And no, the answer isn’t just to spend more money on ads, though we do talk a little bit about running promos and advertising books. We cover a lot more in this episode though.

Here are the tips we came up with (and discuss in more depth in the show):

• Be generous and give some stories away for free… without requiring an email address or anything. No strings attached. Here’s the video of Neil Gammon that Lindsay mentioned about how he started selling a lot more books in the countries where he was widely pirated.
• Use your back matter wisely. It can do more than simply beg a reader for a review or link to the next book.
• Do regular promotions, even if it’s just making a wide Book 1 free for a couple of months or using your KDP Select free days once a quarter and buying an inexpensive ad to promote the book.
• Be consistent and publish regularly so that readers start to look for new releases from you at certain times of year.
• Try to build a community (or construct your series/characters in such a way that it encourage fans to create a community of their own).
• Regularly run ads to your first book or series starter bundle and monitor how they do so you can figure out what works best and do it again in the future.
• Write in series, since readers tend to remember characters and fall in love with them and their world over time. A series has a better shot at sticking with a reader than a stand-alone, and readers recommend books that stick with them. The best and most effective advertising you’ll ever get is word of mouth recommendations of your books.
• Make sure your book covers and blurbs are up to snuff, not only professional but that they fit into your primary category.
• Run your book through a writing workshop or otherwise engage beta readers before you publish. Don’t rush to get your first book(s) out there. You want the craft side of your work to be as strong as possible. People only recommend stories that they love.

Thanks for listening, and thanks to Joshua Pearson for producing the show!