Yesterday I talked about target audiences as giving you a good idea of the basics of "who" your readers are. I also talked about reader personas as the next step to thinking about your audience behavior.
Today I'm going to look at a specific aspect of your audience persona and ask you to think about "Where is your target reader?" This can be taken a few ways, and each one can help you target your marketing and give you more creative ideas to try.
1. Where is your target reader reading?
Does your target reader read at home? At work on breaks? On the commute? In bed at night? At school? Think about the reading habits of the audience personas you create. You can use this understanding to help phrase your marketing outreach, or for what kind of blogs you target. If you have a book aimed at mothers, for example, are those mothers of young children who are reading at night after they put the baby down for bed, or are they mothers of older children who read when their kids are at school? If you're writing for teenagers, are they reading on the bus or in their rooms after school?
If you choose to make a book trailer, you can show a person similar to your audience persona reading at that time of day in that place, making it easy for the reader to picture themselves with that book. When you get quotes from other people to put on your back book cover or ask some of your beta readers for Amazon reviews (and yes, I recommend that), you could ask them to say something about how it's a "good book to read when the kids are asleep" or a "great read to get away from your parents."
2. Where does your target reader spend time online and off?
Where does your target reader spend time online? Is it in specific forums with other readers of genre fiction? Is it on "Mommy blogs" with other mothers? Is it on Twitter with other journalists and bloggers? Is it on Facebook playing Farmville? These are all communities you should go out and learn about, understand, and become part of. Readers do tend to move in some overlapping online circles, and if you spend time there, you'll understand some of the themes that come up in conversation, what the trends are, and what the no-no's are. These are all things that will help you tweak your marketing outreach to better reach them when your book comes out.
3. Where does your target reader get book recommendations?
This could be an extension of #2, but it may also include book-specific sites like Amazon, Wattpad, Goodreads, Shelfari, LibraryThing, or many of the others that are coming out. Spend some time on each of these and see who are the influential people making book recommendations. Figure out how to pitch those people to read and potentially review your book when it comes out. Offline, think about what stores, magazines, reading events, or conferences your readers look to for book and other information recommendations. Rather than trying to reach readers one by one, how can you reach the influencers who are responsible for the content in those places and get them excited about your book?
Have any of you had more success with any locations or place-based approaches to marketing?
Image courtesy of TRAILSOURCE.COM via flickr
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