Authors: How to get more readers for your book!
This post is specifically for authors who want to increase your book sales. I’m going to be talking about five different things your book should have to make sure it's a good market fit and to set it up with a strong foundation for success.
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Genre Expectations
The first thing we need is an understanding of our genre and reader expectations around that genre. There are two important things we can do here. One is to read books in your genre and get a sense of what's currently popular (and even unpopular) in your genre. Second is listening to your readers—doing a quick Google search and finding Reddit threads or social media posts of your readers talking about their favorite books in your genre will give you a really good indication of what readers might be expecting when they open up your book as well.
Of course, we are all creatives and want to write our own unique story, so there's certainly a balance between including what you want to include but also making sure that you're aware of any expectations a reader might have.
Book Title
Point two is going to be picking your book title. Now there are many authors out there who are writing books for passion projects, so you might not care about some of these categories. Just know I'm not trying to take away your creativity by any means—I'm just sharing the best ways to get your book visible and make sure it's a good fit for your readers.
One of the things I recommend is trying to avoid a title that has already been selected by another book, especially if it's a pretty popular book, or it's a very competitive search term where there's a lot of books already with a similar phrase or title. It can be hard to find a title that no book has ever been named, so I'm not suggesting that you need to do that, but just consider it. Before you’re fully set on a title, just try doing some searches for it and see what comes up.
Cover Design
I know we've all heard the cliche that people judge a book by its cover, but it's true. It's one of the first things people see about your book, and that genre fit is really important here as well. You can, of course, go outside the lines of what your genre's covers typically look like—and I think that that's important to help it stand out and look unique—but there are certain elements your genre might include in their covers that readers have come to expect and recognize.
So my advice here is going to your nearest bookstore or library and heading to your genre to take a look at books in that section. You can also go to book charts like Amazon's top 100 books in your genre and browse there to see what commonalities you discover.
Keywords
Number four is going to be picking the right keywords for your book. When self-publishing and uploading your book to your platform of choice, you'll be able to choose a selection of keywords that readers are searching for to find your book.
There are various tools out there to help you pick keywords, but another way I also like to do it is just go onto Amazon and Google and start typing in my genre to see what keywords come up. Don't be afraid to get specific here, because if someone is looking for a romance, there's going to be millions upon millions of books that come up. But if someone is specifically looking for a “friends to lovers” romance, and you use that as a keyword when publishing because it fits your story, that's going to narrow search results to potentially push your book towards the top of the list.
Book Description
The fifth important thing you should do for your book to give it its best chance is writing a very strong book description that hooks your readers in. There are a few different elements to a strong book description, but the first one is hooking your readers by grabbing their attention from the first line. That could mean a compelling sentence about the plot and the story for a fiction book, or a really compelling question or opener for a non-fiction book about the transformation or what the person's going to learn when they read it. That opening line is the best chance of hooking people in as they skim the rest of your book description to find out more.
When you're spending time marketing on social media or spending money doing paid ads, you don’t want to send traffic to a book that is not set to convert. By applying the five above tips, you could potentially be getting many more sales, meaning you won’t feel as though you’re wasting your time or money.
Remember, if you’d like more tips and tricks for these five things you can do to give your book a solid marketing foundation, click the button near the top of this post (under the picture) to watch the YouTube video or listen to the podcast episode where I go into more details.
And if you’re launching a new book this year, you can grab my 1-hour Lifetime Launch course that provides guidance on setting goals and warming up your audience prior to launch so they’re already prepared to purchase your book, planning a pre-order campaign, how to get reviews and increase visibility through collaborations, as well as done-for-you social media graphics, captions, and workbooks—plus more!
I look forward to sharing more with you in the next post. Bye!