Wednesday, April 29, 2020

If You Want New Readers, You Need To Promote in New Places

There's an old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results. This is particularly true when it comes to marketing your work. If you're one of those writers who is perfectly pleased with the amount of regular readers you have, and you're comfortable with all the readers and sales you have, then you can relax on your laurels and go back to what you're doing.

For those of us who need to grow our reader base, but can't quite figure out how to stimulate that growth, this strategy might be helpful for you.

Time to get out of those comfort zones, friends!
Because the truth is, a lot of us probably have our preferred social media platforms, and the groups we regularly post in on them. And you probably have an expected range of reactions from those groups... but if you want more, then it's time to broaden your horizons and widen your search.

Check For New Groups Every Few Weeks Or So


Finding new groups you can spread your signal to isn't easy. There's a lot of trial-and-error, and sometimes groups will be insular, or have clashes of personality with you. But that's the nature of the search! Just like your book isn't for everyone, not every group is going to be ideal for you.

Well, this one looks promising.
The thing to keep in mind here is that while several groups might share members, chances are good that you're going to be preaching to a mostly fresh choir when you show up and drop your book title, or share around other pieces of content. And even if a group is small, active discussion and involved members can make a big difference in just how high your signal gets boosted.

Also, Try Unexpected Groups (Results May Surprise)


For those who didn't catch my Vocal piece 5 (Specific) Tips For Increasing Your Vocal Reads Using Social Media, I would highly recommend giving it a quick perusal when you've got some time. However, the 5th tip on it is one that I've found has been quite useful for me, so I wanted to draw special attention to it.

Try some sideways thinking to find communities who might be interested in your work, but which you might not normally think to share your work in.

Hey, new guy, come on in!
The example I gave in the article was my movie fan theory found in What is The Monster in "The Ritual"? If you haven't seen the movie, it's a horror film about friends getting picked off in the woods in Scandinavia, and one of the cultists we meet tells us the thing is a jotun, a child of Loki. I had a head canon about which specific creature in Norse mythology it was, and when the article came out it was middlingly popular in the horror groups I shared it to on social media.

But it exploded when I shared it in on a few mythology pages.

The difference, in this case, is that the film was fairly well-known in the horror circuit by the time I put my thoughts onto the Internet. However, there was not a great deal of overlap between people browsing mythology pages, and people who hunkered down to watch horror movies about monsters in the woods. So there was interest, activity, and a lot of sharing because the piece was relevant to their interests, and told them about something no one else in their community was talking about.

It remains my most widely-read article in my Vocal archive, with several times the reads of the next most popular article.

This same logic, which I talked about in Sell Your Book in Unexpected Places (You May Be Surprised at The Results), has generally worked out to my advantage when I've expanded the areas I look at for promotional purposes. If you have a modern fantasy story where your protagonist is an einherjar, and they have to deal with giants and draughr, then you should definitely be sharing that book in mythology and Norse enthusiast groups, as well as in fantasy groups. If your main character is a cat, then you might find some interested readers in groups about cats, pets, and pet cats.

And so on, and so forth.

It's All One Big Gamble


Like I said in Luck Makes Your Career (But Persistence Makes Your Luck), there are no guarantees when you're trying to promote your work. You might spend hours carefully wording and crafting just the right post for no one to care, only for a throwaway comment of yours to immediately catapult you to overnight Internet celebrity. You can crunch all the numbers, but the best you can make is an educated guess.

With that said, you miss all of the shots you don't take. So roll the dice, and keep rolling them as often (and in as many places) as you can. Sooner or later the number you want is going to come up.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!


That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on FacebookTumblrTwitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

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