How Do I Figure Out the Core Audience for My Book?

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• Don't Be Like Me

• The Riches are in the Niches

• Don't Try to Find A New Audience with Your Book

• Decide Who Your Book is For

Don't Be Like Me

For me, I can tell you, I didn't do this for six books, and instead I thought, well, they're for everyone homogeneous who wouldn't love this, that is the worst way to do it.

And strangely, in my experience with HarperCollins and Simon and Schuster, no publisher ever brought this up with me either. They never said who is the audience for their book.

Nobody asked possibly because it didn't occur to them in the same way that it didn't occur to me. So I've said this before, and I'm certainly not the only one. 

The Riches are in the Niches

In Ryan Holiday's The Perennial Seller, he talks about how his first book, Trust Me I'm Lying, was targeted towards people who work in social media.

And this was many years ago before so many people worked in social media because he knew that it's about having converts and not readers.

And that goes back to the Kevin Kelly infamous blog post, 1000 True Fans—the idea behind this is that you do not need to Brene Brown or J.K. Rowling to make a wonderful living as an artist; you only need a thousand people who will buy anything you do.

Of course, a thousand followers on Twitter as not the same thing as a thousand true fans, a thousand people on your newsletter list is not a thousand true fans. True fans are converts. The reason you want converts and not readers is that converts will start doing the selling for you.

We buy books usually because they're recommended to us, not because we heard the author hyping them on Twitter. So you want a bunch of people going out there and saying how your book changed their lives and they're happy to do it because you've helped them so much because you have identified who they are and what they want.

Don't Try to Find A New Audience with Your Book

I will have clients that say to me they want their book to educate or convert people beyond their target. And I always explain that thinking smaller in this case is actually thinking bigger.

What I mean by that is there's a Facebook group called Australian Made Products and that has one point six million fans.  There's an instant pot community on Facebook that has two point seven million fans.

My point is that your community is way bigger than you realize. And if you create something that's specifically for them, they're going to become an advocate for it in a way that they will not if it's just kind of sort of for them and sort of for other people. 

I remember hearing about a guy who had a course called How to Use LinkedIn, which nobody bought. So he made a new course and he called it How Lawyers Can Use LinkedIn. More people bought it. Then he made it How Lawyers Can Use LinkedIn to Get Clients and it blew up.

The more specific you are about who it's for, the better it's going to be.

Decide Who Your Book is For

Don't say "People like me."

Maybe it's mothers of high needs children or people suffering from co-dependency issues. or CEOs of nonprofit companies; these are just a few of the core audience groups of books launch pad has published recently.

When you've figured it out, go to Amazon, find books that are for that core audience and see from the negative reviews what those readers are not getting that they want.

Then get to know this core audience. Hopefully, you do a little bit already because you're writing a book that's meant for them. So you're probably very invested in this topic. But make sure you subscribe to their podcasts, join their Facebook groups, sign up for their newsletters and infiltrate their world so that you can write something that will serve them.

Don't Sacrifice Your Creative Desires

Remember, you're looking for where their needs and your creative gifts have a crossover.

And that exists. You're going to feel it when you get there.

Whatever you do, don't try to enlarge the group by hoping to appeal to a group who wouldn't normally be interested in your book topic because people don't pick up books on topics they're not interested in, no matter how brilliant you are.  

HERE'S HOW I CAN HELP YOU WHEN YOU'RE READY:

→ You can get my 5 steps to creating a life-changing book

→ You can apply for an Authority Experience to have us create the concept and promotion plan for your authority-building book

→ You can apply for a call to work with Legacy Launch Pad (our publishing packages range from $7k-150k)

RELEVANT LINKS:

Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday

1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly 

CLICK ON ANY OF THE LINKS BELOW TO HEAR THIS EPISODE!

QUOTE OF THE POD:

"Your community is way bigger than you realize. And if you create something that's specifically for them, they're going to become advocates for it in a way that they will not if it's sort of for them and sort of for other people."