Who's Your Audience?
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Who is your reader? When I ask new authors that, many says that it’s “everyone who reads.” Not quite. You need to determine who is reading your books or who would be interested in reading what you write. Here are some things you can do:
Look at your social media analytics. Many offer information on your audience’s demographics (e.g. age, country of origin, gender, etc.). This helps you see who is paying attention to your posts.
Look at your website’s analytics. This tells you who is visiting your site and when. Many of the dashboards show detailed information about your audience.
Make a list of several authors who have books that are similar to yours. Look on major book seller sites and skim the reviews. What can you glean from those who have read these books?
Find Facebook sites or groups for your genre. Look at the members or the “top fans” of the page. Who is commenting the most about your style of writing? I write cozy mysteries, so I look for groups, sites, and book reviewers/bloggers who specialize in my genre.
When you create posts or ads for your books, make sure that you target your readers. Think about what appeals to that demographic. Do they prefer content, lots of pictures, videos?
Build your social media platform on sites where your readers are. Search for social media platform demographics online. There are lots of articles that define all kinds of statistics about who is using what site. This gives you an idea where to focus more of your promotion time.
Sometimes, it’s difficult to narrow down your readers. It takes a little work, and as you build your website and social media audiences, you’ll have more data on your analytics pages.
