Book Marketing

Genre- The genre defines the subject of the book. A cookbook has a different genre from a history book. The goal is to identify your ideal customer. Who is the best person to buy the book? If you had a room full of people, which ones are interested in this subject? 

When I ask authors to identify their reader, often they say, “My book is written for everyone.”

This thinking will only stifle the search for your ideal client. For example, Glorybound Publishing has an ideal client portrayal. Our ideal client is a 78-year-old man with two houses and a flip phone. Let me break it down for you. 

A 78-year-old is well retired with, possibly, something to say. He wants to leave a legacy. He is a man because our business meets personally with authors to compile books. We have found a larger percentage of men than women are comfortable giving directions alongside of the publisher. Women not so. 

He owns two houses. This tells us he is well off financially and can afford to publish the book. He has expendable income. Publishing a book is not considered a necessity but extra—and someone with two houses has proven he has extra income, otherwise he would not have an extra residence. 

He has a flip phone. This part of the assessment for our ideal client points out that he is digitally challenged, or not very computer literate. It also may point out that he is not confident working a modern cell phone. He knows what he wants, or who he wants to call, but not into modern electronics. This guy (the template of the ideal client) is challenged with the modern technology of publishing his book [soft-ware, editing AI, Kindle, and on-line presence]. He needs someone he can trust to lead him through the maze of publishing his manuscript. 

You would be surprised at how many authors meet this criteria—and have actually handed us paper copies of their manuscript because they do not know how to send us the digital format of the files. I even had an author unscrew his hard-drive from the case of his desk top computer and bring it in for us to obtain his files! 

The more specific you can identify your ideal client should, the easier it will be to develop a sales marketing plan. Let’s say I have a children’s music book with Christian songs. The music is simple and written for ukulele and piano. The songs can be sung at Christian schools, Churches and camps. 

Who is the ideal client for the Christian song book? Not the children because they are too young to buy anything. You need to target someone who is old enough to purchase a book. Who would be interested in such a book? 

• A Song leader or Sunday School teacher in a Church
• Christian Camp Director
• Christian School Music Teacher

So, what does our ideal client look like? He or she? Old or young?

Just taking a stab at it, I suspect we are looking for: 

A 30-year-old female Christian Music Teacher

Again, the goal of evaluating the genre is to determine who is the book written for? and What is the best way to reach him or her?

So, where do you find Christian Music Teachers? 

• Christian Schools
• Churches
• Church Camps 

Part of sales is to consider the end-user. What could make this product even better than it is? When we look at releasing the young children’s Christian song book, we pictured the situation. What are the anticipated needs of those who may be using the book? The more you can picture someone reading it, the better you will be at developing end-user options. 

The book above is for teachers to show children how to sing and play instruments along with the song. In keeping with the idea, we augmented the original text with the following adjunctive materials: 

• Chord charts showing fingers on the ukulele for each song.
• We made a YouTube video of each song with a dedicated channel. The QR code for each YouTube song video is given alongside of the song in the book. Then a teacher can show the YouTube video to the students while reading the song book. It becomes Show and Tell. This is very helpful for the teacher and will increase sales.