Oct 29 2008
For E-Book Authors: Getting to Know Your Readers
The following is just my personal opinion based on seven years of writing and publishing erotic romance ebooks. Your mileage may vary :)
1) Why do you want to know about your readers?
You want them to buy your book, right? It is hard, and in most cases impossible, to make a person want your book. Books are diverse, consumers are diverse–you have to play the overlap. That is, you do not grab the nearest person and try to force their book into their hands; you try to find the people who would love to buy your book if only they knew about it. In old style marketing terms this is called the ’soft sell’. Using it is more often a matter of finesse than great effort and expense. And bear in mind that your publisher will have done an enormous amount of ground work because in a general sense your readers and their readers will be the same readers. You just need to piggy back on their efforts with message fine-tuned for your specific material. Finally, this is something of a cliche, but nevertheless true: the best way to spend your time is writing the next book. Promote in your extra time.
2) What do you want to know about your readers?
You should not approach you readers like you are writing a police blotter, nailing down their age, gender, race, nationality and so forth. Thinking demographically leads into a number of fallacies such as the consequential fallacy. Two examples of this incorrect reversal of thinking are 1) Harlequin’s: because most of our customers are woman, what we provide is what all women want and 2) Ellora’s Cave’s initial disinterest in gay romance because their customers were women, they were women, so whatever they were not interested in, their customers would not be interested in (not so!). Try not to assume that even if 99% of your readers are female, or American (or whatever) that they all are–this may lead you to use language that excludes the minority group or implies their interest in your work is abnormal. What you want to know about your readers is what they like about your writing. The easiest way to discover this is to observe them (have your pen name on a Google Alert and lurk) and to ask them. Your readers will be buying your book because it does something for them. It might be the erotica, the prose styling, the complex plotting, the world building, it may be as specific as a certain fetish. You can then look for those readers in places devoted to that interest such as your publisher’s yahoogroup, fetish forums, genre chats, specialist review sites etc. And don’t forget, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. If a reader has bought your books once or twice before they may do so again. So try to reprise popular themes with a new twist, develop series and build up a backlist, preferably at a limited number of publishers with decent distribution abilities–and provide a book listing in your website.
3) What do readers want to know about you?
In most cases, nothing. Really. There are a lot of very active online sites where readers and authors can mix but the great majority of readers will buy your book and that is it. Attitudes are mixed when it comes to how much authors should share online. My attitude is that I am online not as an author, but as me. Your may take a different approach (e.g. building your author brand assertively online, or surfing under a different name entirely). In my case, writing is not my primary income so I can afford not to care. I would suggest that it pays to have a fairly relaxed attitude to the internet no matter who you are. Readers will tend to stereotype authors just as we stereotype them. Erotica writers are easy (or frigid). Romance writers are stupid and unimaginative. People will say stuff online, swathed in relative anonymity, and some of it might not be pleasant–but most of it will blow over very quickly if you extenuate the positive and gloss over the rest. In the end if you don’t stereotype your readers, do appreciate them, and try not to act like an ass (too often) — most of them will do the same. And not only will you sell books, you will sell them to people who will enjoy them, and a good time will be had by all. :)
