Who is the Target Audience for my Book?

As an author, you are often asked ‘Who is the target audience for your book?’ Rarely does anyone guide you as to how to find that target audience? If there was a way to find your target reader, your life as an author would become that much simpler. This would enable the book to be bought and read more widely.

So, how do you fulfil this pressing need?

How do you find out who is the target audience for your book and what they are looking for in a book?

Here is how you can find your reader’s needs:

By finding who your target audience is and what they need. If these words ” target audience” “need” “survey” make you shift in your seat, don’t worry we will guide you, give you plenty of example and illustrations to make it simple for you to find the target audience for your book.

1.Conduct a survey: It is essential to know what your target audience for your book seek and what interests them the most. You have hundreds of contacts spread across India and the world. How do you ask each of them individually; as they are spread across a large geographical area? By conducting a survey. We have found Google Forms to be the easiest and most convenient to use for creating a survey. Use this link

This survey can be sent to all your contacts.

Find out the desires of your readers by asking as many questions as you can. You can ask them if they like books that entertain, motivate, inform, provide peace, for self-improvement or mystery? Gather all the answers and study the graphs.

Through the survey, you need to get to know their pain points. Problems are a part of life. Accept it or not, each one of us has problems in life that need to be resolved. Books can help resolve many of those issues. It would help if you dug deep into what keeps your readers up at night.

You can also include questions that answer their buying behaviour, e.g., whether they prefer reading ebooks, audiobooks, or hardcovers. Which platforms do they use to buy books from?

2. Define your reader: After you’ve done the initial research, you now have some idea about what the reader will be like. Therefore it becomes essential to define that reader.

Create a hypothetical reader in your mind and think about his characteristics. Identify the key demographics, such as:

Determine your book genre. This reader will be decided entirely based on your novel’s plot.

For example, if you plan to write a romance novel, then your imaginary reader would be around 18-35 years of age.

Once you have completed the survey and compiled the data, you will be able to create a category of your reader. Reach out to all those readers that fall into that category.

3. Know your competition: If you know precisely what you’re going to write about, you can jump onto the next phase, that is, knowing your competitors. Open your search engine and get going!

Do some quick research on Google and social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, etc., and try to dig into your competitors’ information that you may not be aware of.

Try searching for keywords related to your industry. Google will throw up a list of companies/people that are your competitors. Go through their “About Us” section and read. This is a fast way to develop an idea of who your fellow competitors are. Go to their social media accounts and research further. This information will be needed to carry out effective marketing for your book.

Once you’re done with the above research, study the strategies used by your competitors. Ask yourself, “Is there anything that you can do better?” Now that you know who the target audience for your book is, you know what kinds of posts to make for the reader so you can go all out to target that reader across social media platforms.

There are great readers out there waiting for your content. Solve their problems and serve them with everything they are looking for!

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