Gosh so much as that is half the goal of this site!
There is a growing trend that authors have to become their own marketing team. That concerns me because it is very difficult to do and it takes time away from writing. One of my long-term goals is to make it easier for authors to market themselves and I am looking forward to working on this challenge.
How am I doing that?
Right now... trying to help them zero in on their target audience. So if they wrote a book about the Battle of Midway, I want to get them to recommend 5 books around that subject and then feed readers into their recommendation. As readers not only meet their book they get to see their voice and expertise. In early user testing I found these recommendations increase interest in the author and their book because you get to peek in their head.
Next? Full channels based on topics like WW2, Grief, Anxiety, Startups, etc. The goal being to give authors channels with interested readers to serve their book and book lists within. Details here and hoping to ship this end of July:
https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages
Lots more, but need to get the flywheel spinning.
I could talk a lot more about this, feel free to email me :)
Sounds very interesting. Thanks for the detailed reply. I wrote a book about 4 years ago. It was very well received by those that read it and still gets a 5-star rating to this day but marketing it was real hard and getting the kind of distribution I would have wanted has been really hard.
Ya and that is the crux of what I am hoping to try to solve.
There are so many great books that are also unknown, and I am trying to help people diversify their reading material and eventually map out people's "book dna" in order to do better recommendations. I am really worried that new authors have an even harder time to get traction than they did 10 years ago, even if a big publishing house picks them up it looks like most of the marketing burden is on them. I want to see if I can help in that department while giving readers better ways to find amazing books.
There is a growing trend that authors have to become their own marketing team. That concerns me because it is very difficult to do and it takes time away from writing. One of my long-term goals is to make it easier for authors to market themselves and I am looking forward to working on this challenge.
How am I doing that?
Right now... trying to help them zero in on their target audience. So if they wrote a book about the Battle of Midway, I want to get them to recommend 5 books around that subject and then feed readers into their recommendation. As readers not only meet their book they get to see their voice and expertise. In early user testing I found these recommendations increase interest in the author and their book because you get to peek in their head.
Next? Full channels based on topics like WW2, Grief, Anxiety, Startups, etc. The goal being to give authors channels with interested readers to serve their book and book lists within. Details here and hoping to ship this end of July: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages
Lots more, but need to get the flywheel spinning.
I could talk a lot more about this, feel free to email me :)