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Quick Content Marketing Tip for Finding Readers
When people talk about content marketing, there's often a vacant expression that follows. Everyone knows it's a good idea. But it's so much easier for nonfiction than fiction. How the hell do you "content market" to fiction readers anyway?
What is content marketing for fiction?
It's not the mythical unicorn you think it is. Content marketing for fiction simply involves putting out information, quotes, extracts, behind the scenes snippets, photos, short stories set in your book world, character information, listicles, recommendations and interesting information about your genre. Here's some ideas:
- An article with your top 10 upcoming horror book releases for 2021.
- A pretty image with a snippet quoted from your book.
- Character art of your characters with information about who they are or an extract of a scene with them in.
- A Facebook post with photos and a write up of a location you visited for book research.
- A review of your favorite books in your genre from this year.
- Hell, if you follow me on instagram you'll see me posting lamp post photos all over the place. All of them are connected to my next book, The Scent of Death.
- Asking for input and opinions to help you name characters or choose between covers.
The most important thing you need to do, is to appeal to the reader in them. If you're a reader of the genre you write in, this is infinitely easier. You'll know what you look for. Maybe it's recommendations, maybe it's sneak peeks or behind the scenes info.
Figure out your platform
Once you've figured out the type of content you want to post, you need to choose the platform you're posting it to.
Are you going to podcast? Are you going to blog? Are you going to create a YouTube channel? Do you want to run quick book recommendations from instagram stories and posts? Ideally, you want to choose a platform where your readers hang out. I don't know where that is, you need to do your own research. I know that for me and my Young Adult readers there's a huge community on instagram. But equally, there are lots of YA book bloggers and older YA readers on Facebook.
Things to Consider
You don't want to only write content about your books, readers like to read hundreds of books in the same genre. But, the more often you can tie your own books in or mention a character or something in amongst the content you create, the better. Think smart.
Content marketing is not a quick fix. You won't spontaneously discover 1000 crime readers over night. It takes months and years to build an audience using content marketing. But it does work.
You need to engage. Blasting out shit tons of content into the interwebs without ever interacting with readers, commenting or following other authors will only hinder your growth.
TLDR: If you want to find readers using content marketing, appeal to the child-reader inside them. Think about the types of content you like to hunt for as a reader of particular genres, and then post, post, post on the platforms where those kinds of readers hang out.
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