Hitting the target: Finding your audience (and the big mistake I made)

Occasionally people will ask how my novel is selling. A personal question, I know, but the answer is always the same:

“Well, I’ve still got a day job so that should tell you what you need to know.”

But in all seriousness, I know very few writers who are ecstatic about their sales, and even less who have been able to ditch the day job. So why is that? What makes it so difficult to sell a bunch of books? People do manage to do it after all. Of course, in that article, all of those are big-name authors who have not only big-name publishers behind them, but also everyone else: movie production companies, major book and department stores, the New York Times bestseller list, etc.

So what about us little guys? How are we supposed to get our feet wet when the the beach is already at capacity and there are hundreds of swimmers with more talent, exposure, contacts, and experience than us?

Well for starters, you’ve got to write to sell. You need to know who you are writing for and how to reach them.

That is where I failed.

Let me talk a little about the big marketing mistake I made with Holy Fudgesicles…

My biggest mistake was assuming I knew the market.

I didn’t. I just figured that if I wrote a similar style to some of the big names in the genre that my book would automatically sell alongside them.

But, really, that’s where it ended. I looked simply at style of the novel and nothing else. And in hindsight, I didn’t even know who my target audience was. And, really, I still don’t.

Who is the audience?

Well, it was a young adult book, so the audience was young adults, right? But what does that even mean? I would have said “people who read John Green books” when I started writing. That doesn’t tell us anything though.

The Wikipedia entry says:

Young adult fiction (YA) is a category of fiction published for readers in their youth. YA books are catered towards readers from 12 to 18 years of age. While the genre is targeted to teenagers, approximately half of YA readers are adults.

So I guess that’s pretty good. The main characters in my book are fifteen and the antagonist is sixteen, so I guess I got that right. And that’s about all I got right. I wrote a book with a causal first-person narrator and a group of characters who happen to be teens.

But who was I really writing for? As I look back, today’s teens were not my target audience. I didn’t know it at the time, but I realize it now. You know how I know that? Because I know absolutely nothing about today’s teens. I wrote this book thinking I was writing for teens, but the group I was really writing for was 1990s teens.

I did zero research on the interests of mid 2010s teens. Nothing…not the slang they use, the music they listen to, the clothes they where, or the shows they watch. Instead of putting myself in the current generation and bringing characters to live there, I brought myself back in time to the previous generation of teens and wrote those characters for that audience. Now, remember, I didn’t do that on purpose, but that’s where I ended up. And that’s a problem.

The other problem comes with the marketing. I know that with small and medium presses, most of the marketing falls on the author. I’m fine with that. But how did I market my book? I went to sci-fiction conventions, writing conferences, and book fairs. Places where I might meet a bunch of authors and aspiring authors, but not where I’m going to find a bunch of teenagers willing to look away from their phones long enough to hear me pitch a book.

The sad part is I’m not even sure how you market a book to teens, and that is where my biggest failure as a writer lies.

So what’s next?

What’s next is I’m not working on any YA novels in the near future. Not until I’m a little more established. And to be honest, I don’t think I can write the type of books YA publishers are looking for right now.

Instead, I’m working on books that I will be better prepared to sell to a reader-base I better understand.

I never really though about how important it was to have a marketing plan before you publish. But now I have, so hopefully when my next book is ready, I’ll have a better sense of what I’m doing and how to get that book in the hands of readers.

But enough about me. If you’ve got any markets failures or successes to share, please leave a comment and let us know!