Three Main Influencers of Book Purchases
Most
self-published authors spend the majority of their week in two ways, writing their next novel and marketing their current book. It’s no secret that we operate in a highly saturated market, with hundreds of sub-markets which are also highly saturated, take for example, the romance genre. In the era of saturated markets and heavy competition, it’s important for authors to know what makes the book buyer think ‘yes, I’m going to buy this book!’.
Word of Mouth
Word of mouth is statistically proven to be the most popular reason for book purchases. Word of mouth translates to recommendations from friends or family. It makes a lot of sense that the average book buyer trusts the opinions of their friends and family over the transnational publisher waving their promotions in their face. Word of mouth marketing is also undoubtedly the hardest to achieve and execute because you’re essentially not in direct control of anything. Most major publishers have an army of reviewers, major newspapers and popular bloggers to spread the word about their books. As a self-published author you can still achieve word of mouth sales, you’ll just need to put in a bit of work into developing a base of reviewers and followers first, but we’ll address that in a different post.
Book Reviews:
You guessed it! Who would of thought that the main influencer of word-of-mouth marketing would be crucial in increasing your book sales?! Okay, we’ll stop with the sarcasm, you get the point. Book reviews are crucial. Firstly, they provide valuable social proof that your book is worth the reader’s time. Readers are often inundated with a plethora of book choices on Amazon and as a result they have to make snap decisions on which book link to click on and during this snap decision, most readers take into account the number of reviews a book has. The more, the merrier. Tip: find the average amount of reviews in your genre on Amazon’s search results and make that your review target.
Favourite Author:
For the most part, book readers are a loyal bunch. When they find an author they really love, they’ll stick to them like glue, often choosing their new releases over other books which are also very enticing. Writing a fantastic book goes a long way to securing your place in the hearts of readers, but it’s not the sole factor. Many successful authors have strong personal brands on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, where they share aspects of their personal life and communicate with their audience. They’ve cultivated relationships with their readers, and this cannot be understated enough. Once a reader falls in love with the personality of an author, as well as their writing, it’s a wrap. They will be purchasing their books until that author decides to stop writing.
Hope you enjoyed the read,
Rahull Ravi
Marketing Director
Dawn Hill Publications
