Thursdays with Amanda: Available Now! My Book on Building an Author Platform

Amanda Luedeke is a literary agent with MacGregor Literary. Every Thursday, she posts about growing your author platform. You can follow her on Twitter @amandaluedeke or join her Facebook group to stay current with her wheelings and dealings as an agent.

Alright, all of you Thursdays with Amanda fans out there! I’ve got something for you…

Each week I try to tackle the big, bad topic of how to build an author platform. We’ve looked at Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, blogs, websites, and more, and the backlist of posts has become quite daunting and difficult to search.

SO to put an end to the madness and help all of you navigate the tips, rules, and tricks we’ve discussed on our Thursdays get-togethers, I’ve released an ebook.

THE EXTROVERTED WRITER: An Author’s Guide to Marketing and Building a Platform is a compilation of my Thursdays with Amanda posts PLUS a bunch of great new content (new content includes LinkedIn, strategies for building a Twitter following, how to identify your audience, and more). All in a shiny digital package! Categorized, organized, and hopefully quite navigable, this little ebook is perfect for those who have come to love my weekly blog posts.

Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on knowing your audience:

How to Find Your Audience

All right, enough theory. Let’s get practical. How do you take a book that is loved by everyone and your mother and find its basic readership—those who are most inclined to shell out fifteen dollars to buy it (or those who are most inclined to get their parents to shell out fifteen dollars)?

First, you must identify other movies or books or plays that are similar to your work. So, go to the bookstore or get online and put on your researcher jeans.

The first similarity should be genre. Match mysteries with mysteries, cozy mysteries with cozy mysteries, police procedurals with police procedurals, and so on. Pay specific attention to where these books are shelved. For example, Nancy Drew is a mystery series, but it’s shelved over in the children’s section, making it a juvenile mystery fiction series. You wouldn’t compare readers of Nancy Drew with readers of Agatha Christie (even though Agatha Christie readers most likely read Nancy Drew in their youth). 

The second similarity should have to do with main characters. Match female, upper teen leads with other female, upper teen leads. Match male, mid-fifties leads with other male, mid-fifties leads. This will help you narrow your comparison search. Like the Nancy Drew series, the Hardy Boys is a similar mystery series for children, but it has male protagonists. Therefore, if your children’s mystery had a female lead, you could exclude the Hardy Boys from your list of similar titles. The two series are near identical in many ways, but their audiences are different. You need to only concern yourself with finding the best possible matches you can.

Once you’ve come up with a list of projects that are similar to your own, try out one of these methods to identify and profile your readership. (Yes, we’re getting uber technical at this point.) …

THE EXTROVERTED WRITER is available from:

AMAZON

BARNES AND NOBLE

SMASHWORDS (for all other ereader devices)

Now, here’s where I ask for a favor…will you help me spread the word about my book? Here are some things you can do for me:

1. Write reviews on Amazon.com and BN.com

2. Tweet and share this blog post! (You can do that by clicking the social media icons below).

3. Feature me on any writing blogs you may be in touch with (email me)

4. Tweet and share about the book. Here are some Tweets you can use…just add to the Tweet one of the links I provide above (Amazon, Smashwords, etc), and you’re good to go!

Great new book on #authormarketing! Highly recommended for new writers and old pro’s #bookmarketing #ExtrovertedWriter

I’m ready to get my author marketing under control! Can’t wait to read the #ExtrovertedWriter

Hey authors! Highly recommend this book on #authormarketing. It looks at Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and more

And for MORE Extroverted Writer chatter, check out this interview.

Thank you all for making Thursdays with Amanda a GREAT place to blog!