From the author of Let’s Get Digital and Amazon Decoded, this book will change how you think about marketing. Strangers to Superfans puts you in the shoes of your Ideal Readers, and forces you to view your marketing from their perspective. *Learn the five stages in the Reader Journey.*Identify where your blockages are and how to fix them.*Optimize each stage to increase conversion.*Boost sales by … stage to increase conversion.
*Boost sales by making the process more frictionless.
*Build an army of passionate readers who do the selling for you.
It’s not enough to know who your Ideal Readers are, you also need to imagine how they feel when a recommendation email arrives containing your cover. You must figure out why they hesitated before clicking the Buy button. And it’s crucial to determine why they liked your book enough to finish it… but not sufficiently to recommend it to their friends.
The Reader Journey is a new marketing paradigm that maps out the journey your Ideal Readers take in their transformation from strangers to superfans.
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When I read a marketing book all the way through and take notes, it gets a five-star review. There are way too many book marketing books out there with tips, tricks, and short-term solutions to a bigger problem–this isn’t one of them. Gaughran’s grasp of book marketing is fresh and, most of all, right on strategically. I love the “backwards approach” of his failure matrix–starting with the product and working your way back to find the best promotions. Most of us do it the other way around–thinking the lack of successful promotion is why the book isn’t selling.
The place I really think David is right on is defining the marketing challenges of each individual stage of the reader’s journey (or sales funnel). Each stage has its own goals and you’ll be surprised to find out that the stage you may think is the most challenging is actually the easiest, if done right.
I want to raise my hands and say a hearty “Amen brother.” As a longtime marketer myself, I know he’s on the right track. Also, he has a wonderful sense of humor. Well-written. I highly recommend.
You’ve heard of “the hero’s journey,” a term coined by Joseph Campbell, describing the epic tale of the heroes in stories. Gaughran uses the journey metaphor to describe “the reader’s journey,” from the moment she discovers your book until she becomes a superfan. He details a six-stage process (i.e., discovery, visibility, consideration, purchase, and advocacy). While most writers, particularly new ones, focus on the first stage–getting noticed–he advises paying attention to each stage so that we keep readers interested in our books and so they tell other readers how great they are. Each stage, he claims, gets trickier.
Gaughran advises writing to market, knowing your genre, targeting your readers and nurturing your relationship with them and using the correct metadata to make your book stand out.
I highly recommend this book for all authors.
Some more real-world, sane, straight-talking advice for us would be writers. The work David recommends is not easy per se, but it is worthwhile and David holds your hand and takes you through the meaning and logic of how to build an author platform that is made up of people who admire your work and want to read more of it (which lets face it is music to an author’s ears). Recommended.
I enjoy what David Gaughran has to say in interviews and in his newsletters, and Let’s Get Digital was so full of useful information that I was REALLY looking forward to reading this. However, this book never delivered any concrete information, only general ideas that I’d already heard before from David (not that those ideas aren’t great, and if you’ve never heard or read anything of his, this book will give you wonderful mindset tips).
In one section, the section I was most eager to delve into, the book promises to help you evaluate where you might be misstepping on the Stranger to Superfan Road and I was hoping for some of those terrific Gaughran methods of scrutiny, but the “tips” in that part of the book were incredibly (and disappointingly) vague.
Still, as I said, if you’ve never heard any Reader’s Journey info before, you should read this book, but if you’ve already gleaned Reader’s Journey info from other sources, I’d say to skip this and move on to Gaughran’s other writing/publishing books.
An explanation and diagnostic for why some books sell and others don’t. Highly recommend for authors who wish to increase book sales.
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