By Joe Moore
Who buys your books? If you write mysteries for instance, then the obvious answer would be mystery lovers. That's pretty easy. And to a certain extent you can identify male vs. female readers simply by the nature of your books. Action-adventure, techno thrillers don't usually have the same readership as cozy mysteries. But is there a better way to identity your readership. The answer is: sort of, thanks to Amazon. It's readership identity by association.
Take a look at your book listings on Amazon. One of the first things you'll notice on your book's page is something called "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought". There are usually 6 books displayed with arrows on each end of the display. Clicking on the arrows shows 6 more books. There can be up to 9 pages of books to view. Are the authors of those other books familiar? Is there a thread running through the themes, titles and cover art? If you click on one of the other books, do you see your books displayed as being bought by their readers? If so, the audience that reads those other guys is also your audience.
If your sales ranking is good, you could be listed in popular categories which appear below your Amazon rank. Click on the last level in the category you fall into and look at who else is on the list. Do the names look familiar? If they do, then you can form a pretty good picture of who buys and reads your books--the same audience that buys your fellow author's books.
With even this most basic information, you can make marketing decisions on the theme of your blog posts, the look and feel of your website and display ads, your email newsletters and other promotional and collateral material.
Thanks to a few simple tools found at Amazon, you can come closer to answering the question of who is your audience and who buys your books.
6 comments:
Yeah, but someone has to buy my book first....
Joe - Amazon is just tantalizing, since the rankings and so on are constantly changing. I try not to pay any attention (to some extent, those rankings don't mean a lot to anyone but Dan Brown). I do try to limit how often I check my page. Oh well, one more time this week won't hurt...
I'm with Mark--I'm not positive that people buy my books. :)
But it is interesting the way that Amazon can sort that out for us. And even tell us what names are used most often in our books, how many letters are in the average word, and how many words in the average sentence. I had no idea of all of that until I looked at my Amazon page. Will wonders never cease!
Now if only Amazon would include a naughty language meter, what Stuart McBride calls a Fuck-o-Graph, the information available would be complete!
It's also a good idea to create your own list on Amazon. If you add your books and some of the others that appear on your page, your readers may see your covers more than once.
p.s. But don't get me started on why Amazon can do all these amazing feats but they can't get the cover of my book right. Either it's the wrong cover, or no cover at all.
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