Recently, while listening to many varied podcasts, I discovered something that we don’t think nearly enough about. Our book buyers. Who the heck are these people buying our books?

We can no longer just say, oh, my book buyer’s twenty something and reads romance. Now we have to know more specifics. We have to know WHO they really are and WHY they are buying OUR book.
So who is today’s book buyer? And how can we harness that information into creating content that they REALLY want?

Peter E. Lee / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Four ways to know these book buyers

1. First and foremost, where are they spending all their online time? Are they prone to stay on Facebook, or Twitter? Or are they more the website surfer-type, preferring instead Stumbleupon or Digg?

2. While they are online, what are they getting? Do they patrol ezines? Blogs? Or maybe it’s more like the forum boards?

3. Do they actively seek out these places and read the posts listed or do they prefer it to be given to them from a different media, such as video (Youtube, Vimeo) or audio, (podcasts, radio shows)

4. And finally, but certainly not least in importance, what sort of materials are they interested in? Are they book buyers, or short story readers? How about poetry? Maybe it has to do with tech articles? Are they writers too? That may put a whole nother twist to the tale.

If you will ask these sorts of questions and seek out the same spots that your potential book buyers visit, you may find buying habits that you can incorporate into your product. If a romance writer has a character that is into race cars and said writer is over at the race car forums, and suddenly they have a ton of new friends, well, it’s because they’ve just found a niche market to learn more from. This may be for the (a) research of the book or (b) the selling of the book, but at any rate they can now use this connection to some of these new friends in a great way.

I hope this article has been helpful. You can find it listed under the articles section on this website.