Getting a handle on your book’s target market can be a challenge. Who specifically were you writing for, as you wrote the book? Who is your book’s message going to connect with? Will your book solve problems for someone? Have you zeroed in on your ideal readers’ demographics, lifestyle, worldview? Here are a few tips for considering these questions.

Let’s say you’re a woman author and memoir is your category. Of course, memoir as a category by itself is too broad. So what is the particular life experience you were compelled to write about? Maybe you navigated the quirky politics of a southern California town, contributing to preservation of magnificent land and natural resources? ? Or, yours is the story of an Israeli war widow whose unimaginably brutal wartime experiences resulted in positive transformative life changes?

The Frequency Question: How often do you blog? Following are thoughts for those of us who are not easy, ardent bloggers. We are authors and author-publishers whose marketing challenge is to find our niche book community. Our aim is to identify who will want to read us. We seek fellow book/e-book travelers to dialogue with — the goal is list building — for when our book offer or webinar or event is ready to roll. What, then, is an effective rate of blogging in order to significantly increase online public visibility as an author? Once a week? Three times a week? Twice a month?

At this moment, with New Publishing quickly gaining ground over the old, there are two favorite self-publishing — including e-book — routes for first-timers. One is to use a print-on-demand firm. The other is to use a multi-service printing company that also offers e-book conversion services—for example, Lightning Source (owned by Ingram) and CreateSpace (owned by Amazon). Heaps of e-book conversion companies are springing up, and it’s my desire to sort out a handful of trustworthy ones. Smashwords is a great example. They offer distribution in addition to free conversion. The only problem is that they prefer converting straight-text word documents. So if what you have is nonfiction with visual elements like graphics and tables, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

With the rising popularity of electronic books, any book that is only in printed form is only reaching part of its potential readership. So, do it yourself or hire a service? Fortunately, converting your book into an e-book can be as simple as hiring an affordable service to do it for you. If you’re ready to get your self-published book out to people who rely on e-reading devices such as the Kindle, Nook, and the iPad, here’s what to do.

No matter what stage of publishing you’re in-an author-publisher, a beginning publisher, a more experienced publisher-IBPA Publishing University, in a new location on the west coast for 2012, brings you hands-on tools and techniques to succeed.
Visit www.ibpapublishinguniversity.com for details and early bird pricing. I will be speaking on the panel “Creating Websites and Blogs That SELL” the morning of March 10th. I hope to meet you there!

I empathize with the frustration of having to knock on so many doors to effectively promote a book. Jumping into social media alone is daunting enough, and much more is usually needed. The core marketing question is this: How and where will you show up and be publicly visible to your ideal reader? Imagine this scenario. You have several novels under your belt. You’ve been a dedicated writer for years, and you’ve spent many of those years going to writers’ conferences, attracted by the promise of scheduled ten-minute appointments with editors and agents.