Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. This is episode 51, and today we are going to spend the entire episode subtly disagreeing with each other over how to pronounce the word niche. 

Matt: Now I see why you wanted that topic title. Like, I kept thinking like, why is she sticking that in there? I know that that's a small part of what we're talking about. Now I get it. Okay. You were baiting me, as usual. 

Lauren: Always. I'm always baiting you. 

Matt: Yeah. All right. Well, I will forever say it's niche. 

Lauren: That's fine. 

Matt: I am not French or any other European dialect that feels the need to call it niche. 

Lauren: We don't have to - we don’t - 

Matt: Tropes. What other bougie words do you want to throw into this episode? 

Lauren: Would we call tropes bougie?

Matt: I do. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: I mean, they're necessary, but.

Lauren: Oh. Okay. 

Matt: I don't know. I just think tropes is one of those words right now that's like the thing that people say. Like younger kids, all last year all I heard was rizz.

Lauren: You're comparing tropes and rizz?

Matt: I think this year I've heard tropes enough to qualify as one of those words like rizz or brain rot or whatever else you Millennials talk about. 

Lauren: Did you see that brain rot was…

Matt: I did. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Yeah, it's disturbing.

Lauren: I know.

Matt: I don't understand why - is it Dictionary.com or Websters that is doing that word of the year thing?

Lauren: I thought it was Merriam

Matt: Merriam-Webster, right?

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Yeah. Didn't I say Webster? 

Lauren: You did. You did. But there's a bunch of different ones. 

Matt: Well there's one that makes the news every year and I think it's - 

Lauren: Well, yes. So there's Oxford said brain rot was the word of the year. 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: Um, and apparently dictionary.com said the word of the year was demure. 

Matt: Oh God. 

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. Actually. 

Matt: Although - 

Lauren: Especially considering people don't know what it means.

Matt: So Dictionary of Matt would say the word of the year is tropes.

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: Or trope. 

Lauren: Okay. All right. Well, I'm sorry it bothers you so much. I don't know what else you want me to say. 

Matt: Nobody cares. What do your bracelets say? 

Lauren: What do my bracelets say today? I actually, I feel like I had done a better job planning ahead this morning because my bracelets are all kind of Disney themed today. This is the End is one of them. That's not Disney themed, but then Foolish Mortal and Take the Stairs are the other two. But Spotify Wrapped came out this morning and I was - it was my annual humbling by a stupid software on my phone. I should have chosen some representative bracelets for that today instead. 

Matt: So you've seen your Spotify Wrapped already? 

Lauren: I have. 

Matt: Do I need to even guess if it's anything besides Taylor Swift or Panic! at the Disco?

Lauren: Fall Out Boy.

Matt: Really?

Lauren: Panic hasn't made my list in a few years, actually. I've been pretty bummed out by them. Yeah my top five were Taylor Swift, Fall Out Boy, Post Malone, MUNA, and Sabrina Carpenter. 

Matt: I don't think I've gotten my Spotify Wrapped email yet. 

Lauren: Oh. Well, I was compulsively checking the app this morning, but, you know it's more along the lines of somebody will text me and be like, look, Taylor Swift was my number one artist. I listened to 5,000 minutes of Taylor Swift this year. And I'll be like, cool, I listened to 22,000 minutes of Taylor Swift this year.

Matt: Oh my god. It is in my app though. Let's see what my top songs were. I'm almost scared to do this online. 

Lauren: It’s okay I can cut it if I have to.

Matt: Let's see. Oh, they're all 80 songs. 

Lauren: Nice. 

Matt: Yeah. I don't think anybody will be surprised by that. 

Lauren: No. Probably not. 

Matt: Says I spent 12,394 minutes this year listening to podcasts. 

Lauren: Oh, look at you. 

Matt: I don't realize -

Lauren: I don't use Spotify for podcasts, so I don't have those metrics. 

Matt: You don't?

Lauren: I use Apple Podcasts. I did use Spotify for a while and I kind of liked it better. But one of the podcasts that I listen to, I'm a Patreon subscriber. And there isn't - or at least, at the time that I set it up, there wasn't a way to integrate the Patreon feed into Spotify. You had to do it on Apple Podcasts. And once I set that up, I was just too lazy to ever go back and change it. So I use Apple Podcasts for all my podcasting now. 

Matt: Okay. I did find my top artists. It took a little while.

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: But my number one top artist was The Cure.

Lauren: That feels so appropriate. 

Matt: Number two, anybody who knows me could guess, was the Smiths. Number three is the Deftones. Number four is Knocked Loose. Okay. 

Lauren: Yeah, I don't think that you're ever allowed to give me a hard time for my taste in music ever again, because that's also very predictable of you. 

Matt: Well. Yeah, I didn't know that that was coming out today. 

Lauren: Oh yeah. 

Matt: It's crazy how that's such a big thing. 

Lauren: I know. It's actually, I think it's a fantastic example of marketing working successfully, like truly, truly viral marketing, because it actually is just Spotify every year being like, hey, reminder that we track all your data meticulously. We know all these things about you and we have all this information about you. And instead of people being like, oh no, my data, people are like, give it to me sooner, let's go, I want it. 

Matt: Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's actually a lesson in packaging and marketing, but do you know the story behind how that came about? 

Lauren: No. 

Matt: So the first Spotify, the idea was by an intern at Spotify. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: She had this idea and… and in fact, I don't think she's with them any longer. And I think she left Spotify shortly after giving them this idea, but it was an idea from an intern that was there. I don't remember if she was paid or unpaid. It's probably irrelevant. Although it is relevant if she was an unpaid intern. 

Lauren: Yeah. Yes, absolutely. She deserves -

Matt: But nonetheless, yeah -

Lauren: Financial compensation for this idea. 

Matt: Yeah. It was an idea from an intern at Spotify and it turned out to be probably the biggest thing Spotify has ever done. 

Lauren: Wow.

Matt: Even bigger than when they bought Findaway Voices to do audiobooks.

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: This Spotify Wrapped thing is probably one of the biggest things, not only they've ever done, but in general, in the downloadable music industry. 

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, everybody talks about it. Even the people that are like, I don't care what your Spotify Wrapped was. 

Matt: They do. 

Lauren: Don't put it on your Instagram stories. 

Matt: They do. Yeah. 

Lauren: I'm like, well, why are you looking then? So anyway, share your Spotify Wrapped with me because I'm always curious. And I will not share mine in response because it's once again, humbling.

Matt: You want to tie this back into our topic today? 

Lauren: Sure. Why? You got an easy, easy way to tie it back in? 

Matt: It's a little bit of a stretch, but it might work.

Lauren: Go for it. 

Matt: You can use people's Spotify Wrapped to find out if they're your target audience or if they live in your content niche.

Lauren: You know what, actually, I don't disagree with that. 

Matt: I'm just going to leave now. 

Lauren: Episode done. Fastest we've ever done. Great work team. 

Matt: Yeah. Let's piggyback off of Spotify’s Wrapped and we'll just… 

Lauren: Sure. 

Matt: Yeah. Somebody should do that. We should do a Lulu wrapped for all of our Lulu customers - or unwrapped. 

Lauren: I did see a funny TikTok the other day that was somebody acting out what it would look like if they did a Kindle Unlimited wrap. 

Matt: Oh my God. 

Lauren: And then -  

Matt: It would be X-rated, wouldn’t it?

Lauren: Exactly. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Well, that's what it was. It was like, it was like, never mind, we can't publicly share that. We - no, we can't share that either. Wait, we can't share that either. But it could be cool. I mean, I always love seeing end of year report. I'm really looking forward to doing my end of year reporting -

Matt: Yes, yes.

Lauren: For the podcast and for like, seeing what other people in the company have been working on and seeing what trends we've seen. I just outlined - here's a spoiler for our next episode. The last episode that we're doing for this year is going to be like a 2024 retrospective in publishing and stuff like that. And as I was outlining it, I was going through some of the like, biweekly emails that I get or meeting topics we've had, stuff like that, where I've - I'm looking through like what were the hot topics from the year? And I always kind of love doing that retrospective on the year. Look forward to that episode coming next. 

Matt: I'm glad you like doing that. Cause that means I'll get yours on time, right? Your yearly metric? 

Lauren: Always. 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: What do you mean? I'm the one that turned in like a hundred page reports for social media every year.

Matt: When you were social media. Yeah. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: I don't get any stats from podcasts. 

Lauren: I - They're weekly. What do you mean? 

Matt: That’s - Where are they at?

Lauren: Literally in the spreadsheet that we share. 

Matt: Really? 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Are they good? If they're not good, I don't want to see them. We got five downloads a week. 

Lauren: We have more than five downloads a week. 

Matt: Nice. Let's have a party. 

Lauren: Okay. 

[8:22]

Matt: All right.We probably should talk about creating a path to success. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: And doing that through identifying your target audiences, your ideal customer profiles, personas, however you want to refer to this, which all kind of starts with identifying your content niche. 

Lauren: Yes, it does. This episode was inspired by one of my coworkers. We were talking about things that people asked a lot at conferences or interesting conference topics or conversations that we've had with authors. And the one that she shared that I thought was so great was it seems like new authors try and emulate how other authors have found success, but there are so many different ways to do this. How do I know which one would work best for me? 

Now what we're looking at here is here's how you identify your core audience, create reader personas, identify your content niche, whatever it is that you're trying to do and use that to figure out what the journey to success looks like for you. 

Matt: I'm not falling for that, by the way. Every time you say the word niche wrong. 

Lauren: I'm not trying - I'm not trying to bait you. That's what I - 

Matt: Yes you are. 

Lauren: No, I'm not. That’s why - 

Matt: Well why would you purposely say something wrong?

Lauren: Why would you purposely say something wrong? 

Matt: I don't. I just I don't. 

Lauren: Agree to disagree on this one. 

Matt: No, I don't like that either. 

Lauren: That's why I said we were going to be like - 

Matt: Okay. 

Lauren: You know, subtly disagreeing with each other the whole time because we don't have to debate it every time. I'm just never gonna say it your way and you're never gonna say it my way. We're gonna keep pronouncing it different ways for the entire episode. 

Matt: Your way is the wrong way. 

Lauren: If you say so. 

Matt: So, you know this idea that self-publishing is a customized experience for every author, yes, a hundred percent. That's basically what self-publishing implies. You're gonna do it yourself. You're gonna do it your way. You're not gonna do it the way that somebody else tells you to do it. You're not gonna hand over your manuscript and let them do it their way. You're gonna do it your way.

The start of that journey is understanding who your audience is, who you're creating content for, what is your niche topic or content area, and then understanding like, how do I create content for this audience, but more importantly, how do I market and sell it to this audience? Because at the end of the day, if you can't sell the book, did anybody ever actually read it? 

Lauren: If a tree falls.

Matt: That's right. Yep. I like money better than trees. 

Lauren: Okay. I mean, I liked it. 

Matt: I like trees too.

Lauren: I like everything you said. 

Matt: But I like money, so. 

Lauren: Fair enough. 

Matt: Yeah, we want to talk about how you market and sell your books. And again that starts from understanding your audiences and your customer profiles 

Lauren: Yeah. So you want to start talking about how to find your niche? 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: This is something that I think that we've talked about a lot, and it's not an original thought either - not gonna lay claim to that one in any way - and I'm actually even going to recommend a webinar that I'm going to link in the show notes. We hosted our friend Joe Pulizzi earlier this year for a webinar. If you look at the title of it, you might not think that it's relevant to you depending on what genre you're writing, because it's called How to Create a Multi-Million Dollar Business from Your Business Book. 

But it is actually incredibly interesting and I think useful for any author of any genre that is interested in growing their brand, because Joe talks a lot about the idea of finding your niche and your content tilt and trying to understand exactly what it is that you are specializing in and what you are giving to your audience and what your tilt is on this. You know, he then goes on to talk about it specifically in the idea of business books, but the first part of that at least is I think very relevant to anyone. 

Matt: All of it is, because core marketing principles exist outside of any relevancy to genre or topic. 

Lauren: Yeah, exactly. 

Matt: So again, like we said at the top of this, this is really an episode about some core marketing tactics that really need to be done ahead of time so that you can ensure a successful path to book sales - 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: - and writing more books. So yes, Joe's presentation was amazing. It does focus a lot on some of those core principles of finding your niche area, creating those audience personas and profiles, and then how to create content from there that will speak, that will be relevant to those personas and those audiences. Yeah, it doesn't matter if it's fiction, nonfiction, reference, doesn't matter. Like, these are core marketing principles and tactics that everybody can apply to charting their own path to success. 

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's something that's really important to understand if you're listening to this, first of all, if you're listening to this and you're like, this doesn't relate to me… thank you? I don't know why you're listening to this if it doesn't relate to you, but thank you. But also more importantly, it does. 

Matt: Maybe they just want to hear you pronounce the word niche wrong. 

Lauren: Maybe they just want to hear your sparkling wit. 

Matt: We know that's not true. They're here for my sunny disposition. 

Lauren: Cheerful can do attitude. 

Matt: That's me. 

Lauren: That’s me. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Yeah, so basically what you're asking yourself, regardless of what you're writing, what you're publishing, whatever is what problem does my book solve for its readers? 

Matt: Yes. So for fiction it's entertainment. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: It's escapism. So what am I writing that is going to make them feel entertained and help them escape into the world of what I'm writing about? Nonfiction, you're actually answering that question of what problem am I solving. Yeah. 

Lauren: Beyond that, go further than that and narrow it down as much as possible. So that's really what we're talking about. We're talking about like finding your niche. How deep can you go down the rabbit hole into identifying exactly what makes your content unique and something that you are the only person that can then provide the solution to this specific problem. 

Matt: I love it.

Lauren: Wow.

Matt: No notes.

Lauren: I was ready for an argument on there somehow. 

Matt: No, no. I think that for this particular section of talking to people about how to find their niche. For fiction authors, I think for the most part, it's fairly self-explanatory. You're gonna write what you're most comfortable writing, what you're interested in. We're not suggesting that you write something you're not interested in just to appeal to a particular audience in the genre of fiction, right? However, what we're saying is, if you do write fiction, whether that's fantasy, sci-fi, thrillers, horror, whatever, what we're saying is, by doing a little extra research on your ideal audience type by finding that niche, you may be able to carve out a little section of that market share that you can command and own outside of every other, let's say, science fiction author. 

So if you can add an element or a twist to your science fiction that you enjoy, that you see other people kind of asking for, or somebody might be commenting on a science fiction book they read, and they might make a comment that speaks to one little tiny part of that trope or story or plot line or anything that was in there, that might be a signal to you like, oh, that's a whole… that's another click deep into sci-fi that I'm happy to explore. And that could be a lot of fun. And so you've just established a niche where you can get in there and really own that space and own that market share. 

Because otherwise you're trying to share a market share, or market space, with thousands, if not tens of thousands of other authors. And that's okay. That's what everybody is doing to a degree, but you know, marketing and selling in a space where there's tens and thousands of others writing stuff that's very similar to yours is a lot harder than niching down and maybe carving out a little bit of that space just for you and your subcategory of science fiction or romance or horror or whatever. 

Lauren: Yeah. I was reading reviews on a book the other day and it was a hockey romance and two back to back reviews that I read, like literally one after another. One of them said, not enough hockey in this hockey romance. The next one said, too much hockey in this hockey romance. So an important thing for you to understand as you're kind of like, finding your niche and finding your audience and getting to know your readers, which we will talk more about in a little bit, is understanding that your book is not for everybody. And that's okay. 

And if you're trying to write a book that's going to please everybody, you're gonna wind up writing something that is too broad, that is not focusing in on one specific tilt and actually like, committing to what you know you can do. And so, you know, if you wanna write a hockey romance that doesn't have a lot of hockey in it, you're gonna speak to that community of people. And it's okay that some people are gonna say, well, not enough hockey in this one. You weren’t - that wasn't the point.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: As long as you know that, as long as you know what it is. It's looking at the market that you're writing in and trying to figure out like, where are the gaps? 

Matt: And to go back to Joe Pulizzi, and you were talking about him, his success came on the heels of being one of the very first people to really talk about and coin the term content marketing. And so at the time there wasn't a lot of content marketing that was happening in marketing in general. It was all still very programmatic. There was a lot of like, just digital stuff that was happening that was very formulaic, spend more money to make more money, these types of things. And so by being one of the first to talk about content marketing, but then continuing to niche down into that as more people came into that space is what kept him relevant and successful. 

And then more recently, you have others who have taken that and niche down even further. So now Brian Piper is another author. He just released a book on the heels of a previous book of Joe’s. So Joe wrote a book called Epic Content Marketing. And there's a couple of versions of it and Brian helped write some of that. And then what Brian did recently, because Brian is in higher education, he works for a university, he wrote Epic Content Marketing for Higher Education. So he niched down into content marketing specifically for higher education. Because believe it or not, universities and colleges and schools, they have problems with marketing. 

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So again, this is all just examples to help you understand like how do you continue niching down? Like you might say, well, I write in horror. That's my niche. That's my genre. No, there's deeper subcategories or sub genres or niches of horror where you could move into that space, have a lot of fun writing and command the full amount of market share or as much of it as you can, because you'd be one of the only people kind of writing in that way. So the concept is once you think you've arrived at what your topic or genre or category is, try to go one click deeper.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And if you can still go another click deeper, then keep going. It's a lot easier to go and scale, niche down as tiny as possible. Start with that audience, build a good following and sales record, and then start scaling back outward, right? 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: So if you scaled down three times in the genre of horror and you got down to some really niche style of horror, it's a lot easier to scale back up to a general category of horror once you've established yourself. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: So. 

Lauren: Absolutely. 

[18:47] 

Matt: All right.

Lauren: All right. So once you know your niche and once you know where you're writing, you got to figure out who you're writing to. 

Matt: For. 

Lauren: Yes, sure. But I think they both work. Who you're writing for or who you're writing to. I think they both work. You need to know who your audience is and you need to know who your ideal reader personas or ideal customer personas are. I’m… gonna throw a suggestion out there that some people may or may not like. This is a great place to use AI.

Matt: Yeah, for sure. 

Lauren: This is what we talk about when we talk about using AI and publishing. And people are like, you know, I don't want to read a book that's written by AI. I don't want AI to like, be writing - 

Matt: Me either. 

Lauren: - original content for me. I don't either. 

Matt: Nobody does. 

Lauren: Nobody does. Absolutely not. That's not what we're recommending that you do at all. But using an AI tool like ChatGPT to help you create customer personas is a great use of that tool.

Matt: Well, or any tool AI for that matter. 

Lauren: Sure. 

Matt: But yes, we've said this before and we'll scream it from the rooftops as long as we have to, but use AI to do all of the stuff that you don't like to do. One of the things we hear most commonly from authors at events and in general is that, yeah, all this stuff sounds great, but I don't want to do it. I don't want to do marketing. I don't want to do sales. I don't want to build my own website so I can sell direct. I want to do all those things, but I don't want to do them. That's great. Use AI to do all that stuff. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: That's what AI is great for. Don't use AI to create stories or things like that. We'll never, never say never, but we don't advocate for that. But use AI to do all the stuff you don't want to do. 

Lauren: Yeah, that's absolutely the point. And I will link a blog post in the show notes that Paul wrote earlier this year about using AI to create - 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: - reader personas. 

Matt: And you mentioned ChatGPT, that's a great one for sure. And you can get a great ChatGPT plan for 20 bucks a month, which is worth it. If you learn how to use ChatGPT to do a lot of the stuff you don't want to do. There's also Claude and Perplexity and a few others that are moving along pretty well and fairly trustworthy, as trustworthy as AI could be. But do your own homework, pick one you're comfortable with. 

I would stick with one of those for now, instead of going with AI tools made specifically for certain things, cause I still think there's a lot of room for growth there and so, you know, a lot of those tools are coming onto the scene. Oh, this is a great AI tool for managing your finances. And then two months later, they're either out of business or they've pivoted and now they're doing something totally different. So I would stick with one of the major ones for now until you get comfortable using AI tools and then maybe branch out and find -

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: - specific AI tools for certain things, but yeah. 

Lauren: Yeah, for sure. I think there's also just a good rule of thumb for using these if you're still experimenting with using AI or if you're still like… I haven't been using it, but I wanna try. For me, I think of it as something like if I'm using it for internal use, not something that's going to be customer facing for you. It's not going to be the book content that you're writing or your cover copy or social media posts. I mean, you can use it for all those things, but I wouldn't encourage you to. But like, this is - like, your reader personas that you're going to create are just for you. 

You're using that to inform marketing decisions and writing decisions and publishing decisions, but that's not something that you're ever going to share publicly, that's just for your own like, internal reference. So that's something that's great to use AI for, because it doesn't have to be perfect. It's okay if it's a little bit inaccurate. It's okay if it's a little bit rough and tumble or something like that, but you're the only one that's ever going to see it. So it doesn't matter if it's perfect. It's just kind of a reference point for you. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: The other way that you can kind of make them a little more perfect, even if you're, again, never sharing them outside of yourself is to keep them up to date by keeping track of your actual customer data. 

Matt: Well, you can only do that if you're what? 

Lauren: Selling direct. 

Matt: That’s right. 

Lauren: We have done a whole episode on using your customer data. So I'm not going to reiterate that one over and over again. Just go listen to it. It's a great way for you to kind of just continue to fact check - because you should. These aren't things - all the things that we're talking about in this episode right now. They're not like one time practices. Like, it's not like when you first start writing, you're going to pick one content niche and then you're just going to live there forever and never grow from that. 

Or you're going to create reader personas one time very early on in your career and a decade from now, you're going to assume that you're still writing to that exact same audience of people, like that’s... You should be doing this… I'm not going to say regularly, but the very least periodically. You should be updating your own understanding of who your readers are, who your audience is, who you're writing for, who you're writing to. Maybe those are different things. 

Matt: Well, but it's all part and parcel of that concept of treating what you do as a business. And these are things that every business has to do to keep growing and stay relevant and sustainable as a business. So again, if your thing is being an author, and that's what you want to do is be an author and you want to make a living from that, if you're not already… These are things that you need to eventually get comfortable with and do in some form or another so that you can continue to stay relevant and grow. 

Lauren: Absolutely. They might just also inform like, decisions that you make about your business. You don't know - now I'm just going deeper into the why customer data is important thing, which I think… I'm not going to say that we've talked that to death, because I don't think we have, and I think we'll continue to talk about it. It's obviously something that we think is very important, but. Might I recommend that you go listen to episode number 47 if you're curious about why customer data matters? 

Matt: Yes, you might. 

Lauren: May I? Might I? 

Matt: That was just weird.

Lauren: I don't know. 

Matt: But go right ahead. 

Lauren: I don't know. This is what happens when we record before lunch. This is my fault, I'm sorry. The point is that this is something that's going to be useful for you to have. It's something that's going to be useful for you to keep checking and referring back to, whether it's because you're working on writing a new book, whether it's because you're working on adding new product lines, whether it's because you're trying to grow your business. If you're trying to reach a new audience, a different audience, if you are… 

Like I said earlier, I was working ahead a little bit and working on 2024 retrospective. And I was reading through Written Word Media puts out an annual indie author survey every year. It's mostly fiction authors, but it is an interesting read anyway. And I was reading through it. And one of the things that they were talking about in there was the number of survey responses that were something along the lines of like, “I'm really sick of marketing. I feel like I do the same marketing things over and over and over again, and they never work or like, things that used to work, aren't working anymore.” 

And like, that's kind of where this stuff comes in where it's like, if you, if you feel like you've exhausted your marketing efforts and like things that used to work for you, aren't working anymore, and you are looking for ways to like inject new life into your marketing, but you're also really burnt out… 

Matt: Well, first of all, that's normal by the way. 

Lauren: Yeah. Absolutely. 

Matt: So as people who are marketers for a living and have been doing this for a long time, that's normal. Welcome to the life of a marketer, not an author. It is normal. It's something that constantly changes, especially as new technology comes into play. But in general, a large part of marketing is using tools and platforms that are algorithm based. So of course there's burnout there because things are constantly changing. So that's normal, just know that. 

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And don't feel bad when you feel that way because even as marketers, sometimes we hate being marketers. In fact, I would say more often than not, I love marketing and I hate being a marketer. 

Lauren: That's fair. Actually, that's really, that's very reasonable. But yeah, this is - I think this is if you're feeling that way, this is your opportunity to say, okay, like, let me do a little bit of a deep dive into who my audience is, who my ideal readers are, who my actual readers are, and let me see how I can kind of adjust my focus to speak to these people, or if I'm, if I'm looking at this and I'm realizing that my ideal reader is a little bit different than where I actually see my actual readers are. Like, okay, how do I shift my focus to talk to those people that I identified as my ideal readers without also losing my existing readers? 

Matt: Yeah, I would argue that if you have existing readers that you've managed to bring into your ecosystem that really like what you're doing, you're less at risk of turning them away.

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: Unless you're just drastically pivoted from the type of content you write. But you can always think about spinoff series that you know, attract those other buyer personas or customer personas, reader personas, whatever you want to call them while still not affecting your core audience too. So it's always just about niching and figuring out where's my next audience or group of people going to come from. 

You know, everybody's concerned with growing their audience, growing their customer base, all these things are tied together, getting that customer data, using that customer data to turn around and remarket and grow some more. It's, it's a big cycle. And so yeah, I think using these customer audience personas to better understand, you know, not only existing, but new areas that you can push into. That's how you grow. 

Lauren: Exactly. 

Matt: It's not fun sometimes. It's not easy sometimes. And then other times it is, but it's necessary for growth. 

Lauren: Having a job isn't always fun. Well, that's not true, actually, this job is pretty fun, but -

Matt: I was just about to say we're hiring for a podcast host if anybody wants to sit up here and argue with me for an hour a week.

Lauren: Having a job is still work, even when it's fun. 

Matt: Yes it is. 

Lauren: And if you are treating your writing career as a job, which you should be, it is going to involve some work. Whether it's your author brand or whether you have your own brand that you're writing a book as a lead magnet or whatever it’s still - it's all work. It's all a job and you have to treat it that way. 

Matt: I think now we're just getting down to semantics. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: You know what I mean? Calling something a job versus hey, this is my business. This is what I do. Like to me, they're kind of different mindsets. 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: But nonetheless. Yeah, I agree. We should move on. 

Lauren: I'm glad you agree with yourself that we should move on. 

Matt: Well, I was agreeing with you too. I was just saying, you know. 

Lauren: All right. So once we figured out who are -  

Matt: I feel like all you wanted to do today was argue. 

Lauren: I thought this was going to be a much smoother episode, actually, personally. 

Matt: Why is it not smooth already? 

Lauren: Maybe because we're both a little spicy. Again, we're doing this before lunch. We don't usually.

Matt: I am a little spicy. Okay. 

[28:42]

Lauren: More importantly. Once you've figured out what your niche is and who your ideal readers are, how do you use those things to identify your target audience? Because that's really where we're going with all of this, right? Is that you've kind of put in the work to create these specific profiles and spaces and whatever of like, okay, these are my very specific areas of focus, whether it's content or audience. How do you use that to kind of… identify a larger group of people that you are actually going to be targeting with your content? 

Matt: Yeah. And again, a lot of this is also based on the assumption that you're pushing into a new audience per se. Personas and audience, there's a lot of overlap there. 

Lauren: Sure. 

Matt: They're almost kind of the same thing when you're talking about finding new readers to bring into your ecosystem. A persona is basically for the most part an audience or comprises an audience. You could have multiple personas within an audience, sure. But most of the time, especially in fiction, nonfiction is different, but in fiction, most of the time, whatever persona you create, that's pretty much what that particular audience is comprised of, that one persona for the most part. Nonfiction, you'll have lots of personas within a particular audience, but yeah, you need all these things to start building out or targeting your audiences. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: So how do you do it? 

Lauren: Okay. 

Matt: The same way you started with your personas, it's kind of the same exercise with an audience as well. Because there can be multiple personas, there's lots of questions you're gonna wanna start asking about identifying -

Lauren: Yes.  

Matt: - a particular audience. You have listed here the things we learned in grade school, right? 

Matt: The who, what, when, where, why, and how? 

Lauren: Who, what, when, where, why, and how? 

Matt: And that works, that's fine, yeah. But understanding, you know, how these questions relate to an audience, I think, is important. 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: We can go through those if you want. 

Lauren: What, the who, what, when, where, why, and how? 

Matt: Yeah, I mean, you listed them out, might as well. 

Lauren: All right, so basically the... Okay. I think that it's important for you to be able to answer a list of questions. All I want to do right now is sing the song from Spy Kids 2 and I'm not going to, but it's so fine. 

Matt: I wish you would. 

Lauren: I will not. 

Matt: All right. 

Lauren: You want to be able to answer basically a whole series of questions about your target audience. And if you can't answer that, that's probably one of the first things that you want to do here is figure out how you get the answers to these questions and actually be able to answer them. You should know: who your customers are, who your followers are, if there's a discrepancy between those two, you wanna understand why there's that discrepancy. Does it matter? What can you do to turn your followers into customers? Or perhaps the other way around, depending on what your priorities and your goals are. 

You wanna know what they want and what they need. And also if those are the same things, if you can provide those things for them. You wanna know where your audience spends most of its time. Where are they looking for… whether it's new books or solutions to problems, more information? If you are writing about a subject that the main audience base is hanging out on TikTok and you're promoting your content very heavily on Reddit, what does that do for you?

Matt: Yeah. And I would argue as you're going through these though, too, the most important ones - especially for fiction authors, but even for nonfiction - would be the what, where and how.

What is it they're looking for? What type of content? And we're going to assume in this case, if it's fiction, you're writing, we're going to assume they're looking for the kind of fiction you write. And if it's nonfiction, obviously we talked about, you're solving some sort of a problem for them. 

But the where is really the most important, I think out of all those, and even those three that we narrowed it down to, because that's what everybody's hoping to get out of this is like, where do I find more readers and buyers? 

Lauren: Right. 

Matt: That's really what we're trying to get you to is that point where you understand how to find more of those. Where those areas, whether again, it's particular social media channels or groups on Facebook or somewhere else or… Or even, you know, in person in real life things where you may be able to connect with more readers that are into what it is you're writing or your nonfiction how to land more clients and things like that. 

But and then lastly, the how once you've found them, the how is how do you connect with it? You can't just roll up like Steve Buscemi and like, hey kids, I'm cool, let's talk about this. You know what I mean? Like, how are you connecting with them? Right? 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: It can be really awkward and intimidating to push into a new space and to try and introduce your content to a new audience. But understanding how to connect with them, how to start those two-way conversations, having a space where you're comfortable to do that, I think is important. 

Lauren: I think it's all important, even just when it comes to simple things, like I spend a lot of time a lot of my time on TikTok - watching clips of podcasts and I'll watch like - I will intentionally look for long videos. And then I was talking to our social media manager recently and I said, when I provide you like, video clips for podcast episodes for you to share on social and stuff. Like how long do you want them to be? And she said about 15 seconds. I was like, oh, that's not - I needed, I did not have the correct understanding of what she was looking for in the content that she was creating and publishing. 

So that was important. And I have tried to now give her a shorter clips. So our content strategies are aligning a little bit more on stuff like that. It's… even just the little things like that in the how and the where and the what. This is important for you to know. Or maybe you do, maybe you do find out that your particular target audience is very into long form video content. Or not long form video content, because I think an hour long podcast episode is considered long form, not a five Matt: By today's standards, five minutes is probably long form content. 

Lauren: That’s true. That's so depressing. 

Matt: Especially for your generation and below. 

Lauren: Hey! 

Matt: My 14 year olds, if anything is longer than five seconds, they're swiping anyways. So I don't…

Lauren: Don't lump me in with your 14 year olds. 

Matt: Well, I think you lump yourself in there sometimes. Hour is like, what’s beyond long form? Is there like infinity form content? 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: Don't think of the Avengers, by the way. 

Lauren: Too late.

Matt: Okay. Finding where there's more of them and then creating a plan to connect with them.

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: And figuring out how you're going to connect with them. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: You can't just roll in there, kick the doors open and be like, here I am. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Cause they don't care. 

Lauren: That's, you know, circling back to my point of this is how you inject new life into your marketing efforts or into your growth efforts, whatever it is. If you're feeling stuck in that, this is how you do that is by finding where like a new target audience is or a… a new area of readers or customers or followers or again, whatever your goals are and figuring out how to get in there with them, how to start talking to them and how to bring them always and goal, bring them back to your content and onto your owned land and not rented land. 

Matt: Yeah. Yep. 

Lauren: I know that also I kind of realized as we were talking about this, all of this sounds very vague. We didn't really give you like, specific step by steps on how to do this really. That is because all of these things are so specific. They're so unique to the individual author that's doing it. I can't give you step by step on how to find exactly your specific target audience without knowing exactly what you're writing and who your target audience is. So that is something that you have to figure out. And that's going all the way back to the beginning of this episode where you're talking about how it's kind of a different path to success for every single self-published author. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: That is absolutely the case because it is so defined by the specific choices that you make, by the specific niche that you are writing in, by who you're targeting, what your goals are, all of that. So all we really can do is kind of give you like, high level understanding of what you should be doing. And then it's up to you to kind of like craft that. 

Matt: This is also where, you know, we talk a lot about networking and going to events and things like that. And a big part of that as we've already talked about in several episodes is having the ability to learn from others who have forged this path already, or who are reforging new paths into new audiences and kind of learning what they did and what worked and what didn't work. You can't always copy it to a degree, which I think is what you're saying. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: But again, understanding how they did it and the results they got will kind of help you understand how you might try it and what results you might expect or how you might have to do the same thing, but maybe with a slight variation to better align with who your audience is or who your intended audience is or things like that. 

Lauren: Yeah, exactly. We were at Katie Cross's session at Author Nation, which was fantastic. And one of the things that I loved about it was that she was super upfront, right at the top of this and reiterated several times throughout the session that like, I'm gonna share my path to success and I'm gonna tell you right now, some of this is not replicable. Some of this is just flat out like not sustainable for other authors to do and I'm not telling you to try to do this, I am just telling you how I got where I am today. What I did, what worked, what didn't. Giving you the layout so that you can kind of figure out how to apply that to your own efforts. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But she was really upfront about like some of this is just not doable. And I really appreciated that she was like, yeah, this is like… You know, I'm pretty sure I've referenced this on air before, this session that I went to about how to - I went to a session years ago at BEA that was - that was something about viral brand marketing for a specific book or whatever it was. And the first step of it, like literally the first step in the session was: somebody's review for this book on Goodreads went viral and brought a bunch of new traffic to that book. And I was immediately like, well. This entire session is a waste of time, because none of that is replicable, because you cannot make something go viral. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: You can only hope for virality. 

Matt: If you're ever somewhere and you see there's a session on how to make something go viral, don't go inside that room. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: If there's ever a video that has a title that says, here's what you can do to go viral, don't click on it. It's click bait. There is no way to ensure that you go viral. That's the point of it. So a hundred percent - but again, what you can do is you can learn from other people who have forged this path, or through networking and through talking to peers and other authors and creators and entrepreneurs, you can get a better idea of how to start piecing together your own path and understanding how to get results from some of your activities and what those results mean. 

There's other things you can do, but I think ultimately piecing together a lot of these things - with some other marketing tactics, communicating with peers, talking to other people, paying attention to what other people have done and where that may or may not change for you - I think is probably the easiest way to get to a strategy for marketing and selling your books in a more successful and efficient way. You have to understand that these things that you're doing, again, whether you want to agree to this or not, you're building a business. And so everything you do is a step towards sustainability long-term. 

I don't think anybody's in the business of books for a short-term type of payoff. It's not the industry for that. So if you want something like that, maybe… maybe try your hand at crypto or something. But obviously, I'm not a financial advisor, so don't do that, but. Point is, it's a long game. If your goal is to be an author, that's your career, that's your title. That's what you do. Or as Lauren said, that's your job. It's a long term thing and you have to plan and build appropriately. 

Lauren: It's a long term thing. And it's also it's a long game in terms of finding success. None of this is going to be an overnight thing in any capacity, whether it's finding your audience, selling X number of books, becoming a prolific author with a healthy backlist of books, anything like that. Lulu and The Tilt conducted a survey last year that was a content creator and content entrepreneur survey. 

And the average for the people that responded to it was eighteen months to build their business to a sustainable level. It's not an overnight success. It's not something that you're immediately like, you're going to try something new on your marketing efforts today and next week you're going to have suddenly sold a hundred more copies of your book. 

Matt: Yeah. Marketing is a game of patience

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: For sure. And again, it's something where you need to do your homework though too, because you can waste a lot of time and a lot of money marketing and get zero results. So do your homework upfront, have some patience. At the end of the day, all of these things that we're talking about as well in other episodes, these are things that when combined, what you're doing is building, again, a pathway to a sustainable business, understanding how to create reader personas or buyer personas, how to use those to find new audiences, to grow your business and to grow your sales pipeline. 

But then also understanding how to incorporate direct sales for customer data to take that customer data and then remarket with it to continue the cycle of pushing into new audiences and building a much broader and larger customer base, I think, is the goal there. So, you know, understanding you can't measure things if you don't have goals, you can't understand what your success rate is if you can't measure. So I can't emphasize enough how much of a circular sort of cycle this all is. And you kind of have to do most of these things in one way or another, do them your way, but you kind of need to do these things to make sure that you're ensuring some sort of long-term success, whatever your definition of success is. 

Lauren: Which you should have. 

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: That's an important part of this as you're doing this, is you should have a definition of what success looks like for you and what your goals are. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: For me, success is just access to really good coffee. 

Lauren: Okay. That's it? 

Matt: And pizza. 

Lauren: Wow. 

Matt: I'm easy to please. 

Lauren: That's, you know what? That's important, honestly. 

Matt: I'm not easy, please, but coffee and good pizza are important. 

Lauren: That's fair. 

Matt: Yeah. 

[42:11]

Lauren: One last piece of advice that I want to give as we're zooming out on this is, like I said, with the webinar, the Joe Pulizzi webinar that I'm going to have linked in the show notes. Look for advice and look for success stories and look for marketing tips and stuff like that and growth tips outside of your genre. Don't limit yourself to only looking at - if you're writing mystery thrillers, do not limit yourself to just looking at how mystery thriller authors grew their brand and achieved success. 

Look outside of that box. Don't even look at fiction authors. Don't even look at authors. Look at other kinds of growth success. Look at other kinds of content creators, content entrepreneurs. Pay attention to the things that work on you. That's always one of the things that I find really funny as somebody who works in marketing is when I can tell that I am being marketed at but also it's working on me. 

Matt: Effectively. 

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Yeah. You know, like we were talking about Spotify Wrapped. 

Matt: It makes you mad happy. 

Lauren: Yes. Yes. 

Matt: You get angry, but you're like, man, that was really good. That was cool. 

Lauren: Yeah. Like I recognize what's happening right now. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And I'm annoyed that it's working on me - 

Matt: You can’t stop it. 

Lauren: But I'm also like impressed and I can't stop it. 

Matt: It's like the tractor beam in Star Wars when they're sucking on to the Death Star. 

Lauren: Like that great moment in Rise of the Resistance when Kylo Ren -

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: - starts pulling the - oh, I love that. But yeah. I mean, that's the kind of stuff. Pay attention to that, note those things and note what works on you, and then try to figure out how you can turn around and apply that to your own efforts. 

Matt: Perfect. 

Lauren: Thanks. One other thing that I did want to actually - I just said that was one last thing but one last one last thing. I do want to recommend SparkToro as a tool. 

Matt: It is a great tool… for an individual person I don't know what their pricing is. 

Lauren: Oh.

Matt: But it is an amazing tool for doing audience research. If they have a personal plan I would suggest trying it out. It is a great tool.

Lauren: They do have a - so they have a free trial plan that is five searches a month That's totally free to use and then they do have a personal plan that is $38 a month. 

Matt: So yeah, if that's within your means I would highly encourage you to try SparkToro. Lauren's right. It is probably the best tool we've ever seen for finding, for doing audience and persona research essentially. So we won't go much more into that because we're not paid by them and we like them as an organization. But at the end of the day, it's just a really good tool for doing what we've been talking about today. And I think well worth that price tag that you just threw out there. 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: At least for a month or two to try it out.

Lauren: Or try out the free version and see if that's helpful to you.

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: And if you want to dig deeper into it, then try a month or two of the paid version. 

Matt: Yeah. 

Lauren: Yeah. All right. Well, wrap it all up? 

Matt: Yeah. Again, let's say it one more time for the people in the back. You want to niche down, right? Let's start there. If you're a romance writer, great, but can you niche down? You know, I've seen or heard some pretty crazy subcategories of romance. And while it's - to me - crazy or funny, it's very smart on their part. 

Lauren: Yes. 

Matt: Like I've met an author at an event that their sub genre or sub sub genre was like cozy, cozy Christian clean cowboy romance or something like that. And I was like, wow. But she does very well 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: For herself because she's found that niche niche niche audience that existed somewhere, nobody else had really found it, started tailoring her cowboy romance to that. And then now if she wants to can scale back out from there but find your niche. Build some personas so you kind of know who you're writing to or for, use that to find more audiences or couple that with tools, you know, AI or SparkToro to help you find more audiences and then start the cycle all over again. Yeah? 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Matt: Great. Have a good day, everybody. 

Lauren: Thanks for listening, everyone. We'll see you next week.

Matt: Later.