Finding Your Market

I might be due to the fact that I recently took part in a Facebook discussion about the difficulties authors face in marketing books on social media, but this morning I remembered an incident which may be relevant, being about books, if not about reading.

Many years ago I worked for a company which provided fruit machines and juke boxes to pubs, and was asked to bring order to the chaotic library which provided records for the juke boxes and which nobody was maintaining. Whilst sorting through the room’s contents, before shelving the records and creating a cataloguing system, I came across a quantity of explicit pornographic books and magazines hidden under the mess of vinyl. As it was lunchtime I left them on a table while I went out to get food and, while passing through the repair & servicing workshop on the ground floor of the building, I passed the time of day with one of the mechanics and told him of my discovery.

Imagine my surprise when I returned from lunch to find that the magazines and books had all disappeared.

Happily in this instance I was in possession of a product exactly right for an enthusiastic ‘readership’ located nearby. All it took was one small ‘advertisement’ for word to go round and ‘sales’ blossomed. If I’d had the stock I could have shifted that merchandise a thousand times over.

I think this memory reminds me that in our globalised society there is a market for our books, it’s just much harder to find the needles in the haystack. However, even if it seems hard going at times, it would be that much more difficult if we didn’t have social media. And I for one am grateful for that.