Was John Locke Wrong?
The past two weeks have been a whirlwind for me. First, September 15-16, was my opening show at Comikaze Expo in Los Angeles, California, which had an estimated 40,000 people. Then this weekend I was in Las Vegas, Nevada for the Las Vegas Comic Expo, though I wasn’t an exhibitor at that event.
But, while I was in Vegas, I went around to a few local bookstores, not the chains, and had some awesome meaningful conversations with them about the difficulty new authors have in getting their books out into the public, especially when not with a Big 6 publishing house.
The women I spoke with were very supportive, letting me drop off my promotional books with them and leaving giant stacks of fliers on their front desks. But, while we were talking, we got on the subject of the trade shows and conventions available to authors, other than general book fairs, and social media. Nothing beats “boots on the ground” marketing so to speak.
I write historically and mythology inspired fantasy novels. That’s a pretty niche category when you think about it. It’s not general fiction, it’s not mystery, romance, science fiction, or even general wizards and sorceresses’ fantasy, it is historical inspired fantasy, which means the people who read my book must like history or mythology.
Trade shows, fairs, and conventions specifically for science-fiction/fantasy novels are few and far between, however, there are crap-loads of comic-book, sci-fi, fantasy expos.
John Locke says know your target audience.
While I may not have many options when it comes to trade shows, the comic-conventions are about the closest thing I’ll get to a real writing expo. But, that still leaves me with one problem. Comic conventions are, by definition, catered to people who read books with pictures in them. That, obviously, eliminates a lot of my audience.
But, I think I did one thing smart at Comikaze. I hired an artist to do comic-book styled pictures of my characters. Then, I put his art on a big banner and put that in front of my booth. This drew A LOT of attention to me because now I had a picture to go along with my book and comic book fans love their pictures. It gave them something to relate to.
By doing this strategy, I sold over 100 books at Comikaze in two days. Is that awesome? I think so for an unknown author and being my first published book with no writing resume. But it did prove John Locke’s point, know your audience. If I had gone to Comikaze and just piled up my books on a table, I am certain I would have gotten maybe 15-20 books sold. However, by using something that I knew comic book fans would like, I easily increased my traffic and quadrupled my sales.
The lesson here is John Locke was right, know your audience. If you wrote the latest erotic paranormal romance novel, don’t expect to sell a lot going to a strict religious book fair.
