Don’t Forget the Most Important Influencers
Don’t Forget the Most Important Influencers
As you near the end of your manuscript, publishers and marketing teams will tell you to start gathering a list of “influencers” to help get your book out there. They will encourage you to always begin any influencer request with either a personal connection you may have with the influencer or a reason why you believe that particular person may have cause to be interested in your book. This can be a bit stressful as an author, as you try to figure out who might recommend your book who holds enough respect and reach to propel others into purchasing a copy of your newly released project.
Who Are These Influencers?
The most important influencers in any author’s life are your local bookstore owners. These retailers are often over-looked. No matter the genre, someone who sells books automatically holds the credentials to be an expert about books, especially those on their own store shelves. Customers listen to bookstore owners- they seek out their opinion, knowing that bookstore owners are exposed to a whole bunch more books than the average reader.
The best news- creating personal connections with local bookstore owners is a whole lot easier than you think!
Twice a year, The Munce Group, sponsors the Christian Product Expo and any author is invited to attend. It happens in January in Pennsylvania and Nashville in July. You can meet bookstore owners from all over the country, learn about their communities and stores, and find out what types of books and products their customers are requesting to be created. You may even get your next big book idea there! Through Brookstone Creative, you can even set up a book signing, where you have a designated time and space to meet with bookstore owners and tell them about your baby, ahem, I mean book.
Influencing an Influencer
But remember, building a group of influencers is always first and foremost about personal connection. This isn’t an opportunity to shove your book under people’s noses and tell them why you think it’s the one book everybody needs in their stocking this year. It’s an opportunity to build relationships. To offer encouragement. To hear their stories, their struggles, and why they feel called to minister to their communities through a bookstore. Because when you are asking an influencer to recommend your book, what you are really asking is for them to recommend you. So be a person they feel glad to have met. Help them understand your passion for your book’s message.
Preparing to Meet Influencers
Before you buy your plane ticket and pack your bags for the next Christian Product Expo, I’d highly suggest you prayerfully consider how you might encourage and bring value to these bookstore influencers. Ask some strategic questions:
What might I give away to them that they could use in their store?
Would you be willing to pray with each of them as they stop by your booth?
Have you concisely thought through who you feel called to reach with your book and why? It needs to go beyond, “I feel called to tell my story”. Who specifically needs to hear it and for what reason? What will they gain from reading it?
When You Connect with an Influencer
After spending two years in a row at CPE, I can’t wait to go back. I consider these influencers my friends. I know about their stores, their families, and their struggles. I’ve heard the miracle stories of marriages restored, addictions broken, and people becoming saved through the ministry of a local Christian bookstore. I realize these influencers are being the hands and feet of Jesus often through the spine of a book cover, much like I am as a writer. And while I hope they are eager to recommend my books to others in their communities, what I hope even more is that after seeing me each year at CPE they will say, “It was great to see my fellow Kingdom builder”.
Influence always is born out of relationship and shared vision. So be an influential author, whom influencers desire to promote.
by Erica Wiggenhorn
