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“Discoverability” is the hottest topic at any trade show or writers’ conference and gets dedicated at least a dozen blog posts a day on the internet; but it seems that no one has cracked it, really. The truth is, readers don’t have a hard time finding their next read. Sure, visibility on bookshelves (virtual or physical) has an impact, as some readers pick up books directly there, but if there is one thing more powerful than anything else in literature, it’s word of mouth.

A few months ago, I interviewed Mark Edwards, the first indie author to ever reach #1 on the Kindle UK bestseller list with his co-author Louise Voss. I asked him about “metadata”, because that was supposedly how they got their big break. Here’s his answer:

“We did something interesting for the second book, Catch Your Death. We called it: “Catch Your Death (For fans of Dan Brown & Stieg Larsson)”. This quickly became a controversial point, with people starting to talk about it in The Bookseller magazine. But I actually believe, to this day, that it didn’t make any difference to the sales. What really made a difference, and this is a lesson for all indie authors, is that we were patient and hardworking in building a readership.”

Authors are often so obsessed at the idea of “reaching new readers” that they forget that the reader is not only a “customer,” it can be their first and foremost marketing ambassador. Readers can work for you if you convince them to. This post explains how to do that.

The first door-to-door sales

Of course, you first need to “build a readership.” That is another one of those concepts that everyone mentions but no one really goes into detail for. If you are a first-time author with little or no following, you need to “acquire” your first readers.

There is no secret for this part, as Mark Edwards explains: “We hand-sold every copy of Killing Cupid in the first 3-4 months: every single sale was hard work.” You won’t find your first 1,000 readers at once. You will sell them (or give them) your book one at a time.

In the first few months of your author-marketer career, you should be like a door-to-door salesman: identifying people who’d potentially be interested in your work and going to meet them. This DOESN’T mean you should go for the hard sell. It means you should start with people close to you (friends, friends of friends). Starting local (geographically) to find your first readers can be a safe approach (this is a good example), especially if your story has elements that will appeal to a local audience. Otherwise, you can try very targeted online communities.

In any case, you first need to build a relationship with those people, whether it’s in social media or in “real life.” This is why you should start “marketing” long before you hit the publish button: getting your first 50 loyal readers is going to be hard work.

The referral program

Now that you have those first few readers, you can start turning them into your own personal ambassadors. The first and foremost requirement for this to happen is to have a great book. If your writing is strong and compelling enough, word of mouth might happen naturally.

More often than not, however, this is not enough. You need to slightly and subtly push your readers to spread your work. Author and marketing expert Seth Godin says it very well: “People want to share books, but you need to make it easy!”

This is where the referral program comes in: it is designed to make it easy and attractive for your readers to share your work. Startups and small businesses have been using them for years, as it basically gets their customers to do their marketing for them.

Let’s take the example of Dropbox. The company’s growth exploded when they implemented their referral program that allowed you to gain 250mb of free extra storage space for every friend you invited and who signed up to use their service. Since, companies like Uber or Airbnb also have grown exponentially thanks to their referral programs.

Here are the basic principles of a referral program, and to create one for your readers.

• Choose a goal: that can be a book you want to sell, or a newsletter you want authors to sign up for.
• Choose a medium: tell your ambassadors how to spread the word about your goal. You should be able to track who does and who doesn’t.
• Give an incentive: this is the little push your ambassadors need to do something they’re already inclined to doing

3 actionable examples

Of course, this remains purely theoretical, but once you’ve figured out the 3 points above, you can build pretty powerful marketing strategies for your books that will require little work once they’re in place. As I’m feeling generous, I’ll give you 3 practical examples that I’ve already seen working out there.

To grow your mailing list

1. Send your “ambassadors” an email inviting them to tell a friend about your writing. Give them a personal, trackable link to your website that they can share, and tell them about the incentive (see below)!
2. On your website, incentivize readers to sign up to your newsletter by offering a free book. Mark Dawson is a good example for this: http://markjdawson.com/
3. Incentive: If a reader signs up through one of the ambassador links, reward your ambassador with a free book.

To increase your reviews on a particular book

1. Email your mailing list about this book asking them to leave a review for your book (if they haven’t done so already). Tell them about the incentive.
2. Ask them to take a screenshot of their review and send it to you via email
3. Incentive: Reward every review with another free book

WARNING: It is against Amazon’s review policies to “incentivize” reviewers. This is why you should always do it through email, and never mention this at the end of your book. This should allow you to minimize the risk of Amazon finding out.

To increase your sales on a particular book

1. Run a promotion (discount) on the book and send an email to all the people in your newsletter who you know have read your book.
2. Asking them to tell their friends about your promotion on their Facebook timeline and to tag your Facebook author page when doing so. Tell them about the incentive.
3. Incentive: Reward every “share” you are notified of by sending that reader a free copy of another book.

Conclusions

As you can see, setting up a referral program not only requires that you have a loyal readership (even a small one), it also requires you to be ready to offer your “ambassadors” free content as an incentive.

This shouldn’t scare you, though, as it’s quite normal to reward people when they do you a favour! As Seth says, make it easy for your readers to share your books, and they will do it.

Ricardo Fayet is a co-founder of Reedsy, an online marketplace that enables authors to directly access the wealth of editing and design talent that has started leaving major publishers over the past few years. A technology and startup enthusiast, he likes to imagine how small players will build the future of publishing. He also blogs about book marketing and conducts weekly author interviews on the Reedsy blog.

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