SFFMP 172: Making It as a Newer Author, Marketing YA Fantasy, and are Vampires Still “In”?

March 6, 2018 SFFpodcast Uncategorized

Like many new authors, Caroline Peckham‘s first series, a YA fantasy adventure, The Rise of Isaac, didn’t sell as well as she’d hoped. For her second series, she did a lot of market research and switched to a more popular type of YA fantasy, vampires in a contemporary paranormal setting. She also adopted some more effective marketing tactics and had a successful launch last fall. She’s since released a second “V Games” novel and is editing a third, and the series continues to do well, months after the initial launch.

Here are a few of the details that we discussed on the show:

Some of the challenges of marketing young adult fiction as a self-published author.
What made Caroline decide to switch from one type of YA fantasy to another.
Concerns about finding readers when one’s target audience doesn’t have credit cards and doesn’t shop on Amazon.
Why Caroline has had more success targeting adult audiences who happen to enjoy young adult fiction.
Whether vampires are too crowded a niche to get into or there are still opportunities.
How Caroline first found reviewers by seeking out readers in her genre who had reviewed books similar to hers.
Finding reviewers on Goodreads and then moving them over to an easily manageable Facebook group.
Why Caroline makes her ARC reviewer Facebook group public rather than private and lets people who find her through the platform in to get free review copies.
Using the Werble App to create animations that can be used on Facebook to help with promotions.
Pricing a Book 1 at 99 cents or 99p in KU to keep it higher in the rankings and bring in readers for the rest of the full-priced series.
Which social media platforms Caroline uses and why she didn’t do much with Wattpad, despite it being a popular destination for younger readers.
Caroline’s experiments with Facebook advertising and how she found out that the clicks she got weren’t converting that well.
Whether vampire stories seem to do better in the US or the UK.