SFFMP 172: Making It as a Newer Author, Marketing YA Fantasy, and are Vampires Still “In”?
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.
You can visit Caroline on her website or Facebook, and check out her books on Amazon.
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