How Authors Create Readers

Make the reader connect with you even before he has read your book.

It was impossible to imagine this earlier. Digital media has made it a reality today. Stakes are high and the attention span is limited. Apply creativity to pitch yourself aggressively and attract the reader in all possible ways. As an author, you need to come down from your ivory towers and seek the attention of the reader flooded with multiple options to pick up. The story of your life should have enough meat to keep his interest alive.

Being a story-teller is your biggest strength and you need to leverage on that. Just like the story between the covers, your life has engaging stories to tell. To begin with, freeze the story of your struggle in life. Make the reader imagine your life has been hell. You have weathered storms and survived odds. Tell the world you have done odd jobs to survive. You have sold garments. You have been a tour guide. You have been a tutor. You have delivered pizza. Introduce emotional angles and highlight the insults you have swallowed like bitter pills. Make it a mushy yarn to convince the reader the journey of your life has been full of tragedies.

If the story of odd jobs appears done to death, tell the story of your unhappy childhood due to quarrelsome parents. Add episodes of physical or sexual abuse to make the reader feel emotionally shaken. Proceed to tell the story of your love relationship and explain how tough it was to come out of it without scars. Position yourself as a victim who fought back and bounced back. The cathartic effect of writing a book healed you from within and gave you the strength to churn out the inspirational text. Every individual has the power to inspire people and that is precisely what you tried to do through the literary effort.

If you have been a lucky person with a support system that encouraged you to pursue creative writing, tell the world you owe your creative growth to the family and friends who wanted you to excel in this domain. The positive outlook and the pleasure of writing your story should make the reader feel interested in your life. Let him fall in love with your ideal world teeming with supportive people. Express gratitude for every bit of success to them and become humble in the eyes of your potential reader. Play the trick and press the right buttons. Share stories of your fears in life. Make the worst fears and anxieties capture your reader's imagination. Do not hide your stories of rejection. If you have been rejected twenty times by publishers and agents, there is no harm if you inflate the number. Make it two hundred times. Tell your reader that the painful rejection of a manuscript should not generate suicidal thoughts or make you give up your passion. Make the reader feel gratified with your self-confidence and resilience. When the reader hears such uplifting tales, your book is a winner all the way.

Reveal the details of your writing schedule. The reader loves to hear when you write and how you write. He wants to know how you find the time to write, how you balance it with your regular job. Make no mistake here. Tell the reader you have a very hectic schedule. When the family sleeps, you stay awake to pen down your thoughts. You scribble away on small strips of paper whenever you find time for yourself while travelling in a bus or inside the metro. You have to juggle many roles but you still follow your passion for writing. Make it more compelling with a crisis phase thrown in? add a health challenge you fought bravely and recovered. Your reader loves an author who fights all odds to become a hero just like the protagonist in the story.

Your faith in God and the desire to write. This is a powerful combination to try. Position yourself as a god-fearing person who believes in miracles. Tell the reader that your words are magical because a divine power made this book possible. When you credit everything to God and his supreme powers, you come across as a down-to-earth author. You can build a community of readers based on the divine aspect.

Your reader feels good when you upload stylish photographs? nice family snaps or a professionally clicked portfolio that shows the author wants to be a role model. Hold your book, flash a smile, and get clicked in posh locales, inside five-star hotel lobbies, poolside, and resorts. Get more likes, comments, and shares as the reader love to see this avatar. Your fun side and indulgence in epicurean delights grab the attention of the reader.

Your story stays incomplete if you do not tell the reader about your family, your travels, your hobbies, and the next big book in the making. Your life partner or girlfriend is an important element of your narrative. The reader wants to know the world you have explored, the places you have been to. Tell the reader about your other interests such as scuba diving, bungee-jumping, or any other adventure sport. Do not make the reader think you sit huddled in a corner and write. Show you are immensely creative? you can sing and paint and dance. You pursue different kinds of activities at the same time. The reader loves to hear secrets. Unravel something about your next writing project. Give him the thrilling news about the new subjects that grab your attention. Make it appear challenging and something you would love to take up. Say you can switch genres? even if you have no such plans on the anvil. The mere mention of it gets you publicity. It is something you need to build your brand image as a versatile author?

Make it a point to mention how critics have lapped up your book. The influencer community has been paid to create hype around your book. Add how the synopsis and the sample chapter released online fetched pre-orders of more than a thousand copies. Your reader is not going to cross-check it and he has no means to do so. If you can build a clean, lovable image, you can keep dishing out lies after lies. In case you belong to the middle class or even if you do not, there is a great benefit of raising your background issue. Your not-so-privileged upbringing is good content for another human-interest story. The upper echelons of the literary firmament may not like it but the vast, burgeoning middle class is most likely to engage with you and celebrate your rise up the social ladder as an arriviste? Buying your book becomes a duty, an obligation to express solidarity with you. Even if you live in a big city, add some years of living in a small town to present yourself as a sensitive author who has observed life closely and has great emotional connect with small towns. Then the emerging class of readers in small towns will crown you as their literary rock star and make your book an instant best-seller even before it reaches the market. Such is the power of social media feeds. If your reader is not told anything about the book and its film rights under negotiation, then the reader feels let down. Never leave out this crucial aspect. Well, you can always claim to have negotiations in progress and these are not going to fructify. When nothing works out, say you backed out of the film deal because of the unfavourable terms and conditions. Till then, make the reader feel happy he is picking up an author whose novel is soon going to be made into a big-budget film. If possible, highlight this fact on the book cover. Rope in academics to interview you and invite them as guests to launch your magnum opus. Their presence beside you adds credibility to you as an author. Moreover, they are bored and fed up with teaching classics and they want their share of the media limelight before retirement sets in. When you are interviewed at the book launch, make sure the RJ or moderator raises emotional questions. Make the reader feel stirred to order the book instantly without waiting for a discount.

At the end of it, if you are left with the time and energy to share further details, tell something about the book: The story within the pages. Make it appealing to the target audience. A character introduction or a catchy dialogue creates interest. This will determine the actual size of readership? help in converting potential readers into actual readers who are ready to hail you as the next literary sensation. Earlier, it was an interest in the book that led to an interest in the life of the writer. Now, it is an interest in his life that creates further interest in his book.