Engaging with your readers is one of the crucial tasks of every author’s journey. Loyal readers are silent observers and they will give the outside insights into the response of your books. Who knows, you may even be surprised at what they have to say!
If you want to know why engaging with your readers and followers is essential, you can read this blog to get a better perception – Why Having Real Conversations with Your Readers Is as Good as Research?
There are several ways through which you can engage with your readers. In this blog, we will see some of the conventional as well as unconventional approaches to engage and converse with your readers.
How Can You Engage with Your Readers Through Different Mediums?
Many think that social media is the only way you can engage with your readers. But it isn’t true. If you want to really make a mark in the minds of your readers, then there are several other forums to take advantage of. Here are a top few.
1. Social Media
Well, you guessed it right! Social media is one of the top engagement tools that are easy to use. One thing to note is that social media is an extensive space with lots of followers and, therefore, you truly have to put in efforts to make a mark. It can be pretty intimidating to see other authors having thousands of engagement on your posts. But don’t get disheartened by that. 50 comments on your posts are worth more to you as an author than 5000 likes and 5 comments.
People take effort to comment and this means that the person has taken a real interest to spend some time to comment on your post. So, keep working on having real conversations with your followers. Show them how much you value your opinion. Be honest and polite and most of all, regularly engage to slowly and steadily build a loyal fanbase.
2. Reddit
Technically, you may think that Reddit comes under social media, but not many think Reddit when we say social media. Reddit is a great forum to hold conversations about books, author life and other general topics. If your target readers are active in Reddit, then it wouldn’t hurt to log in and have a conversation a few times in a week.
3. Emails
Don’t believe anyone who says emails are a thing of past. No matter how much we have come to depend on social media, emails are still the one thing that we can never imagine not utilizing.
The main reason why we suggest you engage through emails is that value of the responses. You may not get so many reactions as you expect, but every single reply holds much value than a social media comment. It takes so much effort for the people to actually think and type an email when compared to commenting ‘Love it’ on social media.
As you send out your regular emails, occasionally ask a question to the subscribers and let them know that you will read every single email. No matter if it is useful to you or not, reply to every single person who has cared enough to reply you back to show them that their opinion matters too.
4. AllAuthor’ Book Discussion
AllAuthor has a simple Book Discussion feature on every book page that lets you converse with the readers about the specific book. The beauty of this feature is that only readers who have read that book or interested in that book will care to engage in the conversation, which further adds a great value.
To start the conversation, you can add a few questions from the list of template questions present. Any reader or author of AllAuthor can participate in the discussion, like the comment or leave a comment of their own.
If you already have an account in AllAuthor, then make use of this great feature now. Head to your Book Profile, scroll down and see the option for Book Discussion.
You can even promote this book discussion across your social media accounts and mention in emailers to get a healthy group of people to have great conversations about your books!
If you don’t have an account on AllAuthor, you can easily create one and use this Book Discussion feature for free!
