Test Your Assumptions About Reaching an Audience

Do you crave having more readers?

Do you know how many readers you have? Most people have a lot less than they expect.

In many nonfiction subjects, selling 40,000 copies will qualify you as having a subject-matter best seller. Sounds good, doesn't it?

Yet, how many of those books are read? If you book makes a good gift (such as a book about husbands keeping the house clean), it may sell like hotcakes . . . but not be opened very often.

For many nonfiction categories, any part of a best seller will be read by fewer than 4,000 people. You could stand on a street corner and reach more people in less time than it takes to write a book.

What's the alternative? I suggest online book reviews. Here's what I learned.

I hit my online book reviewing stride in 2001, just after the dot-com bubble started to collapse. Many commentators had been repeating the statement that the Internet's usage was growing by 100 percent every 90 days. Well, that wasn't true, but no one knew it then; growth was rapid but not that rapid.

I found myself mulling over the implications of online book sellers' success in attracting book buyers and wondering what it meant for authors, reviewers, and readers in the future. While some argued that almost all books would eventually be bought online, I was skeptical. Book store browsing is a major pleasure for most readers. As book stores became ever more pleasant, their attraction grew for me and I was spending more and more time in them.

But before I bought anything I usually checked it out online to see what people other than the publisher had to say. Was it possible that online comments would be the dominant influence on book buying at some point? I thought that level of influence could happen. After all, few of us know anyone who reads very many books.

You cannot usually rely on your best friend to give you a view on dozens of books you are considering for the one volume you'll read this month or year.
Brand name book reviewers could become important and emerge from the internet. After all, movie reviews are dominated by a few high profile people who are regularly seen on television and write in newspapers and magazines. With newspapers and magazines shrinking their book review sections, could there be an opening for online reviewers? It seemed possible to me.

Where did matters stand in 2001? Online booksellers were secretive about their numbers but public information showed that lots of people came to these sites: How many of them read one of my reviews?

There was reason to be pessimistic. In those days, most books carried only eight customer reviews on the top page for that item. You could click to go back and see older reviews, but that process was slow and annoying with a dial-up connection. For a best seller that received many comments, a review might be up on the top page for only a few hours.

Then I got an unexpected clue. I was invited to provide a photographs of the Top Reviewers section of an online bookseller's site. The original software was set up to load a photograph from the reviewer's site rather than putting the photograph on their computers. That decision provided a major breech in the company's secrecy. Why? Every time someone clicked on a page with my photograph on it, the hit registered on my Web site's counter. The hit quantities were huge and exploding!

By doing a little assuming and extrapolating, it became clear that within five years more than five million people annually could be reading my reviews online.

To put this conjecture in perspective, I could reasonably expect that many more people would read my book reviews than ever read any of the books written by major business authors including Peter Drucker. Forget writing books; writers who want to be influential should just write book reviews!

How did it turn out? My current estimate is that annual readership of my reviews includes over eight million people. Pretty nice for ten years of writing reviews!

Seed Newsvine

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