Building Reader Communities: Strategies for Fostering Loyal Fanbases

In this day and age authors simply cannot sit on the sidelines and have their books sold only through publishing channels and organic marketing.

The book publishing market is highly saturated now with the number of authors having increased dramatically.

To find a remedy for this situation every author must work on their author profile and build an online persona which they can utilise to create loyal fanbases.

Every author must become an online influencer and influence people and create online fans and then the fans will do the marketing automatically for the author.

This seems like a very complicated solution but this kind of strategy has the potential to bring in a lot more readers than any other conventional technique of book marketing.

That is why in this blog we are going to discuss a few strategies that will help you foster loyal fanbases if done correctly.

Strategies To Foster Loyal Fanbases

Instagram Strategy

The very first strategy we are going to talk about is going to be the Instagram strategy and it is simply because Instagram is the most popular social media platform today.

You have every content creator out there trying to gain popularity on Instagram and it is simply possible because of short format content.

We are primarily talking about Reels. Reels have the power to completely transform your social media reach and all you have to do this to keep on making them.

The mistake people make when creating Reels is that they only promote their products in Reels but those kinds of reels are not worth sharing.

The Reels worth sharing should be universal and should have something interesting to say within them and it can be information or something cool or even something funny.

You can create Reels in the form of showing your journey as an author or telling people about the hidden challenges in writing a book or something that catches the eye.

Just make sure that your content is not just marketing content and that it is something that other people can share with other people in general. That will get you views and then you can keep on interacting with your followers.

However, you must remember one thing and it is that your content should be related to your books and that relation might be very distant but it should be related.

If you start making content about food vlogging and one fine day you just promote your book then that will be difficult for your audience to understand and interact with because they are accustomed to one kind of content.

Facebook Strategy

The Facebook strategy is going to be a little bit different from the Instagram strategy and also similar in some ways.

The similar part is going to be the short format videos because Instagram as well as Facebook are run by the same company which means you can either share your Instagram Reels on Facebook or you can create similar reels and upload them on Facebook.

You can also upload long format videos on Facebook but you should make sure they follow the 1:1 aspect ratio because it is the most popular video type on Facebook.

After you do that, you must focus on something else which is very effective on Facebook and we are talking about Facebook groups.

If you want to create a fanbase then you should start interacting on similar kinds of groups you can find related to books and authorship.

Within those groups, you should start promoting your content and also help others with their questions and just be generally good and helpful and also market your book and start gaining a fan base.

Once you start gaining followers you can then create your own page and even your own group and start building a community.

You can then provide exclusive content to your community and give them updates on book sales and exclusive offers related to your books.

It’s all about being patient and working on a community.

YouTube Strategy

The only thing similar between the YouTube and the Instagram strategy is the short video content because short videos are also extremely popular on YouTube.

They have a different name on YouTube and they are called Shorts instead of Reels however the concept is very similar and yet there is a very unique method of using short videos on YouTube.

Creators usually have long videos and that is the bread and butter of YouTube and they edit out small portions of those long-format videos into shorts so that those shorts can bring people to the original long-format video.

You should create interesting long-format videos and create smaller Shorts of them which can then make your long-format videos popular.

However, if you only want to create short format videos then again you can definitely do that.

The YouTube strategy is not really is strategy as it is patience because you need to keep on uploading on a perfect schedule and you need to keep on bringing out new and interesting concepts regarding your authorship.

However, promoting content on YouTube is very time-consuming and the results take the longest in YouTube if your content is not interesting enough or not unique enough to be noticed by the algorithm.

To get around that you can of course promote the content and when you promote it you are going to get attention but that might not be the ideal attention because when a video gets promoted it can be seen by nearly anyone and not really people into reading so you should keep that in mind as well.

Apart from that you can utilise any platform out there whether it is something like Discord or even something like LinkedIn to promote your books and the strategy will be similar and it will just be regular content and shareable content as well as regular interaction.

Interaction is all about how you communicate with people and how regularly you do it day in and day out.

We hope this blog has been helpful for you to understand all the nuances involved in building reader communities.

If you are a new author just starting out and you simply do not have the experience or the time to follow a strategy or you need the best kind of guidance regarding author promotion strategies and even help with author profile creation or publishing then we are here to help you.

We are Orange Publishers and we are one of the most reputed legacy publishing houses in India. We are the only publishing house to bring together the reliability of traditional publishing with the convenience of self-publishing into the most amazing publishing plans for authors.

We will help you in all aspects of publishing whether it is editing the manuscript or formatting it as well as printing and publishing as well as distribution and even copyright.

Additionally, we will provide you with guidance and support as well as promotional material for all your social media platforms so that you can run marketing campaigns for the book as you like.

We welcome you to visit our website and check out everything we do.