Marketing children’s books is no simple task.
Let me explain. With books aimed at adult or young adult readers, you are appealing directly to the person interested in your story. Your marketing campaigns can be tailored to the person most likely to purchase your book and be refined to a great degree of granularity. You can drill down your ads to people who enjoy reading cozy murder mysteries set in New England in the 1950s if you so desire.
With children’s books, you are trying to sell your stories to gatekeepers: family members, educators, and librarians. As a book marketer, you try to guess what might interest these gatekeepers and make broad assumptions. Very often, we think of them solely in demographic terms, say, families with children under the age of five. We imagine that ALL these families will be interested in purchasing the book simply because they might be clubbed together in a census. (At a more insidious level, books featuring white cultures are for all kids while {insert race or ethnicity here} books are for specific types of families, but that’s a whole different discussion.)
I made this rookie mistake when creating my first marketing plan for Yali Books. My basic assumption was that the South Asian diaspora, particularly those of Indian descent, would form my audience pool. (I actually used census data to determine the size of my market. Cringe.) I figured I would reach out to desi families—members of the growing South Asian diaspora—and invite them to celebrate our unique mishmash cultures, rich with detail and full of quirks. My theoretical audience comprised a big group of readers, parents, and families who, like me, were deeply immersed in their heritage cultures. I figured this group would immediately recognize the value of books about South Asia. They would be drawn to stories that presented curious facts or fascinating history from the region. If I thought something was interesting, I reasoned that ALL my fellow desis would also find it equally enthralling. They would instantly snap up any book I published about South Asia simply because it existed when few others did.
I was wrong.
The books I thought would immediately appeal to any desi family did not move the sales needle. At events, I would have potential buyers flip through the books, quietly return them to the table, and slink away. I didn’t understand why my community was rejecting my beautiful books, and I was hurt and confused by their lack of interest.
The problem: I did not understand what community meant.
In 2018, Yali Books was approached by Ameya Narvankar, a graphic designer from India seeking a publisher for his Master’s thesis project. Ameya developed a children’s book as part of his graduate-level study on the representation of LGBTQ+ communities in Indian media. He found that desi children’s literature, in particular, had a near-complete lack of positive representation of same-sex families. He wanted to develop a book that presented a wholesome lesbian relationship for young readers while addressing homophobia in a child-friendly way. We thought long and hard about accepting this manuscript for publication. How will the “desi community” react to this story for children? Would there be a backlash? Would there be calls to ban the book or put Ameya in any danger? Log kya kahenge?
In 2020, with some trepidation, we published Ritu Weds Chandni. Almost immediately, the book attracted attention. Not from the detractors we imagined but delighted, enthusiastic, crying-tears-of-joy readers, activists, and advocates. Families who saw their story reflected in the pages of the book. Parents who wanted beautiful brown gay couples represented in children’s books. Ritu Weds Chandni completely upended my notions of community. I realized that desi readers are not a monolithic set of people united by demographics. Our communities are formed in a kaleidoscope: Our myriad identities and interests shift and interact to create a world full of nuance. Ritu Weds Chandni did not appeal to all desi readers. It also did not push away all desis. Instead, it drew toward itself its own community, eager and welcoming of this particular story.
I no longer set out to publish books with the intention of reaching all South Asian families or all desi readers. With each book we have published after Ritu Weds Chandni, I embraced the notion that each book has its own niche that it fits into. Dancing in Thatha’s Footsteps encourages boys to explore Bharatanatyam and found its advocates in male dancers and Bharatanatyam teachers. Lioness of Punjab united feminist Sikhs seeking stories of powerful female role models. Families from the Kutch region in Gujarat fell in love with Kesar and the Lullaby Birds, a gorgeous showcase of their folk art and language. Each story is crafted with an audience in mind, but once it is out in the world, the book pulls together its micro-community of supporters, united in their love of the story and taking it upon themselves to champion the book and its creators.
Redefining audience as communities
If you are here as a fellow publisher or author-publisher looking for tips on marketing your books, this would be my most important one.
Don’t try to appeal to everyone. Find your book community.
There is no generic book. Each book is written to appeal to a specific buyer, whether consciously or not. If this buyer was not defined during the development of the book, it is up to the marketing team to really focus its message and reach the right people. This group will immediately “get it”; that is, they will understand the value of your book and want to share it with others with absolutely no prompting from you. They will advocate for it and promote it to their networks because they want to, not because you asked them to do so or paid them to say something positive.
If you are still developing your book, you have the opportunity to involve your core readers and buyers upfront. You can solicit feedback, refine your message, or offer co-development opportunities. Instead of thinking of writing and publishing as a solitary process that ends with the big book reveal, you could think of it as a collaborative project to create something meaningful and lasting.
On the flip side, do not be disheartened if everyone doesn’t love your book. You just need to find your community.
A tool to find community: SparkToro
Social media is a blessing for marketers. I know, I know. I can hear you groan but hear me out. Most authors and publishers approach social media with a mix of terror and disdain because they assume that they have to drum up a big following overnight by jumping on every inane trend and relentlessly posting memes (more power to you if you are able to do that in addition to creating books!).
Nothing could be further from the truth. Using the community approach, you succeed if your community is talking about your book. Your job as a book marketer is to enable these conversations (send the right people your books!) and let them spread the word. One of the tools I use to find community networks is SparkToro. If you haven’t used it before, it gives you a great starting point. Enter a specific theme or topic and find media outlets, websites, blogs, and social accounts in your particular niche. You can discover related topics and find relevant hashtags to add to your marketing campaigns. SparkToro offers a generous free plan. If you find that you need to use them regularly, they offer more robust plans for a fee.
You made it to the end, woohoo!
I hope you enjoyed our inaugural post at Book By Book. Suhani and I hope to share insights from our experience building a children’s press from the ground up. We make mistakes every day. We also succeed, albeit in modest ways. We often joke that we are building the airplane while flying at 30,000 feet. But we are having loads of fun along the way, and we hope you will too.
We are glad you are here.
Well said Ambika - I can take a few tips from here.