Author Archetypes and Marketing Strategies

Your Author Archetype is Enlightener

The main thing that characterizes the author-Enlightener is the desire to change the world for the better. He sees its imperfections and cannot stand aside and be silent. He has his own vision—what to do and how—he is not afraid of big tasks and is ready for anything so that his ideas spread as widely as possible.

If you are one of the Enlighteners, your books are your mouthpiece: they provide an opportunity to explore the situation, provide evidence, and convince readers that you are right.

The key condition to success for you is the presence of your own teaching or concepts about significant problems in society.

Motivation

Enlighteners are eager to do something meaningful. They live under the slogan “If not me, then who?”

When people get into their information field, their views and hence, their actions, change. This is the main motivation of the Enlightener.

Successful Enlighteners become opinion leaders. The wider your audience and the more recognition your ideas receive, the higher the motivation.

Optimal Creative Strategy

Books allow the Enlightener to enter into a dialogue with the reader and draw his attention to some important problem. It can be both fiction and nonfiction.

An example is an autobiographical book written by a woman who has experienced domestic violence. Telling her story, the author performs several functions at once:

Draws attention to the problem
Shows readers in a similar situation that they are not alone
Explains how to survive what happened
Demonstrates that this can and should be discussed

In a word, the Enlightener contributes to the formation of culture and public opinion.

For the Enlightener, books are just one way to communicate with an audience. He can also hold public speeches, participate in debates, write articles, hold consultations, etc. Social activities can be both the main occupation of the Enlightener and a hobby that does not bring in any income. In any case, the most important thing for him is to find new supporters.

Your Income

Income from the sale of books depends on their number. If your goal is to provide for yourself, you need to offer the reader a series of works, united either by a theme, characters, or some other elements that allow you to pay attention to a particular problem.

For example, if your topic is healthy eating, you could talk about different ways to lose weight. And if you have chosen acceptance of yourself and your body as a theme, it makes sense to write romance novels, the main characters of which have a non-standard appearance.

You do not need any readers, but only those who are actively interested in your topic or may be interested in it due to their life situation. Thus, you spend resources only once on attracting a reader, and then you sell all your books to him.

If you have only one work, then you can earn from it only under the following conditions:

Your topic is popular and the world is full of people actively looking for answers to these questions.
You propose something new or repackage old ideas in a way that attracts mass attention.
You are actively involved in promoting your ideas in general, and the book in particular.

In addition to books, an Enlightener can make money from public speaking, giving advice, or selling courses and lectures. You can also arrange a paid subscription to exclusive materials.

Marketing Strategy

How Does the Reader Find Your Book?

Books devoted to the problems of society are most often read according to recommendations from:

Friends, colleagues or relatives
Authorities in the field
Journalists, bloggers, or critics (reviews can be both positive and negative)
Teachers, consultants, and trainers.

The recommendation can also come from a book marketplace, a reader reviews service (Goodreads), or a discount service (BookBub). Direct advertising will also work if it is framed as a recommendation (we will talk about this below).

Thus, the main task of the author is to form these recommendations. Fortunately, this is not difficult, because many media outlets and bloggers are ready to talk about socially important topics, and the author who writes about such things is a welcome guest for them.

The Reader's Path to Purchase

After a reader hears or sees a book recommendation, he will look for where to buy or read it. The author needs to make sure that his book is on all platforms of self-publishing, and it is easy to find it by word-of-mouth recommendation. The title and author’s name should be easy to remember, and the book cover should be easily recognizable.

At the beginning and end of the book, emphasize the importance of the issue raised by the author and encourage the reader to tell other people about your book.

The author must decide where he wants to take the reader after reading the book. This may be a call to some kind of social action, an invitation to events, membership in public organizations, etc.

If it is important for the author to stay in touch with the reader (for example, he plans to write the next book, and wants to notify all followers about this), then you need to redirect the reader to the author’s website and invite him to subscribe to the mailing list. In the future, you need to send letters to subscribers, in order to maintain interest in your topic.

Social Media

Before you become active on social networks, you need to ask yourself the question: how will the social network help to attract new readers?

Options may be as follows:

Option 1

You create a social network account. You write several posts in which you tell who you are and what you do (within your topic), what activities you conduct, what books you have written, etc. This account is your “business card,” and its task is to redirect people from the social network to a page where they can buy a book.

At the same time, you do not need to regularly post anything in your account. It is enough to update the last post once a month so that the account does not look abandoned.

Option 2

You use the social network as a platform for communication with other public figures: visit bloggers, host joint broadcasts, publish guest posts. In this case, your account plays the role of not only a “visiting card,” but also a poster of events.

Option 3

You advertise your book through social media. You need to create a promotional post in which someone (not you) talks about an existing social problem and how your book helps people deal with it.

Your account should look like the one above because people will be logging into it to see who you are and how they can purchase your book.

Option 4

You can keep a blog in which you talk in detail about your activities. This option is only suitable for you if you are ready to publish content on a regular basis, and you have enough information to create a blog.

There is another option: you comment on what others are doing within your topic. For example, if your topic is domestic violence, then you draw attention to such cases in your blog, tell stories of rehabilitation, collect recommendations from psychologists, etc. In this case, blogging is your social activity.

Read more about the blog development strategy in the description of the Blogger archetype.