Discovered Wordsmiths

Discovered Wordsmiths


Episode 34B – Doug Knust – Using life to influence your book

January 21, 2021

Doug and I discuss how life can influence your book. This is what he did when writing his book. He is a businessman and writing is not his main focus.

[Transcript]

Episode 34B Doug Knust Using Life to Influence Your Book

[Stephen] - Doug welcome back once again, since this is focused for writers tell us a little bit about the software and the services that you used when you were writing a book.

[Doug] - Well, I I happened upon a Reedsy just I'm not really sure I probably just did a search and found it and and I use that actually as the the writing tool because I was able to then publish in the in the in the different formats that I needed to send on to Amazon for the self-published to self-publishing really Kindle Direct publishing. I mentioned to you earlier I used my my daughter-in-law was my editor. My son was my graphic artist and the rest of it was kind of just you know, was shoe string stuff. Nothing fancy Steven.

[Stephen] - Okay nice, but that's great because you can make a good quality product even if you're not spending thousands of dollars.

[Doug] - Exactly you don't, I mean, you don't even need a word processor it's all online if that's what the way you want to do it if you're familiar with if you're comfortable with a word processor or what are I'm sure that works just fine but, yeah, you you don't even need the word processor.

[Stephen] - right. So when you we were talking a little bit about marketing you mentioned your target audience and I loved that because I mentioned may also do middle grade fiction and it is difficult because you want to write a book and you want to give it to the seventh and eighth graders, but they are not the ones buying it the parents are the ones buying it and the teachers the and you mentioned grandparents that you get a lot grandparents, so what are you doing to try and reach that audience?

[Doug] - I've had I've had pretty good success targeting grandparents on Facebook and I you know being a being a car dealer and I'm doing a little marketing doing a little marketing I have I I know that that demographic uses Facebook and especially, you know, the last six weeks during the Christmas season that was that was really surprisingly successful for me. I've used some of the Amazon ads kind of targeting some books that had the same subject matter had some reasonable success there as well and then you know, I I've given away some books. I put a little card in there asking people to go online and and give me a review and to recommend it and you know, it's the word of mouth is still a pretty darn good way to advertise.

[Stephen] - Yes and so I take it even though you were on Amazon that you actually probably sell quite a few printed books.

[Doug] - Yeah, the vast majority of my books are printed of the sales are printed books and I think again when you think about the the target end reader off the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade boy, not many of them are running around with an electronic reader. Most of them are if they're going to read it I think they're going to read the whole paper version of the book.

[Stephen] - Agreed and of course if you're talking grandparents, there's probably less ell, I guess that's the funny thing, you would think I am talking about grandparents so they're probably going to want a printed book but the demographics I've seen show that there are more people fifty and above using a Kindle and readers then younger people. So you're getting back to that your marketing of these one set of people that read e-books and hoping they'll buy a printed book to give to a younger set thats a different demographic.