by A.C. Williams @ACW_Author

Being an author has never been easy, but to a certain extent it’s a straightforward career path. Write a great book. Work with a great publisher. Sell your books. Repeat. But for those of you who have been at it for many years, you know it’s not that simple.

How do you define a great book? How can you convince a great publisher your work is worth the risk? How can you get people to buy your books when many of them need every penny for the rising cost of groceries?

All of those questions are valid, and they present the common dilemma most authors must deal with in this industry. But in recent years, there is an even bigger challenge that faces even the most successful authors: Discoverability.

You might have a great book and a great publisher and a great catalog of awesome stories, but if your readers can’t find you, it won’t matter. And “getting found” is becoming more and more difficult every day.

Numbers and stats are difficult to vet these days, but I did find several sources that claim Amazon will see up to 350,000 new book titles every month. That’s nearly 12,000 every day, and almost 500 new books every hour. And that’s if that number is accurate. It sounds a little low to me. Amazon itself allows authors to publish up to 500 books every day, supposedly.

Authors used to count on Amazon and other book distributors for some about of visibility on their individual platforms. That simply isn’t the case anymore. With so many books being published hourly, there is no realistic way to be discovered accidentally. Not anymore.

Now, of course, I’m not saying it’s impossible. Anything is possible. God does miracles all the time. But by that same token, if we are all resting on our blessed assurance waiting for God to do things that we ought to be doing ourselves, I suspect we’ll be waiting for a while.

So what do you do? How do you position yourself so your readers can find you? How do you make yourself discoverable?

I’m still working on this. I’m learning how to do it. Personally I’ve tried to do too much all at the same time, and I never developed any sort of consistency with it. That’s the problem. Consistency is key.

The best advice I’ve heard about getting visible is to go where your readers are. Find out what your audience enjoys. Learn who they are and what hobbies they pursue and what music they like. Figure out where they go and go there.

You can show up where they are in several different ways, but there are two that are the most common. You can buy advertising, or you can let your audience develop organically.

Buying advertising is perfectly reasonable. You just have to make sure that you are positioning yourself where you will actually be seen. Amazon ads work for some people, but you really have to dump a lot of money into them to show up in a meaningful way. Facebook ads also work great for growing your Facebook platform, and that’s fairly inexpensive. But having a huge Facebook following doesn’t automatically mean you are going to connect with people who will buy your books.

A way I used to make a splash was in purchasing spots in email newsletters for readers, like Ereader News Today or Freebooksy. BookBub is also a great option, but they are much harder to get into these days. Those are perfectly fine options, and you might sell a lot of free books. But if you don’t have another book for readers to obtain immediately after those free books, that lead will go cold. Additionally, readers who don’t want to invest money in your work don’t often have the motivation to keep investing.

That leaves us with the second alternative: Building an audience organically. How does that work?

Well, it takes a lot of time. It means you actively engage in communities where your readers hang out. It means you invest emotionally with people in those communities without expecting anything from them in return. If you can approach audience building from the mindset of being a blessing to others, something extraordinary happens: You bless them.

When you make your platform about blessing people, about sharing what you have been given, your story no longer becomes about you. It becomes about what will best serve your audience. And, what’s more important, it takes the pressure of needing to succeed off your shoulders and places it on God’s.

If He has called you to this adventure of being a career author, don’t make the mistake of assuming He expects you to control the outcome. He doesn’t. Your job is to do the next right thing. What does your audience need? What are they looking for? What stories would make them feel seen? What characters would make them feel loved?

You are responsible to write a story. God is responsible for the results.

Find your audience. Go where they are. Make friends. Genuinely care about them. Be part of their lives. And when they ask you what you do (and they will), tell them. I’ve found that once people you have blessed discover that you write books, they always want to buy them.

Will you become a bestseller? Probably not. And certainly not right away. It might take years. It might take a decade. But it might not. You never know what God can do with a heart (and a platform) that is dedicated to His glory.

A.C. Williams is a coffee-drinking, sushi-eating, story-telling nerd who loves cats, country living, and all things Japanese. Author of more than 20 books, she keeps her fiction readers laughing with wildly imaginative adventures about samurai superheroes, clumsy church secretaries, and goofy malfunctioning androids; her non-fiction readers just laugh at her and the hysterical life experiences she’s survived. If that’s your cup of tea (or coffee), join the fun at www.amycwilliams.com.