This event will be livestreamed so you can attend live in New York or remotely at your home or office.

Every book has a target market. The challenge for every author is how to turn that market into an audience, a community of readers. But how do you find them? How do you engage them? What’s involved in making them your own readers? There are many steps to this process. You need to know which channels already exist that serve your readers, which authors have succeeded in building reader communities. Who, for instance, are the authors who have built a community of followers on Twitter? How did they do it? What are the five most important things to know in building a reader community? And why are some writers now using newsletters, and tools like TinyLetter, as their preferred ways to communicate with readers?

Join us on November 11 when five marketing experts with experience in building reader communities will share insider tips on how a wide variety of authors in both fiction and nonfiction have successfully created communities of readers. You’ll hear about the key things to remember in creating content for communities, what “earned editorial” means and how to find and leverage opportunities to make the most of it, how to write great headlines, how to make what you write easy to share, the pros and cons of including comments, why it’s important to promote other people’s work, and many other hard-won secrets of reader community building.

Your Expert Nation is delighted to offer IBPA members a 20% discount on tickets to this event. Please e-mail Mimi Le to receive the special coupon code.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

• Writers — both traditionally published and self-published — interested in knowing how to find, build and cultivate a loyal readership
• Marketing and publicity professionals eager to learn current best practices for how to develop a reader community
• Agents and editors curious about how authors have successfully created reader communities and what their authors should be doing to create their own

PANELISTS:

Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. Over the years, he’s covered the publishing industry for GalleyCat and Shelf Awareness, written book reviews for places like the Dallas Morning News and The Daily Beast, served as an acquiring editor at Regan Arts, and co-managed New York City’s first monthly reading series for romance fiction — among many other endeavors.

Jennifer Maguire has more than twenty years’ experience in public relations, consumer promotions, marketing communications, and brand licensing. Her projects frequently include in-store events, co-branded tie-ins, cross-over placement and sampling. Prior to launching Maguire Public Relations, Inc. in 2002, Jen’s corporate career included working inside major media and marketing organizations, including Grey Advertising, Playboy Enterprises, BET, Seventeen media, and Urban Latino magazine. Recently, Jen worked with best-selling author Susan Shapiro on her novel, What’s Never Said (Heliotrope), as well as three self-published authors.

Sarah Galo is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Guardian US, The New Republic, Electric Literature and Hazlitt, among other publications. As an intern for the both The Guardian US and BuzzFeed Books, she previously assisted in managing social media presences and contributing articles, lists, and interviews on arts and culture. New York magazine recently profiled Sarah’s TinyLetter, Things I Tell Myself (and You), in an article about women writers turning to newsletters as new safe spaces online.

Rich Kelley, VP, Your Expert Nation, has been marketing books to specialized audiences — online and via direct mail — for more than 30 years. He launched the first and most successful book club for users of personal computers in 1983 and, as SVP at Book of the Month Club, supervised the editorial and marketing strategies for twenty specialized product lines.

Bridget Marmion is Founder and President of Your Expert Nation. As SVP Marketing of Farrar, Straus Giroux, Random House and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Marmion has over three decades of experience creating and implementing campaigns that led to bestsellers. At FSG and HMH, Marmion oversaw publicity and marketing, traditional and digital, for both adult and children’s books.

The Conference Room Confabs Series

Finding and Building Your Community of Readers is part of a series of Conference Room Confabs Your Expert Nation is hosting every other month. The next one will be on January 13.