6 Tips For Creating Book
Club or Reading Group Discussion Questions For Your Book: Six Tips to
Help Market and Promote Your Books
Book marketing and promotion is an activity that most
writers and published authors undertake in an effort to promote their
books. However, marketing a book can be a daunting task, especially
for a writer. Where does one start? What is involved in marketing a
book? Do you need to hire a publicist, or can you do it yourself? These
are all important questions, many of which have been covered on the
main book marketing and promotion page.
In this article we are covering a particular aspect of book marketing
and promotion: the creation of book club or reading group discussion
questions.
If you’re a writer or published author, you most likely have a
website or blog where you have information about your book(s) and writing.
Important things to have on your website or blog include:
- An author or writer bio
- A purchase or sales page
- A reviews or awards page
- A page with some samples of your writing or where chapters can
be downloaded
- A page of questions for book clubs or reading groups
Book clubs and reading groups can be a good target
market for your book, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. But
why have a page of questions about your book? Well, given how busy people
are, it’s helpful for readers to know that if they suggest a book
to their reading group or book club they won’t have to struggle
to come up with questions. All the work has already been done for them,
and you have provided them in an accessible and ready to use format.
If you haven’t yet provided downloadable questions off your website
or blog, do so now.
Here are 6 tips for creating these book club or reading discussion
questions:
• Direct your questions at the appropriate age level for your
book. If you’ve written a children’s fiction or non-fiction
book, questions should be targeted at the reading level of your book’s
market.
• Questions for adult fiction or non-fiction books should include
a range of questions so that different levels of book groups can find
questions that appeal to their groups.
• For fiction books, are there any current or historic events
that impact the story you’ve told? If so, create questions based
on these events.
• As people often read discussion questions before reading the
book, be careful about accidentally revealing a book’s surprise
plot points or your central thesis in the questions. With careful consideration,
you will usually be able to find a way to discuss a question topic without
revealing these key points.
• Before making your book club questions available, test them
out on friends who haven’t read the book yet. Check that the questions
mean to others what the questions mean to you.
• Make sure you have some questions that deal with your central
theme, your major characters, or that bring up the primary points you
make in the book. You want questions that readers can discuss in depth,
not ones that can easily be answered with a yes or a no.
By providing discussion questions about your book, you’re helping
book clubs and reading groups with the resources they are looking for.
With any luck, the better the discussion the more people will talk about
your book, which in turn will create some powerful word-of-mouth
marketing for your book.
In addition, to encourage book clubs or reading groups to choose your
book you should provide the first chapter(s) for free on your website
so that prospective readers can get a good feel for the story, characters,
or central theme.
|
