Tuesday afternoon I attended the book club that meets in the condo development where I  live.  I’ve been going to these monthly gatherings for almost three years and I have two reasons for doing this. 1. It forces me to read books I might never consider reading, and 2. I get a chance to hear how non-writers react to a book. They’re going to read one of my books next year, which makes me very nervous. I know a couple of the members won’t like my book. I’ll be cringing when they give their assessment of the story and/or my writing, but it will be interesting to hear what “turns them off.”  Not that their comments will get me to change anything. (Can’t since it’s already published.) For one thing, I know these two people just don’t like the type of story I write.  It’s the “You can’t please everyone,” but if what’s not liked is something I simply didn’t realize would bother another person, that’s a good thing to learn.

During these book club gatherings, individual members mention what turned them off (some don’t read or finish the book) or why they absolutely loved the characters or the writer’s voice. There were 12 of us at the last gathering. We only meet for an hour, though we often go a little beyond that time. At the end of the hour, we give a 1 to 5 rating on the book, with 5 being the highest. Some will add a half or quarter point to the rating. And that’s interesting. It’s a tough crowd. Even those who say they loved the book rarely give it a 5.  Tuesday’s book mostly got 4 and 4.5, but there was one 2. The book we read was a Best Seller and sold thousands of copies, so hearing some of the readers give it no higher than a 4 actually made me feel good about some of the ratings I’ve received on Amazon. Just because it’s a 4.5 or 4.8 doesn’t mean I failed/ To me it means I didn’t meet that reader’s “gold star” level.

One thing I have learned from attending book clubs is how important it is to get my book in the right category. That means finding the right key words to bring a reader to my book. It means the right wording in a blurb or back copy. One member of the book club said she almost didn’t read the book because the back copy mentioned S&M and she didn’t want to read about that. Because it was the pick for the month, she went back to scan it so she could talk about it, and in the process of scanning the chapters, she discovered she liked the story and there was very little S&M mentioned. She gave the book a 4.

Writing a book is difficult, but I’m finding marketing a book is even harder.