storybook: 6 Tips For Creating Book Club Discussion Questions For Your Book and Other Book Marketing Tips

Author: Phyllis Zimbler Miller

Book marketing is an activity that most book authors undertake to promote their books.

If you're a book author, you may have a website where you have downloads of your first chapter or chapters. But have you also made available discussion questions for book clubs to use?

Book groups can be a good target market for your book, especially if it's fiction. But given how busy people are, it's helpful for readers to know that if they suggest a book to their reading group they won't have to struggle to come up with questions. All the work has already been done for them by you the author!

If you haven't yet provided downloadable questions off your website, do so now.

Here are 6 tips for creating these 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 fiction book's surprise plot points in the questions. With careful consideration, you will usually be able to find a way to discuss a question topic without revealing these plot points.

• Before making available your discussion questions, test them on friends who haven't read the book yet. Check that the questions mean to others what these questions mean to you.

• Offer the questions to anyone who might be interested besides making the questions available as a free download on your website or other author platforms.

By making available good discussion questions for your book, you're providing book clubs with the resources for a better discussion. And, with any luck, the better the discussion the more buzz will be created.

In addition, to encourage book clubs to choose your book you should provide the first chapters for free on your website so that prospective readers can get a good feel for the story and characters. You can do this with pdf downloads or audio or video recordings or all three methods.

If you have other information related to your book that you can share on your website, do so. For example, if your novel is connected to an historical event, you can include photos or videos or commentary about that actual event.

Or let's say you wrote a non-fiction book about breast cancer. You could include on your website names and contact information for organizations that help breast cancer patients. By sharing such information with your prospective readers you're creating a bond between you and them.

Of course, there is the basic question of do you need a website at all? Couldn't you put your book club discussion questions on book author websites and forget about having your own website?

Yes, you could. But you'd be foolish to pass up the opportunity to have a destination URL for you and your books.

On the other hand, there is an alternative to having a website designed for you. You could do what many people are doing now - using WordPress blog software to create a website. This is usually less expensive and easier than having a programmer design a website, and you have the added advantage of more easily changing content.

With your own website featuring sample chapters, helpful information and book club discussion questions, you will be providing prospective readers with a number of reasons to say yes to reading your book.