I Knew My Reader. I Didn’t Know My Customer

Photo by Mercedes Mehling on Unsplash

Today’s guest post is by author and pastor Jane Willan.

---

Publishing experts agree on exactly one thing: know your reader.

I did. Mine was eight years old, transgender, and wondering if God had noticed them. One sentence, one reader. I wrote Bible Stories for Transgender Kids so transgender, nonbinary, gender-expansive, and questioning children could recognize themselves in scripture and hear a simple message: God knows them, calls them by name, and welcomes them completely. Since I could describe my ideal reader in one sentence, I thought that meant I understood my market.

I was wrong.

I finished the text and then poured all of my creative energy into how the book looked. Children read the pictures—the faces, the clothes, the animals, the colors, the expressions, the small visual details adults skim past. I spent considerable time and, yes, money on illustrations, layouts, and revisions. I wanted the book to feel warm and alive and never like a lesson disguised as a story.

I uploaded the book to Amazon KDP as an ebook, paperback, and hardcover. I sat back and waited and, of course, nothing happened. Amazon can display a title. It does not go looking for the isolated family raising a transgender child, the affirming pastor searching for the right resource, or the grandparent trying to find language that will help a child feel loved.

So I quickly set up Amazon ads and, at the same time, posted the book on my personal Facebook page and my author page. I excitedly told colleagues. As a pastor, I belong to a large network of progressive clergy, all of them committed to LGBTQ+ inclusion. Their response was encouraging. They called the book beautiful and urgently needed and praised me for writing it. They shared my posts, and sent kind messages.

For one lovely day, I felt excited about future sales.

Lesson learned—never feel excited about future sales.

Of my hundred or so enthusiastic colleagues, one pastor bought one copy. And, to his credit, he left a five-star review. My email list didn’t help either, since most of my existing readers know me as a cozy mystery writer, and they are not the audience for a children’s book about gender identity.

Amazon ads were the most disappointing. More than 10,000 impressions resulted in 14 clicks and one sale. After about ten days of advertising, Facebook promotion, and personal outreach, total sales stood at two copies. This was not the launch I had imagined while approving illustrations.

I felt at a loss—something should have worked. And then it finally hit me. I had confused the reader with the customer.

Every creative decision I made—the language, the illustrations, the length, the design, and the tone—had been made for children. But 7-year-olds do not buy books on Amazon. They do not join clergy Facebook groups. They do not open promotional emails from authors. Even if I had made exactly the book they needed, I had almost no direct way to put it in front of them.

Between the book and the child stand several people and institutions.

I would call them the buyer, the gatekeeper, and the recommender.

• The buyer might be a parent, a grandparent, a pastor, a Christian educator, a librarian, a teacher, or a family friend.
• The gatekeeper—a parent, church, school, library, or ministry—decides whether the child ever sees the book at all.
• The recommender—a pastor, a reviewer, a podcast host, an advocacy organization, a denominational ministry, or the curator of a family resource list—supplies the credibility that persuades someone else to buy it.

One adult could play several of those parts. But more likely, the parts belong to different people. I might need one adult to discover the book, another to trust it, another to purchase it, and possibly another to put it into the child’s hands.

To make matters worse, Christian bookstores, Christian publishers, and conventional church leaders were unlikely to jump aboard. Many Christian adults would reject the book precisely because it was written for transgender, nonbinary, gender-expansive, and questioning children. At the same time, the LGBTQ+ side of things was no better. Organizations that readily supported the children I hoped to reach might reject a book built around biblical stories.

The single path to my reader ran through adults who understood and approved of both the book’s LGBTQ+ purpose and its Christian foundation—a tiny spot on a Venn diagram.

My first idea was to contact pastors.

With AI-assisted research, I compiled contact information for clergy in four progressive or mainline traditions: the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church, and the Unitarian Universalist Association. My spreadsheet topped out at 790 names and email addresses.

For one brief and highly satisfying moment, I felt extremely clever. I pictured hundreds of clergy opening my message, seeing the brilliance of the project, and ordering multiple copies. Then I faced the obvious problem: I couldn’t import hundreds of personal addresses into Constant Contact and send a mass promotional email to pastors who had never subscribed. My magnificent clergy spreadsheet was useless.

I finally asked myself the right question: who already had a reason to care about this book?

I started researching organizations whose missions overlapped with mine: Open and Affirming United Church of Christ congregations, Reconciling United Methodist ministries, LGBTQ+-affirming denominational organizations, progressive Christian publications, children’s and family-ministry leaders, queer Christian groups, librarians and reviewers, churches with Pride ministries, and organizations serving LGBTQ+ children and their families. The first search produced fifty or sixty possibilities. As I kept going, the working list grew to about seventy.

My new spreadsheet was impressive until it wasn’t. Some websites were outdated. Some organizations had ceased to exist. Others had no usable email address, had only a contact form, or weren’t as close a fit as they had first appeared. I ended up with 42 organizations that seemed aligned with my purpose and had viable professional contact information. Not bad, really. I dove in and studied each one before writing.

• A group with a newsletter received a request for a mention or a review.
• A group that maintained an online resource list was asked to consider the book for inclusion.
• Podcast producers received interview pitches.
• Reviewers were offered complimentary copies.
• Organizations that accepted advertising were asked about their advertising options.

On August 10, I sent 42 individual emails. Six days later, 15 of my emails had produced some form of response. Five were automatic acknowledgments, outdated-address notices, or otherwise non-substantive responses. That left 10 genuine responses—23.8% of the 42. Thirty-two organizations, 76.2%, had sent no substantive response. Counting only complete silence, 27 organizations—64.3%—had not responded at all.

Five organizations requested complimentary copies: The Englewood Review of Books, the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, FreedHearts, Room for All, and a newsletter contact at the Metropolitan Community Churches. One organization said it intended to review the book. One newsletter mention was confirmed. FreedHearts said it would share the book if opportunities arose; Room for All was considering it for the resource section of a redesigned website.

There were no interview invitations, no event invitations, and no podcast appearances. There were certainly no direct sales I could attribute to the campaign. There were also no flat rejections. The closest thing to a rejection came from a contact who initially declined after mistakenly assuming the illustrations were AI-generated—and who then passed the book along to someone else who requested a review copy. What began as a rejection became a lead.

The campaign also exposed a weakness in my recordkeeping.

Researching about seventy organizations, verifying the contacts, studying their work, and writing individual messages took several days, and I kept no time sheet. I never separated the cost of complimentary books and postage from my other launch expenses. Without those figures, I cannot calculate an honest return on my time or my money. If I repeat the experiment, I will track both from the beginning.

I had to admit: the early results were modest at best. The responses did not justify the work I had put into the campaign, and they produced no sales I could point to. Still, maybe those responses are somewhat useful. They’ve told me more than the Amazon campaign did. Ten thousand impressions had produced 14 clicks without revealing whether a single person who saw the ad had any connection to the children I wrote the book for. The targeted emails at least reached people who already serve those children, their families, or the adults making decisions for them. The numbers were small, but at least the path was real.

Narrow, twisty, and uphill—but real.

I had followed the standard publishing advice and had identified my reader accurately. What I had overlooked was the chain of adults whose trust, money, and permission stood between that reader and the book.