Whether you’re an experienced author or new to the game, social media marketing can be overwhelming. Even before you’ve finished pouring everything you have into your book, you’re expected to start spreading the word and making sales.
Authors have a lot on their plate: managing the demands of a day job, family life, and the never-quite-finished task of book publishing requires more time than a day can provide—it’s no wonder many people put off marketing their book online (or avoid it completely!).
Taking the first step is the hardest part, so I’ve compiled a few helpful reminders to get you going. If you want personalized information, I’d love to help—you can schedule a strategy call when the time is right for you.
Good luck—and have faith in the process! When you create your social media platform with authenticity and make real connections with readers, it can be a gratifying experience—and, of course, it can help you sell more books!
Define your online voice (or author brand)
Taking the time to define your voice, including themes, colors, and topics, not only makes it easier for readers to recognize you, but it also makes planning your content that much more manageable. Before beginning your venture into social media marketing, write down the answers to a few key questions, and keep them handy throughout your marketing:
What subjects do I feel comfortable and confident speaking about, and what am I passionate about?
What subjects are my readers passionate about? How can this help guide my topic choice?
What do I want people to do when they see my posts? (This usually has to do with what stage you’re at in the publishing process… do you want people to follow you, engage with your content, preorder your book, buy your book, review your book, etc.?)
What colors and fonts best represent who I am?
What kind of voice do I have / What feels like the most natural way to interact with my online community? (Authoritative? Friendly? Motivational? Inspirational?)
Once you’ve mapped out the heart of your online brand, content creation becomes much more intuitive. And don’t stress if you’re not following what you’ve mapped out perfectly—social media marketing is (and will always be) a game of trial and error!
Prepare your homebase
Every author needs a few go-to resources before they begin building their social platforms. Readers that are deeply interested in the valuable content you’re putting out want a place they can refer back to for more information about your book, your experience, or any new updates about your career!
For this reason, I suggest taking the time to create some if not all of these elements as you’re starting your author marketing:
A simple website. Consider Squarespace—it’s what I use and I’ve found that authors are able to navigate it well without massive tech experience.
Go-to copy about your book and why you wrote it: universal blurbs that can be trimmed for social posts, expanded for book descriptions, and relied on to attract interest from potential readers.
Your book cover, and photos of your book.
Complete Amazon author page, with photo, bio, and any other elements you can include.
Complete Goodreads author profile.
Complete BookBub author profile.
Complete social media profiles: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn
Email Newsletter
These resources are fairly simple to create, but they do require quite a bit of time and in-depth knowledge about who you are as an author. If it feels like a lot, you can always schedule your strategy call with me to ease the burden of this process. There’s a lot we can do together to move forward painlessly!
Decide what you’re going to post
Now for the fun part :) Starting a few types of social media posts before you create the posts themselves really simplifies the content creation process and gives you a starting place whenever you’re feeling low on new ideas.
Social campaigns can be anything and everything, so I’ve listed a few below to get you going.
Instagram posts centered around a specific topic or hashtag.
FB Live Q+A’s
Twitter chats
Email newsletters
You can also define topics that you’ll post about to help guide your creation. For example:
Tips/nuggets from your book (if nonfiction)
Quotes from your book
Excerpts from your book for longer-form sharing
Facts about your writing process
Sharing from your personal life
Videos that showcase your process or ideas from your books.
Stock images that set the mood for your writing
Playlists, or songs that you love
Make sure that whatever you choose makes you feel happy or interested—otherwise, you may have a hard time sustaining your posts and coming up with new content that you’re proud to share.
Community building (the marketing version of worldbuilding)
After posting, it’s so important that you encourage your followers to be engaged and keep the conversation going, and seek out new readers, and other writers, to connect with.
Being interactive and responsive to those who like, comment and share your posts is maybe the most underrated secret to success in social media marketing.
On your own posts, you can ask people to leave a comment or share the post, if you’d like them to. It really goes a long way to clearly tell people what you want them to do.
And on other posts, you can leave comments (be mindful not to be too salesy and just try to make a connection).
So there it is, a few of my go-to strategies I apply to the work I do with my clients. I know it’s a lot, but it absolutely can be done, and the results will come to speak for themselves! At the end of the day, social media marketing is about using your unique skill set to share your story with the world. People are naturally drawn to authenticity, cliche as it may be, so all you really need to do is be yourself and the rest will follow. :)
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog, let me know what you think is important to do when beginning a social media campaign!
For more great reading on this topic, and some slightly different takes (with the same intention), don’t miss Awere First Publishing’s piece “9 Killer Book Marketing Strategies” that gave me some inspiration in compiling this list!