Do not search readers on Facebook. Take them there.

The often-heard advice that you, as an author, should build a newsletter is still the best advice you can get for your marketing. But your newsletter should not be your only tool to stay in contact with your readers.

If you rely solely on your newsletter for reader retention, you exclude all readers who want to be informed about your books but are not willing to give out their email address. There are more such people than you think. I always think twice about giving my email address to someone.

Strangely enough, there are a lot of people who have no problem giving out much more than just their email addresses to social networks. They often have no objection that Facebook, for example, knows what they are interested in, where they are going on vacation, and what job they have.

But this article is not about questioning why this is so. We are not judging our readers and their attitudes towards privacy; we are only stating what the case is.

So let's acknowledge that many readers who would never give you their email address would not hesitate to reveal all kinds of information about themselves on social media about themselves. You can use that for your own benefit.

Anyone who has ever tried to sell something to their Facebook followers (e.g., your new book) will have found that Facebook is not the right place to do so.

If you want to sell something on Facebook, you should not try to sell it to your followers, but instead, use paid advertising. That actually works if you do it right.

The reason your Facebook friends don't buy your books is that most of them aren't friends with you because they've read your books. If it were different, I'm sure you could sell them your new book. But your former classmates, friends, family, work colleagues, and distant acquaintances are not usually the ones reading your books.

So we have readers waiting for your new books but don't want to give you their email address, and we have your Facebook friends who aren't waiting for their books.

A combination of both would be a great thing, wouldn't it?

And this is where the Facebook group feature comes in.

Don't just offer your readers the option of registering for your newsletter in the backmatter of your books. Also, allow them to join a Facebook group.

I have created such a group, and it now has several hundred members. Many of them are also subscribers of my newsletter, but I have direct contact with most of them only through the Facebook group.

All these group members joined the group after reading some of my work and decided that they wanted to know about it quickly when I publish a new book.

I give them this opportunity with the group.

Whenever I publish a new book, I now have different ways to reach my fans. Through the newsletter, I reach my subscribers, and through the Facebook-group, I contact those who don't like newsletters.

Because many newsletter subscribers are also in the group, I even reach them in two ways. So if my mail has ended up in a reader's spam folder in one case or another, I can contact them via my Facebook group.

I think now you understand why I'm talking in the headline about not looking for readers on Facebook, but bringing them there.

It should also be clear now that you should not fill such a group with just anybody, but only with people who have already fallen in love with your work.

Building such a group takes as much time and effort as building a mailing list. But once this group has a few hundred members, you will find that it works even better than a newsletter, at least in my case.

The only, but very, very important reason to expand your email list instead of just relying on Facebook is that you own your list. If Facebook closes its bags tomorrow, your group will no longer exist, and you won't be able to reach it. Your email subscribers, on the other hand, will always be reachable.

But as long as Facebook exists, a group will do good things for your fans. I see no plausible reason why any author should abandon this method of customer retention.

It's best to start today. Create a fan group on Facebook and invite your newsletter subscribers to join first. Then take a look at all your published ebooks and place an invitation to the group in the backmatter.

Additional tip: if you don't have a newsletter yet, then now is the time to start. A Facebook group and a newsletter are potent in themselves, but only if you combine both, you'll be able to make full use of your resources.