Social to Sell

After writing your first book and publishing it, you may begin to wonder, “Where are my sales?” Well, if this is true, then there may be a reason you aren’t seeing the results that you want. Though distributors and retailers will assist you by getting your book to consumers, they won’t necessarily advertise your work for free. Therefore, it is important to get connected to your audience.

One of the things that will help you in finding readers is to have social media accounts for your writing. This may sound frivolous. However, in this day and age, most people check social media at least once during the day if not more, and if you are on there, they have a better chance of seeing your work.

So, if you haven’t already, the first thing you may want to do is create an author page on Facebook. Facebook has several users worldwide, and there are several groups on there that allow writers to advertise their books. A social Facebook page (the one that you receive when you first sign-up) has a limit of 5,000 friends. Add as many people as you can to that page because you can create a second page that you can use for your writing business under Pages and add all of your followers. Once you have a social page and a profile page created, join a couple of writing groups. You will find these by looking up “books”, “reading”, and “author promotion”. Make sure you read the guidelines of each group you join, so you can establish which groups will be beneficial to you. Last but not least, try to connect with other authors. Just as you are looking to advertise, so are they, so do your best to support your comrade while they are on their writing journey.

Next, create a Twitter account. It is a bit more difficult to get a business account on this site as I believe you have to use several verification methods before you are approved for one. However, a regular account should help you just as well. Once your account is created, make sure that you tweet regularly, using the proper hashtags. Usually, #writingcommunity and #writerslift are popular on this site. Though there are others that you can look up online just by typing in popular hashtags for writers. Also, on this website, there is a promotion held every day by individual authors where you are able to add your book link to their posts. You can find these by looking up #writerslift. The posts will come up, and you just add your link in the posts that state to do so. It might help to friend some of these authors as well. Several of them have good advice, and they are very supportive.

After you create those accounts, you may want to create an Instagram account. Now, this site is a little different as the main post has to be a photo. However, you can use your book cover or an advertisement for one of your book sales, depending on what information you are trying to get across. In the comments section, you can add your book link and information about your book. Then, other members can read it and check out your work.

Having a Tumblr account may also be beneficial. This website will allow you to advertise your books and sales, but it also allows you to post a couple of chapters if you want to hook new readers.

Pinterest is yet another social media site that might be helpful if you want to advertise your work. Their posts are called pins, and with them, you are able to include a photo, a link, a title, and a small description. The business accounts on this website are free, and you are able to categorize your posts.

Now, in order to get yourself out there on a professional level, it may be in your best interest to set-up a Linked In as well. This site is more of a professional website, but it allows you to connect and communicate with other professionals in the writing field, and you are also able to post when you have a new book out or a sale.

If you are able to consistently post about your books, you may also want to consider a free WordPress account. This is a blog website. However, you can advertise new books, give members free snippets of your new work, and even use this website to help you create a podcast. Along with being able to do all of this, you are able to schedule your posts for a later time, which helps if you are not able to write every day. You can share these posts with Tumblr, Linked In, Facebook, and Twitter, which means that instead of having to post individually on all of these websites, you would only have to post once. You also have a good chance of bumping into readers on this platform.

Though this all sounds like a lot of work, in the end, it is worth it. Over time, I have connected with several readers this way, and I have gotten a lot of advice from my fellow authors.