BY VEENA KASHYAP
Happy New Year!
I hope you had a fabulous holiday season.
Now that you’ve had some downtime, let’s get back to business, shall we?
Last fall, I kicked off a series of posts focusing on the building of an author platform. As you may recall, my definition of an author platform is rather straightforward; an author platform is about how you connect with your readers that is, the mechanics of creating buzz for your work and growing your readership.
The key components of a solid author platform include:
- Sound writing and valuable content (books, blog posts, newsletters)
- Social media
- Website
- Frequent publication
- Membership and participation in networks
- Event appearances, interviews and speaking engagements
- Connections to other authors
In Post Two of this series, I spotlighted the first component of the author platform, “Sound Writing and Valuable Content.”
The next component we’ll discuss in the author platform is social media. What’s social media? Let’s start there. Social Media can be defined as any website and/or applications that enables users to create and share content socially.
So which social media platforms are author-friendly? Great question!
Let’s start with my list of must-use social media platforms:
- Goodreads
Goodreads (www.goodreads.com)
With thirty million members, nine hundred million books cataloged and thirty-four million books reviewed, Goodreads, an Amazon company, is the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations.
If you are an author, the beauty of Goodreads lies in their Author Program. Completely free, The Author Program is designed to help authors reach their target audience: passionate readers. This is the perfect place for new and established authors to promote their books.
Goodreads offers authors the ability to create an author profile. Once an author profile is created, an author can:
- Add a picture and bio
- Share favorite books and recent reads with your fans!
- Write a blog
- Publicize events
- Share book excerpts and other writing
- Post videos
- Add the Goodreads Author widget to your personal website or blog to show off reviews of your books
Authors can promote their books by:
- Signing up to advertise books to the Goodreads Community—30 million readers!
- List book giveaways to generate pre-launch buzz
- Participate in discussions on your profile, in groups and in forums
Facebook (www.facebook.com)
Facebook is a social networking website that makes it easy for you to connect and share.
Creating an author page on Facebook should be a part of every author’s social media strategy. An author page (not your personal profile) allows authors to post engaging content (read NOT A SALES PITCH) that draws your readers in. Topics should certainly vary, be unique and highlight not just your work but also share work of other authors, tagging them.
According to www.thebookdesigner.com, post twice a day each weekday and once on Saturday and Sunday. In addition, keep your posts short, between 100 and 250 characters, and vary your banner image (I love www.picmonkey.com). Embrace incentives and loyalty programs. Send a free eBook to your most loyal fans on occasion and offer incentives when running contests or surveying your fans for information.
If you decide to purchase Facebook advertising, don’t fall for the old “Boost Post” option. Why? Boosted posts are intended to increase engagement on your Facebook page by improving penetration of your fans’ news feeds. Even worse, you can’t decide where your ad will be placed. As reported by TechCrunch, 78% of Facebook users access this network via a mobile device so it would make sense to have your ad appear on mobile news feeds. If you fall for the effortless Boost Post method, however, you will be stuck with your ad appearing strictly on desktop news feeds, reaching only 22% of Facebook’s users.
With an ad that you design, you can also establish age limits, and designate languages and countries you want to target. Before creating an ad however, be clear about the results you want to achieve. It’s better to use ads when you have a clear business objective, such as increasing books sales or encouraging fans to sign up for a webinar or newsletter.
Another cool Facebook feature is The Author Marketing App. The app provides users an overview of your published work. It installs as a tab on your Author Page and allows you to add details about your books and upcoming events. If your books are listed on Amazon, listing the books is as easy as entering the ISBN.
The point with Facebook is really to connect and share. Simple. Just remember who your target audience and focus on drawing them in with creative content.
(Credit: http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2014/05/facebook-ads-should-indie-authors-buy-them/)
Twitter (www.twitter.com)
Say something interesting in 140 characters or less. You’d think it were easy but writers are generally verbose by nature. So Twitters makes it a challenge to put out something mind-bending in just a few words. But that’s the beauty of Twitter.
But follow this rule. I live by this rule. Spend 20 percent of the time talking about yourself, and 80 percent talking about others. Not only is it a good practice to promote the blog posts, books, and resources of others in your niche or genre, but it’s also a way for you to make your Twitter feed a must-read for your followers by ensuring they’ll always find something valuable there.
Talk about anything and everything but don’t make everything about you or worse, a sales pitch about your books.
The 80/20 rule applies to ALL SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS! Enough said.
Pinterest (www.pinterest.com)
Pinterest is an online bulletin board with a social media interface. Themed boards can be created and shared allowing other users to re-pin your images. This is why Pinterest has so much potential to be used as a potent tool for authors to promote their books. Authors can also link pictures on Pinterest to their websites to boost traffic.
Boards can be created for book covers, characters, book locations, events, etc. Authors can share their written stories through the use of beautiful imagery.
Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest can be integrated with other social media platforms to increase exposure for you as an author and for your books.
My advice would be to start slow with your social media strategy. It’s nearly impossible to be in all places at once so focus one or two social media platforms that you find easy to navigate.
There are a vast number of tools on the market to help with scheduling your social media content. I use Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) to post to Twitter and Facebook on every couple of hours. The trick here is to create unique content and to post at reasonable intervals (every 3-4 hours). Again, use the 80/20 rule and make your audience keep coming back for more!
Check out the following links for more information on social media platforms. As an author, you owe it to yourself to put your best foot forward, so what are you waiting for?
MORE GREAT INFORMATION:
http://theauthoronline.com/Power-of-Facebook.html
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2014/05/facebook-ads-should-indie-authors-buy-them/
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2013/10/how-to-use-pinterest-to-promote-your-book/
https://media.twitter.com/best-practice/twitter-for-authors
Veena’s love affair with reading began in the fifth grade when she read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Somewhere around that time, she started writing stories that transported her to worlds created by her vivid imagination and knew one day, she wanted nothing more than to write for a living.
Veena continues to read, the owner of way too many e-readers and is notorious for having shelves imploding with books and has resorted to lining her bedroom floor with even more. Currently, she is working on a YA paranormal romance series in between her day job as a geek managing tech projects while running an author publicity site and helping out Xchyler as a book reviewer and blogger specialist