It’s one of those days where you have finished your work and you’re waiting for email replies, you know, mindless surfing the web for interesting stuff.
I came across this on the Huffington Post about self-publishing advice and thought I would share. Interesting tidbits for new authors.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/self-publishing-advice/
I love working with authors who have embraced social media for their marketing. They know just how to reach their audience! As for new authors, they tend to shy away from social media making excuses for not using it like –
1. It’s too time consuming.
2. I’ll get “lost” and end up wasting my time.
3. It’s hard to come up with new stuff all the time, that’s why I don’t blog.
4. I just want to write and sell books, I can’t be bothered with all the posting and tweeting and pinterest pinning.
Savvy authors know that making an investment in social media will pay dividends in book sales down the line. What the savvy authors know that the new authors don’t is once simple key to social media – and I will gladly quote Rebecca Thompson here, “Social media is a conversation, not a commercial.” The key element here is the author’s involvement to create that conversation and participate in it.
Social media can be time consuming but it has great rewards too. Authors can be disciplined and organized when writing their books and they need to apply that same system to creating and posting content to their social media channels. If they would spend 2 to 3 hours once a month to actually do research, create an editorial calendar and then write the short content they would be free to write their books knowing that their social media is working behind the scenes.
This doesn’t mean “post it and forget”. It means monitor it a couple of times of day for comments and interact in the conversation they have started. Social media is the epitome of “like, know and trust” for book sales. Authors can build that likability into their content, let readers get to know them personally and develop a trust also.
There are so many new and tried-and-true apps out there that will allow you schedule your posts across all your social media channels that it’s just about effortless. My fav is HootSuite hands down.
So the bottom line is don’t miss the opportunity for free marketing for your books but don’t try to “sell” all the time either. Create credibility through conversation with your readers.