In my marketing post I mentioned social media is a must. It was something I never really got into in my personal life, but as a published author that all changed. I’ve had to embrace it as part of my daily routine in an ongoing bid to reach new fans and engage existing ones, and it remains a staple part of my marketing campaign as time goes on.
My first port of call was Facebook. I created my author page, intending to use it mostly to post any news around my writing career. Unfortunately, things have gone slower than hoped and there’s been little in the way of news to post, leaving me constantly racking my brains for new ways to engage my fans. My attempts to post something with the potential to go viral have so far been unsuccessful, but I keep trying new things in an attempt to get more likes and shares. Visual posts seem to work best: images with quotes stuck on are often popular, or caption pictures, particularly of animals. Though neither have worked for me so far; most of my fans just don’t seem to be inclined to share these things!
I’m also starting to get the hang of Twitter, at last. At first I found it daunting after all the Twitter etiquette I looked at and advice, but I keep gaining followers and some of them have been kind enough to Retweet and favourite my Tweets. There’s already plenty of great articles out there about marketing through Twitter and it could easily be a blog post in itself, so I’m not going to go into too much detail here. I did find this post by Rayne Hall really helpful when I was first starting out though – http://writeforkids.org/2014/07/ten-tips-for-promoting-your-book-on-twitter/
Amazon Author Central is also a must for writers, but frustratingly you can’t just sign up on your own country’s site and see the information across the different countries that do it. If you want an author page on Author Central then you have to sign up for each country individually and copy and paste your information across each time. I did find it a bit of a ball ache to set up but once it’s there you don’t actually have to do anything with it, unless there’s any need to update anything, so it’s worth doing. Amazon US lets you sync your blog if you have one so new blog posts automatically appear on your author page, though this doesn’t seem to be a feature on any of the other Author Central sites, and they all pull your tweets through which gives fans something to follow. But there’s no need to constantly publish new content like with Twitter and Facebook, so it’s a fairly low maintenance option for reaching out to fans.
Goodreads is a must since it’s a site specifically for readers. You have to request an author account but once they grant you that you get access to a few useful marketing tools, and again you can sync your blog. I’ve still to explore Goodreads but so far I’ve been trying to catch up on some reading so I can write some reviews, and then I intend to try approaching some relevant groups on there. The advice when joining groups is to do so as a reader initially, and only mention your own book(s) when people start to get to know you. So I figured it would be worth doing some more reading before getting into that to give me more to talk about with potential fans of my work.
There’s also Pinterest which I’m actually quite enjoying. The thing I like about Pinterest is, there’s not really much thought required once you come up with a theme for a board. You just search for relevant content and pin anything you like, meaning I can blast out my music while I add to my boards because I don’t really have to concentrate too hard on what I’m doing. I don’t have many followers yet but I still have work to do to build up most of my boards, as there’s a few with only a handful of pins so far. I’m hopeful that I can attract fellow werewolf fans, readers and general horror fans as time goes on, who will then hopefully see my Hybrid related pins and check it out (and hopefully buy a copy!).
And finally, I started my own YouTube channel this week. I was considering doing a vlog of sorts, but it took me a lot longer than anticipated to make my first video. So, for the time being, I think I will just put up videos of me ‘performing’ my short stories and see if it generates much interest. Again, I’m hopeful to reach some new fans this way, particularly as many people aren’t big readers these days. My hope is that people who haven’t really engaged with the written versions of my short stories might be more inclined to watch the videos and share them with their friends.
I’m still learning as I continually try new things, but I do feel like I’m starting to get the hang of the various social media I’m on now. There’s no denying the power of these sites for reaching new fans, but it seems like there’s still lots of experimenting to be done to find the content that gets good engagement and those all important shares.
