Understanding Social Media Presence

It's all about getting your name out there! In publishing, being successful is about making sure your readers know who you are and when your next book is coming out. This, however, is not an easy task considering how many authors are out there trying to promote their books. For new authors, it is even harder. Consider this...

Before posting this, I jumped over to Amazon and did a quick search. Try this for yourself and you will see what I mean.

I just looked up Romance Novels and then sorted the list from low to high in terms of the price. I was easily 15 pages in and over 300 books all being given away for free (I finally stopped just to get back to the blog). Now, the idea behind "giving away a book" is to get your name in front of a reader and hope that the reader will go on and "buy" your other books. We all love great deals, right? The point of this is simple. Somehow, you have to get your name up that list and out of that mess of other authors.

Not an easy task.

It becomes even harder if you are someone trying to do this entirely on your own without a publisher promoting the heck out of your book.

So, we have to find another way to get your name out there and that would be through social media. Again, this is NOT an easy task. Remember, people will only read your blog, follow you on a social media site, or go to your website IF they know who you are. I don't care how hard you work to put your name out there, it will only get to your followers. And again, you have to get those followers.

This is where a lot of new authors realize that publishing is harder than writing those books. You will now find yourself spending 50% of your time marketing your book and getting your name out there in as many places as possible. To add to this, you have to have content that people will want to read. 

Let's consider having an Instagram account. You have to be out there posting multiple times a week. You want your readers to be waiting to see the latest information you put out there. If you don't have anything interesting or at least relevant, they will quit following you. For example, I started following several authors recently, only to quit following them because their content was either information not about their writing, or it was simply the same thing over and over again, or it was not exciting. 

So, as you think about your social media presence, here are some things to consider:

1. Where do your readers go to for their information? Remember, not everyone is on TikTok.
2. What are you going to share?
3. How often are you going to post?
4. Can you post to multiple sites?
5. Can you work with other authors to promote each other?
6. Do you even have anything to promote (I put this out there because if you don't have a book to sell, then there is no reason to promote anything).