Pump Up Book Sales with Social Media Marketing
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Pump Up Book Sales with Social Media Marketing

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Pump Up Book Sales with Social Media Marketing

Writing a book is a grand achievement and checks off a bucket list item for many writers. However, the key to finding readers and selling your book is what happens after you finish writing.

Social media marketing isย the best way to get the word outย about who you are and discuss your books. Learning how to build buzz for your book with social media will take a little time, but the efforts will pay off.

The first step isย building a foundationย for your social media platform by letting people know who you are on Amazon and Goodreads. Each site has a slightly different focus, with Amazon being more targeted towards direct book sales, but they are the perfect place for potential readers to find you.

Make a great first impression

Authors: Create great Amazon and Goodreads author bios, both profiles are important. Click To Tweet

If people are looking for you (amen!), you want them to find something exciting and let themย learn about who you are.ย Youโ€™ll need a current photo and a bio that sparks interest in who you are and what makes you unique.

Assuming youโ€™ll have your book for sale on Amazon, start here and build it using the help of Author Central. You can add your Twitter feed and an RSS feed with your blog content and highlight book reviews and blurbs.

A few authors with great Amazon profiles:

Chris Brogan

Hugh Howey

The Goodreads Author Program offers guidance as well. Goodreads is a vibrant social network of readers โ€“ your ideal audience is here! You can do a lot on Goodreads after you create your profile and add your books.

  • Start a conversation about your book.
  • Add events that you have planned on or offline
  • Join discussions
  • Start or join a reader's group
  • Share book events

A few exciting author profiles on Goodreads: John Greenย andย Matthew Quick.

Build your social media platform

Now that you have your official author pages up on Amazon and Goodreads, itโ€™s time to think about which social media platforms you should choose. Almost everyone has a personal Facebook page, but this isnโ€™t the place where youโ€™re going to sell your books.

Authors exhaust their Facebook friends and family quickly by hawking their books. Your goal is to expand past this group to a broader audience. Choosing your social media platform takes time. It depends on what your books are about and where your target audience socializes.

I like to say that you need to reach people where they like to socialize, so if you write business books, youโ€™ll want a strong LinkedIn presence, and if you write romance novels, Facebook and Pinterest might be better. Great research on social media platform demographics can help aid this decision as well.

A brief intro to the major social media platforms

Facebook Page: Reach Facebook fans; great if this fits your target demographic. Itโ€™s the largest social media network at this time.

Pinterest: Create a visual portfolio for you and your booksOrganize your online world by building boards to help you find and share great content: the best social media marketing and the least complicated to learn and maintain.

LinkedIn: Fantastic professional networking and communications. You can find editors, publishers, PR professionals, and many other people you need to build your publishing team. A solid profile on LinkedIn could benefit all authors.

Instagram: Share the fun side of who you are! It will take time to find your audience and build your social media platform.

Twitter: Find people interested in the same topics and build a fabulous base for your social media marketing campaigns.

My friend, author Shawn Welch, has spent about six months actively working on building his Twitter following. He started with about 1,000 followers and now has over 4,000. A few ways to make your Twitter following:

  1. Participate in relevant Twitter chats
  2. Follow people who are interested in the same things you are. You can find people by keyword searches on Twitter or use websites such as SocialBro to help you find people to follow.
  3. Share helpful content consistently on Twitter using hashtags in your tweets.
  4. Useย Buffer to schedule your content so you have time to write.

Shawn wrote a book on self-publishing and develops apps for iOS; therefore, most of Shawn's tweets are about self-publishing, iOS updates, or other content that is interesting to him but also related to his niche audience.

He will occasionally tweet a link to a great book review or when there is a promotion running for one of his books or apps. Shawnโ€™s followers get a consistent message from Shawn about who he is, what he likes, and what to expect from his Twitter content.

Use this model to create your niche in social media with consistent, targeted contenthat lets people know who you are and what youโ€™re about.

Promote yourself without being a jerk

A word of caution to authors getting started in social media: you canโ€™t only talk about your book! Twitter feeds filled with only tweets about your book will fall flat.

Share a balanced amount of content with your book promotions sprinkled in. They are a condiment, not the main course! Click To Tweet

No magic formula โ€“ create your mix.

  1. You need toย balance the material you shareย on social media. Some people share an 85/15 mix of โ€”85 percent of other peopleโ€™s stuff and 15 percent of yourself.
  2. Donโ€™t be โ€œthat guy or girl.โ€ย You cannot only promote yourself.ย You will have no followers or book sales.

Make wise choices

Itโ€™s better to build one robust social media platform than start and abandon four social media accounts.

Before diving into all social media platforms, remember maintaining them will take time management. Click To Tweet

You want a vibrant and informative social media presence, so choose wisely and build on it. Undoubtedly, having a substantial presence online will help you sell your books. Take time to plan your social media marketing, and youโ€™ll be rewarded for your time and effort in finding readers for your books.

I hope this gives you some ideas on how you can get started with building buzz for your book and you as an author. I look forward to hearing your success stories with selling your books on social media!

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