By Carrie L. Weston, @carrieallbooks
You’ve toiled over a plot, written a horrible rough draft followed by revisions and editing. You’ve been proofread and polished. You’ve managed to select a cover that you love. There may have even been the struggle of selecting a pen name in there as well.
Congrats!
Most people never get to this point. Now that you have finished your book comes the next big struggle–getting your book into the hands of readers. While we would love the idea that our ARC readers or family would share our books far and wide and then we’d suddenly become a best-selling author, the uncomfortable truth is that most of us need to consider marketing and PR.
Self promotion can feel strange, but readers expect to interact with authors online and see information on when their next books are coming out, info on the plot and tropes, as well as information on the author’s life outside of their stories.
Many authors are lost as to how to do this marketing thing. In my day jobs I frequently deal with this issue. I work for a company that serves the marketing needs of many of the best known Christian publishers and independent authors around. The list of their clients I work with include several ECPA bestselling authors. I also work as a Communication and English professor at several local-to-me universities. One of the courses I teach is Social Media Management, which serves near-graduating English students, many of whom chose to focus on plans to market themselves or groups on social media.
Through my work in these jobs I have learned some valuable lessons about what to do during the promotional period to connect with readers, as well as what NOT to do.
- Start early. This can be a challenge when you want to get done with the manuscript and edits. However, in terms of books, this early announcement, your cover announcement, and promotional posts allow for time for readers to learn about your book and follow you and preorder the book. This may also mean that the algorithm of the social media sites you are posting on will have time to show you to more potential readers. We often have posts published for books coming out 8 weeks or longer in the future
- Your newsletter list of subscribers is your owned real estate in the online world. We’ve all seen recent changes in Twitter/X which have underscored that social media is not owned by us and can change and affect our abilities to reach our audience. Our newsletter, for as much as we sometimes worry about being one more email, is our best chance to reach out to our audience. The key is to offer readers more of our unique voice and to entice them to be willing to subscribe by creating your….
- Lead Magnet. Recently I have seen authors who give away free printables, mini courses, short stories, full novels, and all manner of things as a way to entice readers to sign up for your newsletter. (This is a huge area technologically speaking, so I won’t get into all the ways you can accomplish this in this post.) Readers want to feel like they get something from being willing to give you their precious and private email address. After that it is up to you to choose headlines and content that will make it worthwhile to stick around instead of unsubscribe. Some of the best I’ve seen include behind the scenes info on what authors are writing next, “interviews” of characters, which can be serious or silly, and a smattering of embarrassing stories about their real life.
- Create a content bank. Think back to your story. What lines or scenes stick out in your mind? Copy those into a document, whether this is a spreadsheet or other type of document. A spreadsheet has the advantage of letting you keep track of when and where you use this content, and lets you avoid using some of it too many times.
- Schedule your posts. Sometimes for clients we post the same thing on the same day to make it simpler for the authors. Other times we plan 3 days of posts for each week and switch up which pieces of content post on which sites depending on the day. You may want to arrange your content into a content calendar in your documents or you can also simply use the scheduling capabilities of whatever social media site you are using.
Point #5 brings up another important factor to consider, just what social media sites should you use? This is an endlessly changing question. In my work we used to recommend that individuals use Twitter, however, the landscape there has been changing and we have seen diminished engagement and they currently require you to become verified to place ads, which may or may not be a factor for you.
The best means to decide where to invest is by looking and listening. Tik Tok can be wildly popular with some readers, although you may also find that your audience isn’t interacting there at all. Instagram is becoming more and more popular with readers too. Look and see what authors in your genre are using social media, learn what hashtags they are using to good effect, and narrow down on where you should be spending your time.
And in the end, if something doesn’t work, you are free to change and adjust however you want. You only have so much time and a finite amount of energy. See what you like and what provides you the best return for the investment of your time and possibly money. And in the end, don’t be afraid to hire out some of the marketing work if it doesn’t suit you. Many of the famous authors out there aren’t the ones who are directly posting for their social media–and so if you hire someone to do it you will be in good company.
Carrie Weston is a writer and professor living and working in the Twin Cities. Carrie is the managing editor of Shore to Shore Literary Magazine. Her writing has been featured in places like Spark Flash Fiction and her debut novel will be published in late 2023. In addition to writing, Carrie is a mom to five (soon to be six) works for Apricot Services, a marketing and PR company serving publishers and authors, teaches writing at multiple Minnesota universities, as well as instructing in local community education. She has a M.A. in Strategic Communication Management and an MFA in Creative Writing. Carrie is originally from Michigan, and her family enjoys exploring the Great Lakes region and writing stories of communities and people in the area. Connect with Carrie at carriewestonwriter.com