Hi fellow writers! So a big part of my day job is social media marketing, and a lot of what I learned doing this is definitely applicable to marketing your books and broadening your reach. As we know, whether you decide to go the self-publishing route or try traditional publishers, you will be expected to do a huge chunk of the marketing yourself. 

This will be a long one, and I hope it will help! I’ll include a segment about paid ads, but most of what you can do is free. 

What’s social media marketing?

That’s when you use social media for marketing. Currently popular for marketing books are Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. All of those have their merits, and for maximum reach, all three should be utilised. It sounds like a ton of work, and I won’t lie - it’s time consuming. Fortunately, you don’t need to alter your content to fit each platform because at the core, they all fulfill the same need: Connect with people, in this case your demographic, your readership, your following. 

And hashtags. So many hashtags. 

Facebook

The OG. The very shaper of modern society. The bane of it, too. 

You may think FB has since become a place for ages 40 and up, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but those people are also a majority of your demographic. The average age range for romance readers is 30-54, around 84% of those being women. Facebook also offers neat features that Instagram and Twitter lack: FB Groups. Writer groups. Reader groups. SO MANY OF THEM. Join them, post actively in them, remember to be polite when you discuss with other group members. It’s also very easy to set up a business page for your books that people can follow. When they do, your page may be recommended to their friends. Facebook is wonderful to establish a following and offers statistics for business pages, too. And it explains your options like you’re five, which I find very relaxing. Don’t worry about hashtags on FB.

Twitter

Everyone has a Twitter nowadays. With everyone, I mean editors, publishers, other authors - everyone you want to connect with. Like Facebook, Twitter’s algorithm works like a virus: People follow you, may like your tweets, and their followers and mutuals may be shown your tweets as well. Use this. As with FB, you need to take the first step though. Follow authors in your genre, follow editors working for publishers, follow everyone you think you’ll benefit from. Become part of their network, maybe even strike up a friendship of sorts. Again, activity is key. Twitter also uses hashtags, but don’t overdo it here. You have a limited amount of space.

Instagram

Go wild with your hashtags. I mean it. When you post on Instagram, it will need to be a picture (or a video technically), but you also have space to write down something below. A single sentence is enough, since IG cuts off text that is longer than a few words. Which, for us, is a boon! Create a nice picture, add something casual under it, and then: hashtags.

IG doesn’t work with groups like FB does, and while it does recommend posts based on your already established interests, there is no guarantee your post will show up. Especially not when you’re just starting out with your account. Actually you’re not guaranteed to show up under the hashtag at all, it’s a bit weird like that. Go. Wild. When you begin typing with a # it will try to guess what you’re trying to write - and, consequently, suggest popular hashtags, which is really handy, or suggest those you’ve used before. It even shows how popular those are right now, so pick all that apply and don’t be shy to use all of those. For companies, any more than five hashtags is considered tacky, but we are not shackled to such nonsensical beliefs. Shill your work! I’ll add some popular ones at the bottom to get you started.

What would I even post?

Honestly, anything you want that pertains to your author persona and your work. Those could be updates on your WIPs, mood postings that can include only text (Twitter and Facebook) or added to a nice pic (all three), or quotes from your books. If you have one, you can regularly post the release date of your book also. 

The only thing that is truly important, especially when you’re just starting out, is that you do it regularly. The algorithms are more likely to push your content if you are predictable to them. You have to make them notice you. Pick a day or two a week to start out and post on those; only on those, and on all of them. Pay attention to when you yourself are most likely to browse your social media and post at these times. Before work, during lunch or in the evening are all popular. It’s also super helpful if you have (or are willing to get) experience in image editing. 

What do I need edited images for?

To make your posts appealing. Studies say that content containing pictures are more likely to be interesting to people just scrolling (only topped by “moving content”, i.e. videos). This is because people on social media want to be entertained, and our brains are lazy when we’re in “downtime mode”. An only-text post is less likely to be noticed - the exception to this is Twitter, but even there you’re more likely to respond to a picture. (It recently removed the horrible crop it did before!)

Should I create accounts just for my books?

YES. That counts for all three platforms. Before any benefits that come with professional or business accounts, you will have one centralised account that offers your following exactly what they came for: your writing. 

Instagram allows you to create multiple accounts under your main account, and you can simply switch between them at will. The business accounts include statistics that help you tweak your reach.

Facebook has a similar function, you can create business pages that link back to your main account and can be accessed through it. 

A new Twitter is simply a new Twitter though.

And if you use the same post for FB and IG, you can link the accounts and save some time! They will post at the same time on both, are even plannable and both platforms are usually reliable doing this. 

I’m not being seen/don’t get a lot of likes/don’t get any new followers

Don’t give up. The thing to remember is that social media marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s unlikely that you’ll gain thousands of followers overnight. Cultivate your content, engage with the communities and be persistent and reliable. Analyse your hashtags and see if you can’t connect with more people in your genre. They will come.

Does it make sense to start SMM before I publish?

Yes, to a degree. The older your accounts are, the more “reliable” the algorithms think you are. And when new followers come in after publishing, they won’t sit in front of an empty account, they’ll be able to be part of the journey even if they’re late to the party. Stuff like that builds trust in the person they will buy or have bought a book from: you! Aggressive marketing for something that can’t be accessed yet doesn’t make sense though. It comes down to timing, in the end. 

The odd one out: Reddit

You can of course also use Reddit to build a readership! I wouldn’t count it as social media marketing, per se, but we shouldn’t ignore it. It’s so easy to find peers through subreddits. You can talk about your work, advertise it in the right threads, and find beta readers, other authors, editors, just generally helpful people. This works better for networking and knowledge than actual marketing. Generally, use all resources available to you!

Paid advertisement

FB and IG offer ad campaigns. Since almost everything has been bought by Facebook by now, the campaign can run on both platforms at once. If you have an FB business account, you can set a limit on what you want to pay for the campaign and FB will adjust how often it will show your ad - that’s why you see big company ads SO OFTEN and others only once. It comes down to budget. The campaign manager allows you to add demographics and areas, so you can steer where your content is going. 

Be prepared for your reach to tank once the money runs out, though. That’s a mechanism that makes you want to spend more money to get your reach back up. I’m not sure about the current timeframes, but it will slowly heal again. If anyone has info about Amazon ads, please add them in the comments! I haven’t worked with those before.

Don’t get me wrong, doing this is still a lot of work. As stated, even publishers will expect you to do your own fair share of marketing if you go trad - the upside to this is that you can use their reach to add to your own. On Instagram especially, you benefit from keeping a steady profile with your posts: you can use the same background or templates for book quotes, for example. You build your recognisability like this.

Last but not least, hashtags for Instagram use:

authorsofinstagram bookstagram bookquotes #romance romancenovel romanceread contemporaryromancereads romanticsuspence romancebooks romancenovel paranormalromance - as you can see, any genre combined with romance exists and has followers! It’s like a rabbit hole, you will be recommended more and more. 

I realise this is a lot. If there are any more questions to delve deeper into any of these, let me know. We should at some point also discuss author websites I believe! 

I mostly use Instagram at this point in time. If there’s any interest, perhaps we can network and build our reach together.

Happy marketing!