Is it pretentious to make a Facebook page for your writing?

It built up about 1000 likes (still live here, if you want to look - there's a few less likes than it had at its peak, but they're mostly still there. I linked it further up this thread as well, but there's no spam like link-spam)

I'm not sure how many people saw the posts because Facebook's reporting is dodgy. Some posts say '2 people reached' when they got 15 likes and 5 different people commenting. The paperback sold just under 50 copies, and while I can't say for certain they all came from Facebook posts, they all came at the same time as I was posting there. There was also some fairly minimal ad spend - about $15 of boosted posts, IIRC.

FWIW, my measure of success with this was far more about the size of the audience than the money I made off it. I only started thinking about putting a collection together after I'd been posting the stories for like a year and a half - what I wanted was readers. On Facebook, I got about 1000 likes, and regularly had people interacting when I posted a new story up. On Twitter, I got something like 15 followers and barely any attention. Facebook suited the kind of thing I was doing - and just the way I interact with people generally - far better.

 

I've been noodling about social media as well, and also attended a free course offered by my authors association to its members, run by a subject matter expert in social media for authors.

Here's the problem: the subject matter expert was very informative about how to use the various social media for promoting an emerging author's brand. Where he fell down was I don't think he grasped the long term risks.

I have decided not to use any social media, based on my personal situation, but I can see how it will work for many authors. It might work for you.

Here is my thinking...

Benefits:
Setup is free, easy.
Early maintenance is free, easy.
Scaling is easy. (ie: growth is not a time consuming technical problem)

Drawbacks:
Audience is restricted to users on the platform.
Brand can become dependent on the platform. (can start to cost money)
Brand can become tainted by the platform. (if the platform behaves unethically)
Trolls. (brand impacting, time wasting)
Time.

My preference is to always control my brand's communication channel with my customers. Ceding gateway-type control to FB, Twitter, Snapchat, &c, seemed like its business case declined in proportion to potential success. I also don't have a lot of time, don't use social media for anything personal, so every second I spend futzing with social media is time deducted from actually writing.

Basically, I'm not thinking about how to reach new customers - I'm thinking ahead about how to communicate with - and therefore maintain a relationship with - existing customers post-acquisition.

 

One aspect of your excellent pros and cons list, @KevinMcCormack , did strike me as being easier to manage than you might think. Trolls will not be a problem on Facebook if you control your settings. I believe you can set your account so that only you can post and comment. That way you can present what you want without interference. I believe you can also open the site to comments, but also block certain individuals, or remove unpleasant comments.

I do think Facebook is worth using, if you can deter trolls and keep your private life private. Lots of people will search for an author on Facebook. Might as well be there. The ethics of the place might be an issue for some, but again, you can disappear from it if that starts to bother you.

 

Everyone else above will have given far more practical advice than I can, given that I'm someone who sticks to just the writing process and won't try marketing for a good few years yet, but I don't think it's pretentious at all. At least not generally.

I would only see having your own website or social media pages as pretentious if you really are just trying to market yourself without putting any graft into it. I think the biggest mistake people can make is trying to get themselves out there before they're ready and disadvantaging themselves in the process. You can be too cautious as well, but it's better to know your product is ready and worth selling before thinking about how to target your audience.

So long as you've put the required time and effort into your finished book there's no reason why you shouldn't use Facebook as a platform to promote it. It looks professional and it's also a very current way to behave, you'll be seen as someone who is proactive and committed to getting your voice out there.

 

Facebook only shows posts to about 10% of page likers so you're going to need a hefty amount of likes.

 

Yes, I threw them in there as a negative, without much context to explain why.

Specifically, if one of the intended benefits of using a FB Page is to develop a community, then shutting down comments on your Page to eliminate the possibility of trolls also removes that benefit.

The second approach - curating your Page followers to block trolls - is one of the contributors to time demands, which I listed as one of the Cons. Blocking trolls within a reasonable timeframe means frequent monitoring of the Page, and it's a reactive process, meaning the posts are read by followers before you remove them.

 

I think this is where I landed: FB Pages are not pretentious, assuming the owner is promoting an actual product that people will be interested in.

 

There is kind of a happy medium though. Don't open it to public posts, only to people who 'join' or like your site. If they begin to behave badly, dump them. However, everybody will get a chance to participate initially.

Again, yes, it will require some monitoring. But the plus side is you're visible on Facebook. Tons of authors have their own Facebook pages, so it must be reasonably manageable. However, you would need to balance the amount of time you'd want to monitor it, versus not having any exposure there at all.

 

For me, the balance is zero FB, is the thing, where no exposure at all brings me the maximum benefit. But again: this is because of my personal situation, not everybody will have the same conclusion.

I was reviewing some of the notes about FB's functionality, and it's worth mentioning that the different user activities have different relative values to the Page owner.

Shares > Comments > Likes

And by 'value' I mean 'making posts visible to others'. If we don't get a lot of Shares, we will not be seen by even our followers. Comments are less valuable, and Likes are even less valuable. The formula is proprietary, but outside analysts reverse engineer it regularly, and the current estimates are comments = 25 likes, and shares = 4 comments.

A post is scored accordingly, and competes with other posts in our followers' feeds, in a rolling timeframe. What that last part means is that if we have a million shares, but none recently, we're not scoring very high right now, nobody can see our posts.

I do observe that a lot of authors have FB Pages, but that's not necessarily evidence for their manageability. Large publishers have staff to handle these, and smaller self published authors may just have bitten off more than they can chew.

A friend of mine who is self published is pretty honest about it - he had to take a 'FB vacation' to reserve enough time for his writing. He did a calculation and concluded FB was actually a net cost, not bringing in enough business for its time investment, but it took five years to get a grasp of the problem. His website is the main sales channel. (Not sure if I should post the URL? it's a friend's site, so could be construed as an endorsement)

 

Well, I certainly appreciate your concerns, @KevinMcCormack . I guess I only suggested Facebook because so many people are on Facebook and do follow Facebook pages. I follow several author pages myself, and do get reasonably frequent feeds from them. And these are famous authors in my 'follow' pages, like Terry Pratchett (one whom I follow.) His site is updated by whoever is running it at the moment—obviously not him.

I have a friend here in Scotland who is an author and runs a Facebook author page as well as his personal FB page. He's had no trouble with it for the past several years, and certainly doesn't feel that maintaining it eats into his writing time.

Because Facebook does reach people, I will certainly make use of it myself, when the time comes. I feel it's good because it takes less effort to run than a blog, in that you don't have to write a treatise every couple of days. You only need an occasional notice or couple of lines, to keep it in the news feeds.

But I do appreciate that it MIGHT become burdensome, especially if the 'wrong' people start contributing to it. However, the solution is simple then. Just take it down?

 

I wouldn't worry about trolls until you've actually got some. In all my time using FB for writing stuff, I don't remember ever having one.

 

This. The biggest problem you face is getting any eyeballs on your stuff at all.

 

@KevinMcCormack, ditto to your excellent pros and cons. I am very enthusiastic about FB as my platform, and have had very good results, so let me address your negatives. First off, don't confuse your personal FB page with your professional one. You spin your professional site off your personal one, through the "create page" option on the lower right left hand corner of your personal page. Your author page is of type "artist", your book page is of type "brand". Professional pages work quite differently from your personal one.
1. Your FREE audience is limited to those who like/follow your page. You can invite your personal friends to like your page. However, for a reasonable price, you can boost the post or page to a wide audience of thousands of people, tailored by country, region, interest, demographics. Reaching over ten thousand can be done for $50 to $100. Repeated boosts reach generally a different audience. Those you reach who like your post can be invited to like your page, to build your following.
2. You are going to have to spend some money to reach a wide audience. And that is true of any media, not just FB. Just set yourself a budget, and go for it. Do NOT expect to make money on sales for a long time: I think the objective for any self-published author is reach, not dollars, looking for that critical mass when it begins to sell itself. Eventually, if you achieve that, you may begin to make money., but don't rush out to buy that Maserati. Those who go the traditional route get (sometimes!) professional marketing as part of the benefits of going through the rigorous and sometimes arbitrary screening process of that route. Self-publishing means self-marketing.
3. You are in control of the ethics of the platform. Set it up professionally, don't get personal, cute, political, and don't allow respondees to do so. Try to tailor each post to some interesting aspect of your book that may spark someone's enthusiasm, don't just keep posting "buy my book on Amazon, it's really cool" I have now about 700 followers on my author's page, and have separately spun off pages for my two books, and trying to build the books following. Just remember, every time you post, all you followers will see/know. So try to make yourself interesting, not someone they eventually block to kill the noise.
4. On a professional page, you can control whether people can comment on your posts or not, so that is one troll control. I have not exercised that option, and I enjoy on occasion being able to answer questions about my books, and it is truly satisfying to have a stranger say, in a public comment, that they really enjoyed the book, and to be able to thank them. In nine months of operation, I have had one minor annoyance on one post on "Come, Follow Me, a Story of Pilate and Jesus" when both a die-hard atheist and die-hard Christian (I don't know which is worse, you know the types, they are mirror images of each other) weighed in with each other, beginning with "Oh, I get it, fiction about fiction," and downhill from there. I made some conciliatory comments, they went away and no more problems. Oddly enough, the vitriol actually generated sales among other readers! I have seem far worse vitriol on this forum.
5. Work, I build up a couple of posts a month, about an hour each, and the rest is just watching the numbers tick up on the boosts, checking comments (relatively few).

You can check out my author site at Lewis McIntyre, check for my avatar, there are several of us. Also my wife @K McIntyre has a page at Karen D. McIntyre. Like us both, link to our book pages and like us there also.

Whichever way you go, good luck.

 

Yes, this is why I capitalized Page - to distinguish it from Profile. These are different account types in Facebook, with Page being intended for branding, and Profile is personal. There are some good primers on FB for other people on the thread who may be interested, which describe the functional distinctions (eg: maximum number of followers, &c.)

'reasonable' is the key word there. IMO, that's where a person has to get their abacus out and decide what the conversion rate is. I don't care how many people I reach - I care about the sales after conversion rate. 100% of 100 people is the same gross revenue as 1% of 10,000 people. If there's a cost difference, then one route is more profitable. This will vary by individual, because we all have different business models. I'm just saying that in my case, FB's conversion rate was so low that it became a net cost. My friend found the same.

I think how one invests in marketing depends on the marketing plan. In my case, yes, I do 'spend money to reach a wider audience' - it's my agent's percentage. I just got a residual for having some of my old backlisted poetry shown in Japan on public transportation, for example. My agent knows more markets than I can even imagine exist.

One other concern is that monetizing by leveraging a platform does mean that the writer is tempted to adjust their time commitments to work that satisfies the needs of the platform. FB's currency is likes, comments, and shares. I am not a writer because I want likes, comments, or shares.

My opinion is that the moment a person thinks, "How will I change my writing to improve my FB scoring and get more views," is the moment a person has started working for FB. I'm concerned the FB business model is going to be a gradually worsening proposition for content creators over time, and am reluctant to give up that much control of my communication channel with my customers.

This depends on the author. My friend writes nonfiction, he focuses on healthfraud. There are entire industries with fulltime staff whose jobs are to shut down people like him. He costs them money.

Likewise, I have a writing colleague who shut hers down because of threats of violence. The sad reality is that we don't have to be deliberately hostile to attract trolls - she just had to be a black woman who writes science fiction novels and software game stories for EA here in Vancouver, which is apparently offensive in and of itself. But her calling is to write meaningful fiction, so there was no hesitation about closing her social media accounts. Click, done, back to writing.

Again, though, these examples aside, I agree with your main point - it works out for you, and will work fine for many people. My intention was to give a list of pros an cons, with the note that the relative importance of any these will vary by individual.

Regarding the ethics of the platform - what I meant was that some elements are beyond our control. We cannot stop FB from selling our submitted personal information to 3rd parties to enhance our customer profile. For our followers with their personal profiles, they are the product FB sells to marketers, it's the business model. This is a reason many people like me do not make use of personal FB and other social media profiles - privacy. When (not if - when) there is a major privacy crisis, a platform is impacted, including our Pages - it's beyond our control as mere Profile users and even as Page customers.

Yes, this is the appeal of a Page, in my opinion - maintaining a customer relationship. I do this, too - I use email. But this is another example of how people differ in their prioritizing of those Pros and Cons... I have a background in software development, so building a website is a snap, so FB Pages aren't less time or easier for me versus a website. If anything they're more time, because FB keeps updating and I have to tinker. I've been at this since FB was just a baby, so Pages are maybe the 5th generation of FB's marketing offers, all of which were unilateral policy changes on their part, replacing the work I'd done previously, take it or leave it. This is another example of the Con labeled 'giving away control of the channel.'

The need to disable comments will depend on whether we have or anticipate brand impacting problems. My friend who does the quackbusting, and my other friend who writes scifi but has the wrong demographics, should have known in advance, but anyway, they found very quickly that there are automated botnets in the hands of motivated parties whose entire purpose is to detect and discredit or intimidate those they believe are deserving.

I predict I will fall into that category as well, due to my family's demographics, and my writing's subject matter.

Yes, this is the ideal: that there will be low maintenance. Another poster mentioned Hootsuite, which I also use, to maintain Pages for various nonprofits where I volunteer. And just to throw out another option: I am migrating to Radian6, which I believe is now a part of the SalesForce suite of CRM apps. With any of these tools, the appeal is that I can consolidate maintenance across several social media platforms simultaneously through one interface.



And, sorry to the forum about all this, because I realize it's a derail. The OP was asking about pretentiousness, and I ended up discussing general issues about social media's business proposition for authors.

 

Well, the OP started an interesting conversation, for sure. Very informative thread!

I appreciate your details, @KevinMcCormack, and in fact learned a few things from you! Take a look at our pages, and let me know what you think... I am still a novice at FB. I also built a website www.lewis-mcintyre.com, but found that websites are the only thing in the world harder to promote than books. Advice on that one would be appreciated also... it needs an update, but I haven't found it to be worth the time. That is, by the way, my very first self-built website.

I have a very simple way to evaluate advertising... I stop doing it for a while and see what happens to my sales. I stopped FB posts in late August through the end of September, since I was attending a very pricey Historical Writers of American conference in late September. My sales dropped to their lowest level since my February launch. At the beginning of October, ran a free Kindle giveaway for five days, (my third) with a small boost for that, followed by regular boosts, and sales have blasted off again, November shaping up as a record month.

You apparently have a marketing agent, and I don't, and am a bit gun-shy of them. A local author and close friend hired one for $2000, got put on five radio shows... and sold 10 books.

 

It looks great - squarespace does have great themes that make it simple to build a site that's easy on the eyes and bug free.

That's a good way to test existing channels, yes. The challenge is about how to compare channels against one another, especially new channels that you are not using yet (there's a risk of getting locked into the first one that worked, even if there are better opportunities out there - in software we call this a 'local maximum problem'). We're in an era where a self-promoter might need to juggle a shifting portfolio of multiple channels without losing focus on core competencies (ie: without sacrificing writing).

Yikes, yeah, that's disappointing. In my case, it's a percentage contract. She makes money by selling my content, so her success is linked to sales results. I got in her portfolio as a new author who is only writing part time around a day job, which is incredibly rare, so I'm not saying "everybody should do what I do," but rather that this is an example of why authors need to customize their marketing plan - we all have different situations.

Your site shows Amazon as publisher? - do you do any Amazon search engine optimization? That's another type of expertise that some specialists offer to authors. Google SEO for websites is similar.

 

Not that I know of, other than some of the low-level Amazon marketing tools, and I am not sure how effective they are. I think most of us here are not successful enough to quit our day jobs, so I don't think you are as unusual as you think! I tinkered a bit with SEO on the website, but I don't know what I am doing. For some reason, on a search, the site title, my name, is repeated three times.

 

I have one of those dead channels, BookDaily. For $49/mo, for each book, they blast it out over the e-mail channels three or four times a month to a tailored audience. Since I track daily sales (I am an engineer, I got to quantify everything I do, drives @K McIntyre crazy), I think I can detect small upticks in sales after each boost. I average sales over the past seven days, so I wash some of the noise out. I don't think I am getting enough sales to justify continuing to use that channel, and may drop it just to see what happens.

 

I feel like this is a rich discussion that probably deserves another thread.

And maybe an "Article" - ? It seems like self promotion channel decision factors is an example of something the forum hosts had in mind for the Articles section.

 

Yeah, trolls have never been an issue for me. I've had a couple of arsehole tweets in my years of Twittering, but all I had to do was ignore/block and that was that. If you stay away from politics (which authors should do anyway IMO unless they're at the JK Rowling level), trolls aren't a significant risk.

 

Thanks for all the insight, folks! Wow, didn't know it would become such a full topic but it's good.

I know what to do and how to avoid trolls. Like others say, I won't even have to worry about that until I actually gain some kind of recognition. I do admit it will take a lot of time to get people to like my page once it's up because I already have a page for my literary journal and it hardly gets any attention at all. Mostly friends have liked my page because Facebook won't let me invite people who aren't my friends.

I'll leave the link below if any of you are interested in giving it a look.. Or a like

https://m.facebook.com/LabyrinthinePassages/?ref=bookmarks

 

Looks like a nicely set up site. Will like it tonight, on a Navy computer right now. Working

 

Done,m @Alex R. Encomienda, please also like
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1510483442328642/?source_id=245650645781133
and
https://www.facebook.com/KarenDMcIntyreAuthor/, and their links to our books. Thanks!