One of the challenges I have with building a social media marketing plan is that a lot of what you said is pretty common advice, and it's never made sense to me. So I'm obviously clueless about something critical. Specifically, yes advertising has to reach out to people where they are. So: I have no hesitation about advertising on social media, that's budgeted for and I've worked with peers to build their ad details (image, text, keywords, demographics &c) so understand the nuts and bolts of that and expect to continue... BUT not sure why I need a 'presence' on these platforms. The advertising directs them off the platform to the author website which has the mailing list signup, link to sales closure (eg amazon), and in most cases other content like the media kit and calendar. Why build a redundant presence on the platform and force readers to click through an extra barrier to get to my site? It seems like make-work. The second gap is that I don't get any information from followers. For the most part their privacy settings exclude exposing their posts to strangers on the internet. Is there something I'm missing, like, a way to harvest information about followers through a database pull? This is the other gap, I think. The parts I don't want to interact with are 'all of it' and I have literally never found any aspect of social media 'fun'. It's all just tedium. Every second I'm on those platforms I am counting the seconds until I can get back to something I actually want to do.
Like some of the other poster's here, I'm also not a big fan of having to promote myself and my work on social media. One thing I noted from people I've reached out to for help in this area is that if you want to make a living writing you HAVE to treat it like a business. I thought writing my book would be the hard part, and it was! The harder part though is selling it! While I'd like to charge ahead with the social media I don't know if merely creating that presence will get the attention I need to become a successful author. I think it will probably pay off when people start looking for you but you still have to get yourself and your work out in the public eye to begin with. That's been my weakness, I'm not an extrovert. If I had a bigger budget I would hire people to do it for me but since I don't I'm going to have to dig down inside me and develop an author personality who is still me, but a more affable outgoing me that is able to generate enough interest in my work for people to buy it. If other's have actually had good response solely going on social media I'd love to hear exactly how you did it and how long it took (also important). I know I have a good book and a good sequel in the works but reaching that audience has been a very difficult task. GOOD, SOLID, STRAIGHTFORWARD ADVICE WOULD BE DEFINITELY APPRECIATED, THANKS!
On a side note, it came to my attention the traction that #booktok on Tik Tok is gaining as marketing power. Still need to keep in mind that most people on Tik Tok fall into the category of teens and young adults. This is my understanding of how the social media platforms are changing, I am by no means savvy. Do people get the same impression?
Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of ways besides social media to quickly promote something on the internet. Even then it might be really cliche and a major time sink with no reward. Twitter is mostly for sharing stuff quickly between communities that are already made anyway. It gets lost in the sea of everything else going on, better to build a community naturally and not try forcing it. Eventually you lose the ability, time, or interest to even be able to keep up with such things. It's perfect if you're already a celebrity though. You see it all the time, people with 'terrible' content have a large fanbase, but post little.
Okay so I'm not sure if it is relevant to the thread or not but recently while I was doing some research about the creative writing stuff, I found a website that has a full guide and stuff. it was cool and everything but then when I scrolled into its depths, Damn THEY WERE CHEAP. and so if anyone is thinking of finding a career in creative writing but doesn't have the time to write and stuff, Just Outsource your work to [spam link deleted] and they'll give you their best deals.
Unfortunately written in a talking-down-to-children tone, but I thought this was interesting, and might have something to say about forums like this one.: https://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-is-the-aol-of-2021/
I am sure they'll understand what you are doing, Karen. because I'm only sharing a useful resource that I find helpful in my writing experience.
nope you're spamming cheating services that are deeply unwlecome here, bye bye... no one here wants to 'outsorce their writing' we're writers.
That article makes some good points, but I don't know how accurate the history is. Most people I know didn't join AOL until well after the world wide web was established, although they may have had to use Netscape to browse it (which was fine back then). I'm talking mid-90s, when you could use AOL to browse the web as well as external chat programs like mIRC and basic ftp or peer to peer transfer.
Sorry, but from the Rules: All posts must be free of illegal or distasteful content, which includes pornography and nudity ...
