When wandering along the precarious paths of book marketing, no doubt you have heard of using social networking to market your books. But it’s never as easy as announcing your wonderful book to the world and watching your book climb The New York Times best sellers list or the USA Today best sellers list. We’ll look at fallacies and facts related about building a social media presence and how to optimize social media to promote your romance novel.
First, the Bad News
You have written your masterpiece and made it as wonderful as you possibly can. You have published it and got it on all the distributor channels for e-books and paperbacks that you can muster — and it falls flat. Your Amazon ranking sits somewhere in the 1 millions. Desperate, you use Facebook and Twitter to announce the book to the world and get nothing but crickets. Maybe your Amazon numbers dip into the 100,000’s and then creep back up.
What in the heck happened?
This is actually pretty common when it comes to books by unknown or relatively unknown authors. Without the fan base to support the author and without the book reaching the intended audience, the books simply becomes one of millions of books available online.
Time Waster or Book-Marketing Powerhouse?
You can increase your presence and reach your intended audience using social media. Social media promotes your presence online and includes blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, and a host of other online forums where you can talk with people about all sorts of things, including your book.
If you are already using social media to stay in touch with family and friends, you’re probably already aware of what a time sink social media can be. Between all the memes, the cute cat pictures, news stories, and other items, you can spend hours wasting time with little more to show for it than learning what character in Firefly you are.
Because it can be a real trap to the unsuspecting author, it can suck you in and leave you wondering where the day went. For example, there are games and apps on Facebook that can totally waste your time. However, if you avoid such temptations, you may find that Facebook is a great place for book marketing.
