Use Social Media to Sell More Books Online!
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It’s all very well to have a presence on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn. As an Indie author, paying attention to your online presence is just one of the many tasks in your quest to master social media. The fact is, Amanda Hocking--she of the 100,000 book sales a month fame--said that becoming an expert at social media was key to her success.
So, in order to build your writer’s platform and get your name out, you know to show up on all your social media sites frequently (ideally, daily) and make comments (and friends?) and generally make your presence known. You’ve been told long enough to know that this is something you MUST do if you want to trigger or sustain e-book sales. But when it’s all said and done, when you’ve tweeted and posted and commented and e-mailed and retweeted and blogged until you’re blue in the tweeter, how do you know if you’ve really made a difference where it counts?
First. Know your goals. What is it you hope to accomplish? To sell more books? Get more reviews? Drive traffic to your website?
Second. Establish a baseline. Look at your current book sales or Google hits on your site. Even the number of likes will tell you how far you’ve come.
Third. Track your progress with toolslike Facebook Insights which will help you analyze demographics, referrals and click-throughs to all your Facebook pages. Use WordPress Stats, if your blog is through WordPress. This gives you a number of great plug-ins to analyze who is reading your blog and when. When you burn your RSS feed or blog to FeedBurner, you can see which of your posts re the most popular.
A VERY helpful thing to know!
And finally, because Twitter can be a virtual tsunami of information, HootSuite is a platform designed to help you manage and integrate Twitter with your other social media sites!
So let’s get out there, people, and sell some books! But, like anything that’s worth doing: let’s work smarter, not harder.
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Great! Glad I could help. Good luck to you! Is it fiction or non?
Great information for those who are thinking about, or in the process of publishing. It can be a tedious road. A road I have never traveled, but my wife has done so, and been successful at it...as time went by. Great hub! Thanks!
the first self-published book I'm putting out there is a book of poetry. I don't expect to make much money with it, but I'm using it as way to "learn by doing" in the self-publishing world. I also working on a book of fiction and not-yet-finished novel I'm considering for self-publication. All of the poems that I've self-published (through CreateSpace/Amazon) and the fiction I'm considering whether to take down that road (plus an excerpt from my novel) are on my hubpages.
I will check them out. It can be a long, nerve-wracking road and it's pitted with an amazing amount of hard work, as you know, but it's so worth it. For a writer to have his or her work "out there," and available to readers is what it's all about.
You're welcome and good luck to your wife. As they say, this business is a marathon, not a sprint.
mjfarns Level 3 Commenter 4 months ago
Very useful article. Thanks! I'm getting close to pulling the trigger on my first self-published book and this was very helpful.