Crafting a Social Media Message for Your Book
- In This Quick Guide:
- Before You Start
- Use a Two Pronged Approach
- Craft a Message That Grabs Readers
- Test It First
Now that you’ve published your book, it’s time to take the plunge and start building some buzz for your book online. Social media sites are great for getting the word out. Here’s how you do it.
Note: for purposes of this quick guide we will assume that you control all of the rights to your own material and can make any and all decisions regarding how to use it and where and when it will appear. If you are being published by someone else, then you will need to involve your publisher in many of these matters as (look carefully at your contract) you will not have the right to post excerpts without asking for permission.
Before You Start
The first step is to decide what success will look like for you. Is your goal with your social media campaign:
- To increase book sales
- To increase traffic to your website/blog/build your lists
- To book more author appearances
- To build energy and awareness of your book
Understand that focusing solely on the number of copies you sell from your social media efforts could lead to disappointment. Focusing on the broader goals of increasing exposure and gaining attention is a more realistic way to measure results.
Use a Two Pronged Approach
An effective campaign will involve multiple approaches to potential readers. Using just Facebook, or just Twitter, isn’t as effective as combining the two. Some are devoted to one medium and suspicious of the other, get over it and use them both. Remember, the point is to not rely on just one outlet, and one contact with followers and friends. Don’t put all of your electronic eggs into one basket.
Should you use your own personal Facebook account to promote your book or should you start a Facebook page strictly for your book? Both, is the best answer. If you have been on Facebook for awhile you already have friends, and chances are you have already mentioned your book once or twice (or twenty times) in your posts. So it will come as no surprise to your friends when you start to post pictures of the cover of your book with links to an online bookseller or info on how to get a copy.
In addition to your own personal account, you should set up a page that is strictly for your book.
After logging into Facebook, go to Create a Page and simply follow the instructions. The category you want for a book page is “Entertainment.” Don’t do this until you already have a photo of the book to upload and a sense of what information you want to post. Otherwise the fact that you created a page will appear on your profile page and there will be nothing there for anyone who clicks on it. So wait (we know it is hard) until you have everything you need before starting the book page.
Same question for Twitter, should you use your personal account or start one identified with your book title? Tweeters respond to people, not products, so we recommend using a personal account to tweet book-related messages. Use the hashtag function (#) to get conversations started around your book topic. Sally Hogshead is a master at this technique. The author of a book called Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, she tweets constantly with the verb #fascinate in her message and reminds her followers over and over again about both her book and her philosophy. It doesn’t seem like overkill but rather a part of a larger conversation.
Craft a Message That Grabs Readers
How do you get someone to buy your book by posting or tweeting about it? To be blunt, it isn’t as easy as most writers believe. First, you need to get them to read your post/tweet. And then you want them to follow through and repost or retweet it themselves to expand your exposure, and also buy your book. You are asking for three different things, and depending on who these people are, their response may vary from not reading at all, to reposting, to buying several copies (the category your mom falls into).
What matters most is your message. Think of effective campaigns that you have responded to, and what caught your attention about them. There are a number of ways to go:
Funny Think of every cat photo you have ever clicked on, videos of small children conducting imaginary orchestras, and the raging viral pre-publication success for the book Go The F*k to Sleep. Can you put together a funny teaser for your book? Can you come up with more than one funny teaser? Is there a way to create multiple amusing messages that you can send out once a week for several months? Think hard, a one-time joke will only work one time.
Newsworthy Immediacy can work, timeliness and big issues can cause a reaction from readers. During the debt ceiling crisis no doubt an author or two with a business book or economics title to push used that as a hook in their tweets and posts to drive sales. A novel can be promoted if you write books that seem to tie into what is happening in the zeitgeist.
Poignant In the early days of social media, Jennifer’s ebook A Glimpse of Heavenly Miracles reached the number one spot on sales lists because of the sad story behind it—her co-author Laura Lewis was dying and the money from the ebook would go directly to Laura’s children. Thousands of people circulated the story online and the ebook became number one. Poignancy only works once or twice though, crass as it seems to point that out.
Provocative “I always get the best results when I put a question out there,” says author/blogger JT Long. “Engage people, don’t just broadcast your ideas.” Recently Jennifer posted on Facebook an actual rejection from an editor to one of her projects, she got a huge response from her FB friends, lots of comments and likes. She added her own comments to it, reminding readers that a new edition of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published was due to release soon. A softball way to get people engaged with you first, and then slip in a plug for your book.
Flat-Out Cool You know it when you see it, and what you think is cool might not hit others that way. This might be the hardest kind of message to craft, and it is hard to create cool. Cool seems to happen on its own, and to be anointed that way by other people.
Obviously, not everything can be pitched in a funny way, and very few things can be poignant. But figuring out which approach will work best with your book is half the battle of writing the message.
When creating your own messages, focus on everything that has caught your own attention in the last sixty days—a viral video of a customer who had a pizza delivered to the Apple store, a news story about Occupy Wall Street, a tweet about Russell Brand’s next comedy tour. What was it about those messages that got your attention? Where do they fall in the categories we have just listed? This will help you figure out how to craft a message to which people will respond.
Test It First
Once you’ve got your message written, you need to test it out on people. You really only get one chance to grab people’s attention, and you don’t want to blow it. So before you post or tweet, test your message on a friend or two. People who will tell you the truth, not needless flattery. You don’t have to take their suggestions, but sometimes an outside opinion really helps.
Now that you have your message, it’s time to send it out to the world! Once you see how social media can help boost interest—and sales—in your book, you’ll be hooked. Good luck!
by Jennifer Sander
