ARCHIVE FOR The Socially Savvy Author

When I talk to authors trying to wrangle their social media activities, one of the big questions is what should I do every day to make the biggest difference? This is especially important to figure out so you can maximize your time and put your efforts in the right place. Savvy book marketers should be able to do the following five things in an hour or less every day

I’ve been meeting with the same writing group for over a decade. All of us are in varying stages of our novel process, but one of our group members recently landed an agent and her book is now out on submission.

“You are going to start thinking about your social media now, right?” I asked her. “Don’t wait until the book is published!”

For many of us book lovers, we love to keep track of books we've read and easily discover new books. We also love to talk about them, and to tell others about the books that really impacted us

All too often authors use a push strategy in their social media efforts, sharing out messages to their audience without engaging with their audience at all. To do so is to ignore one of the most effective marketing tools in the marketing arsenal, the power of 1:1 conversations.

Individuals in social media are looking for those connections, especially from people that they admire. Twitter, in particular, seems to be the network I see authors using a push strategy rather than engaging, but it’s not something unique to that channel.

Last month Facebook implemented new changes in their ever-changing algorithm, this time with the intention to counteract a few things: unhealthy Facebook addiction and ongoing problems with Russian influencers, both brought on by passive consumption of material. Plus a whole slew of studies have shown that users who spend time on Facebook often leave a session feeling worse than when they started. One study, from Harvard Business Review, may have been one of the deciding factors in Facebook deciding to make the changes it did:

Overall, our results showed that, while real-world social networks were positively associated with overall well-being, …