Self-Publishing

4 Innovative Ways Authors Are Using Social Media to Market Their Books

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Every author knows they need to be marketing their book on social media. But how do you think beyond the status update? These authors had some creative ideas for how to market their books on Facebook, Twitter and beyond.

Leverage Twitter for Book Marketing

Davar Ardalan adapted a multimedia book, “The Persian Square: 101 Things to Know About Iranian-Americans,” chronicling the culture and history of Iranian-Americans, on Pressbooks.com. To market it on social, she created 101 Tweets with facts from her book.

“These have been well-received,” Ardalan said, “and I plan to share them using the hashtag #PersianSquare throughout 2015 via @idavar and @PersianSquare.”

Ardalan also co-hosted a Twitter party and invited some of the folks featured in the book to engage and share stories.

How to Use This:

Maybe your book doesn’t have 101 facts that can be easily adapted into 140 characters. But you can still send out tips, novel facts and the like to tease the book. Include a link to the book in stores, and don’t forget to include a branded hashtag.

Go Tweet to Book

Kevern Write a Book compiles the best of @rudd2000, a parody Twitter account created after Australian parliament member Kevin Rudd resigned. The handle chronicled the journeys of Rudd and other satirical fictitious characters until it amassed an impressive 3,000 tweets and 5,000 followers. Selected tweets were compiled into book form in “Kevern Write a Book” by authors Scott Bridges and Stephen Owen and published by Editia Books.

How to Use This:

Lots of people are going blog to book, taking the best, most useful or evergreen parts of their blog and reproducing them in the convenience of ebook and print formats. So why not go microblog to book? Think about the really interesting, timeless and/or useful content you’re providing to your followers, in your unique voice and consider whether it could provide value as a book.

Do Pre-Release Book Marketing on Facebook

Biographer Marshall Terrill posted excerpts of his book “Zora Folley: The Distinguished Life and Mysterious Death of a Gentleman Boxer” on Facebook and Twitter as he was writing it.

“What I learned from doing that exercise is that everybody loves a mystery,” Terrill said. “It doesn’t matter that [my main character] Zora Folley was a boxer or was once a celebrity. They want to know how I solved the case … of course, I’d tell them they’d have to buy the book to find the answer!”

How to Use This:

What are the most fascinating tidbits in your book? Tease them out to your audience one intriguing fact, quote or image at a time to build up interest for the eventual launch.

Also, use Pressbooks’ privacy features to make select sample chapters public as you’re working on your book. Then, push links to these chapters out to your network to review (and maybe provide valuable feedback on) in advance.

Build a Mailing List Through Social Media

Bestselling romance author Inglath Cooper employs targeted marketing through her Facebook page ,where she has more than 42,000 likes. She pairs this with email marketing (giving free downloads of her book to those who sign up to her sizable mailing list) to build her audience.

“You have to find readers who like your view of the world and the kind of story that you have to tell,” Cooper said. “I think we have tools now that we’ve never had before.”

How to Use This:

You don’t have to have fat pockets to target the right audience. Facebook now lets pages target fans by interests in their regular (free) status updates. This kind of targeting is thought to increase the number of interested people who will see a post while decreasing the overall numbers of eyeballs for whom it might be less relevant.

And don’t confine yourself to Facebook advertising. Depending where your audience is, it may make sense to deploy targeted advertising on Twitter, LinkedIn and even Amazon.

Need more help marketing your book? Pressbooks is hosting a webinar on book marketing today at 12 p.m. PST in partnership with Booklaunch.io. There’s still time to register at https://booklaunch.io/events/pressbooks-webinar.