How to Achieve Effective Social Media Promotion for your Ebook
Being an independent writer has many perks, not the least of which is the ability to maintain complete creative control over your work; whether you’re completing a work of fiction or a technical manual, that control can mark the difference between staying personally motivated and allowing a publishing house to have their hands wrapped too tightly around your work.
There are many bonuses to working with professional publishers, however – bonuses that you’ll need to make up for having lost. The most prominent of those is marketing, a field that you’ll need to increase your skills in if you want your ebook to be seen, purchased, read, and appreciated.
Whether you’re pushing a work of fanciful fiction, a dry technical tome, or anything in between, these five tips on how to achieve effective social media promotion for your ebook are sure to help:
1. Spread Your Social Wings
While you’re likely familiar with Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and other major social networks already – you may even have already established a strong personal presence on them – now is the time to open yourself up to all kinds of new connections. This will give you an audience to help you to build hype around your ebook, setting you up for an effective social marketing campaign when it comes time to start dropping hints about what’s to come.
To that end, don’t stop with the easiest and best known of the social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, but instead take the time to search out smaller but surprisingly effective social platforms. From forums that focus on books and authors, to niche social media sites that aim to assist self-publishers just like you, such as the MyBlogGuest ebook gallery, you’ll be surprised at just how many hidden social networks that there are to leverage.
2. Make Your Book Your Focal Point
No matter what type of interaction you plan to indulge in, whether it’s chatting with followers, providing visual aids to accentuate your work, or simply dropping tidbits about what’s to come, be sure that your book is the focal point of all of your interaction. Besides keeping your title and content at the forefront of every conversation, you’ll also establish yourself as an expert in whatever niche your ebook occupies – whether you write fantasy fiction or woodworking how-to guides, this ranks as one of the most important aspects of marketing any written work.
3. Be Friendly and Approachable
Readers almost always enjoy getting to know the scribes behind their favorite works, so be sure to turn that spreading of your social wings that we spoke of earlier into an opportunity to answer the questions of and establish banter with the people who have taken an interest in your book.
This level of social interaction may seem a little overwhelming, especially to a creative worker who wants to spend as much of their time as possible on the words themselves, but taking less than an hour each day to visit your social profiles and personally engage your followers is more than enough to paint yourself as a friendly and approachable author, helping to generate additional interest in your future works through personal interest and the all important word-of-mouth advertising that you’re likely to generate.
4. Get Your Fans Excited
Leveraging your social media presence, you can release quotes, use visual aids to add to the gravity of your words, indulge your fans with character sketches and plot hints in advance – anything that you can do to tantalize potential readers into just having to know more about what lies within the pages of your published work will go a long way towards encouraging them to purchase your book when it comes time to release it, and long afterward.
5. Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Even once your book has been released and you begin to enjoy some level of success with your sales, never give up on your social media promotion efforts – there are always more books to be sold, after all.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that continuing to have a pervasive social presence online is a fantastic way to set yourself up for future success, especially if you plan to write more in the same niche or storyline that your first ebook set you off on.
Image Credits: social connection, ebook.
About the author: Anna Fox is the writer addicted to self-improvement. She is running a blog where you can find dozens of tips for increasing productivity. For spreading the word about her ideas she is using Viral Content Buzz – free social media platform for content promotion.