Marketing your book as new author
Marketing & Promotion Advice for New Authors
(very basic steps for those not-social media experts)
Hello, my friendly energy worker, welcome to my little virtual corner, everyone is welcome here, even those who say they don't like hugs, those are the ones we welcome at V.I.P. class with open arms.
If you are a new author, but also you identify yourself as a "witch" or "healer", no worries, many of us have been in your position before, some of us even have editorial experience doing marketing, so maybe one or two tips from this post will be for you. of much help.
1st, My Experience
No, this is not a post about algorithms and tricks to grow your following on Instagram and Twitter, if that's what you're looking for, don't waste your time here. This post is to support my colleagues and friends who are new authors and often ask me about social media and how to sell their books. Well, with a degree in marketing, a degree in marketing and advertising, etc... etc... etc... I've learned a thing or two.
I graduated from the University more than a decade ago (yikes!!) and in a University in Venezuela, where obviously social networks (at that time and in that place) were not of vital importance as in the US and Now, so adapting myself took a minute, however, I think I've done pretty well, especially working for a couple of ad agencies here in NY.
Except for one person who recently offered me a job managing his Instagram account, and I immediately turned it down because I didn't want to work for that person, with just that one exception, most of my accounts are entrepreneurs and people over 40 looking to carve out a space on social media, so I've gotten used to teaching them the most basic, once they have the most basic tools in their hands, everyone can choose which of these to use and how to use them.
If I have learned anything from working in marketing (well, a couple of things) it is that people over a certain age tend to feel detached from social media, they feel rejected by them as "work tools" and it causes them some anxiety to be taught by younger people. Obviously, this can represent for them to put themselves in a position of vulnerability and admit that they need help, something that for many people of an older generation, was not socially accepted at the time, not like now that we even ask a colleague for help via DM's or do any question via Twitter and immediately some hero comes to our rescue.
2nd Why is Social Media so Important
Just like in the '90s having the phone book, that huge yellow page book was so important at home, or a fax at the office, or even for parents it was important to put a lock on those old dial phones (lol, I remember that), social media networks are our new contact phone book and emails are our new faxes, if you are not in them, you simply do not exist, if you do not exist, your business, whatever it may be, cannot be taken into account to be invited to podcasts, interviews, radio, newspapers, events, or even to receive promotions, discounts, prizes, or any kind of invitation.
Being on social media is not the number 1 priority for an author, your priority is to write, but if what you want is to write more books, and connect with your audience to know what they think of your books and thus receive feedback (a constructive criticism), social media is the way to do it, and also, the way to convince your publisher (beyond sales) to allow you to do another book.
In addition, if you are on social media, you will save some work for the publisher that publishes you, because as authors many times we forget, the publisher is printing thousands of copies of dozens of different titles at the same time, all of these from different authors, and all of these books are priorities, and they all deserve some promotion (even when we know that some books for one reason or another are more promoted than others, it is important not to focus on it, but on promoting our work).
3rd Why do "witches" and "healers" need social media.
Witches, magicians, brujos, healers, etc... They don't "need social media", but your presence there will help you in two things for which social media is very effective:
1. Connect with other individuals around the world who share your same path and vision of the world, as well as with those who feel disconnected because they do not have other colleagues and teachers in their environment. Your presence on the networks will make their journey of knowledge much easier.
2. Being on social media allows you to clarify misinformation situations that may be occurring (and most likely are occurring there). For example, this colleague of mine in NY who told me a couple of years ago "I don't use Instagram because there is a lot of misinformation about my tradition there, especially among the young", my simple and honest answer was "maybe there is a lot of misinformation about it among the young people on said platform, because all the experts on the subject, as well as you, think the same and pretend that this is not their problem".
(If you are not on a platform, you cannot simply complain about what happens there, complain and not provide solutions, or seek to be part of the solution, even knowing that the problem is happening, it only makes you part of the problem.)
The entire holistic/metaphysical community on social media is quite large, intimidatingly large, made up of hundreds of thousands of individuals in search of knowledge, in search of what you want to dedicate yourself to teaching because of your years of experience.
This community is divided into certain "factions", the community of witches, the pagan community, the Wiccan community, the Thelema community, the healing community, the yogi community, etc... And there is a community of which you are part even without being there yet.
Your presence in this community will enrich it enormously, every story, every experience you have lived, every teaching you have received, every esoteric or magical experiment you have done, someone else out there is waiting to know.
The Most Basic Tools for an Author
either to show and promote your work, to connect with your readers, to request reviews of your books, etc...
Profile Platforms
They are those official platforms that allow us to market our work and connect with readers around the world, the important thing about these platforms is that that is where the reviews of our work are, and those reviews for an author are worth gold, because they are the result of everything their effort, these platforms also allow you to create an official profile as an author, that way you can add your professional author photography to the public, group all your books on your page (even if they have been published with different publishing houses) and connect with your networks and blog.
Two of these platforms are Amazon (where most online books are sold) and Goodreads, a virtual platform that brings authors and readers together:
Amazon
You can go to "Author Central" and from there create your profile as an author, add one or more photos, add your biography, links to your website and networks, you can even connect your personal blog so that the posts are shared on your Amazon page, that way those followers that you accumulate on the page will have access to this content and will also receive notifications when you have a new book available.
GoodReads
Imagine a gigantic blog devoted entirely to promoting books, and linking authors with readers and publishers. Here you can also create your author profile, group your books, create and share reading lists, link to your blog and social media, connect with your readers, write on the author's blog/page, and promote your work.
It has the advantage of allowing you to create a professional author profile, and when you share the links of your books, if someone is interested in acquiring them, the page provides them with the links to acquire it in their country without any inconvenience.
For example: If you search for the page of my book "The Magical Art of Crafting Charm Bags" (click here for example) or any other title you want to search for, when you select the "Get A Copy" button, Goodreads opens a short but effective range of options that includes links to the book on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, Apple Books, and in the "Stores" section opens a tab with a dozen options to choose from where to buy the book.
SOCIAL MEDIA (for beginners)
YOUTUBE
It is more of a content channel than a social media platform, anyway, it allows you to upload short or long videos to explain or promote your work. Especially if you are a new author, this medium will allow you to expose your work to the entire world.
You can either record with a professional camcorder and upload the video to youtube, or you can record directly from your smartphone/laptop/Chromebook/tablet and upload the video through the App.
advice for the new author
If you are a new author this is highly recommended, you can record a video between 5 to 10 minutes explaining who you are, what is the title of your book, where to get it, and what it is about, and then share the link of this video in your networks favorite social networks (your Twitter or Facebook wall for example), you can send the link to your colleagues, family, and friends, surely many of them will be delighted to share it.
Personally my favorite because I like the way people can creatively tell a whole story in one picture or short video.
Instagram is the platform par excellence for the most creative, it allows you to upload single photos, photo albums (for now up to 10 photos), videos between 1 to 15 minutes (horizontal or vertical), reels (15-second videos with special audio, music, effects, etc...), Stories (content that is deleted after 24 hours), and also allows you to make live videos of up to 1 hour.
The use of #hashtags is recommended if you are new and not exactly a very big name still in your niche. The #hashtags are used by users to find content related to their tastes and interests, for example, since we can even subscribe to them, I am subscribed to #brujosininstagram and #witchesinnewyork so that photos, videos, and other content published by other users making use of these hashtags appear in my timeline and so I can find more colleagues to make connections with, whether they are "brujos" (Latin/Hispanic Wiccan or folk magic practitioners) or Witches that live and move around my city.
You can add between 1 to 30 #hashtags in your publication, what I recommend is to add between 6 to 12 of these hashtags at the end of the text (or in the comments after the post).
For example, if you are posting your new book titled "Voodoo Witchcraft for Baby Witches" (name entirely made up) you can post a selfie holding your first physical copy of the book, add a short description, and include it in the end: #Voodoowitchcraft #Voodoowitches #Babywitches #Babywitch #Newbook #authorsofinstagram, etc...
By doing the above, not only your followers will see the post, but also all those who are looking for content related to "Voodoo", "Baby witches", etc...
The platform most loved and idealized by our parents, uncles, and grandparents, the one that we do not abandon simply to not lose contact with all of them because it is safer than sharing our phone numbers with each person in the family.
Facebook has (like everything) its advantages and disadvantages.
Advantages: (ignore the number of millions of people on the platform, there are also billions of inhabitants on earth and most don't even know us, right?) it allows you to share practically any kind of content: Texts, Videos, Notes, Live videos, Links, Recommendations, Places, etc...
It also allows you to tag others in your content, share the location of where you are (very effective if you are, for example, doing a book signing), upload links related to your work, interviews, photos of your events, etc.
Disadvantages: the platform is saturated with ads, the algorithm does not favor everyone equally, and we all know of its infinite problems with privacy, a couple of years ago Facebook asked me for a photograph of my passport and my ID to prove that Elhoim Leafar was my name, followed by my phone number and location, which should not happen as it puts people at risk.
Facebook also allows you to create groups and alternative pages to your profile:
Groups
Virtual spaces within the platform that serve as discussion forums on one topic or another, for example: Witches living in New York, Queer Witches for Woman's Rights, Black People Decolonizing Voodoo, etc...
Pages (used mostly by haters, horrible people, and kept without work to spy on you day after day)
An alternative profile that you can use exclusively to promote your work without having to use your personal profile, ex: Your name is Alicia Hamilton Coromoto, and you are publishing your first book, you can create the page @AliciaHamiltonAuthor or @AliciaHamiltonwriter and dedicate that page entirely to your professional content, thus keeping your personal profile to share your birthday photos, museum visits, stalking your ex and continue to ignore the messages of your cousins
It is statistically the slowest growing platform among the big platforms, for a time it was the most important platform of all but over time it has lost popularity, however, the public that decides to stay on Twitter is the most loyal public of all, they connect practically daily (in fact, people connect on average 3 to 4 times a week).
You can share photos (up to four per post), videos (quite short), and tweets (obviously !!) that are comments within a very precise number of characters, which although it forces you to be creative in summarizing ideas, many times It doesn't offer enough to fully clarify an idea, so we often end up writing a dozen tweets in a row to make it clear what we mean.
Unlike Facebook, which is more like an amalgamation of communities all colliding with each other, Instagram and Twitter are the two platforms (followed by Tiktok, which is not included in this list) where you have the most opportunity to find your community and carve out a space between them.
Which Platform should I choose, and if I am new, what should I do?
You can choose the platform that best suits your work, if you are more introverted you can use Twitter to write your ideas from time to time, connect with other readers and also read the ideas, perspectives, experiences, and responses of others.
If you are the kind of person who enjoys taking photos of everything and sharing them, Instagram is perhaps your best option, you can add a long or short description, some hashtags, and let others come to you.
Facebook is what I naturally recommend to my marketing clients as the lowest priority. Facebook owns Instagram and other platforms, so many times the content you promote (paid content) on Instagram ends up showing up on FB as well.
You don't have to follow everyone or change to like everyone, 1st you don't like everyone either so if someone doesn't follow you back on some platform don't take it personal, 2nd let's be honest you can't wait everyone likes it, not everyone has such good taste.
POSTING FREQUENCY
Posting frequency is always a topic of discussion on social media.
When we have a new book on the market, what we want most is to promote it, and let's be honest, at one point it's not even for sales, it's because we are simply proud of our work after years of writing and months of boring editing.
It is for the above reason that many authors often make the mistake of only focusing on promoting their book over and over again to the point of boredom.
The best promotion strategy is: Be yourself, and do what inspired you to write.
Being yourself is what will differentiate you from the rest, do not seek to copy what others are doing, and don't worry, in due course, they will also copy you.
Being yourself can mean only posting what suits you, or even posting content from time to time that you know is not in your favor, for example:
Content that I should publish:
My photos and videos of making or crafting something always bring me more views and followers, but I have three full-time jobs, so even if I wanted to, I can't spend every day preparing incense on the patio.
Content that I should not publish:
Having survived the death of my older brother at a very young age, years of trauma and physical abuse in military school, and several years in a stormy relationship with a narcissist, I have become very vocal on the subject of emotional well-being, and although this does not go hand in hand with witchcraft, and it is not the content that my followers prefer, I keep posting it for being true to myself and my principles, even though I know that some of those posts will not reach more than 20 likes in Instagram.
Doing what inspired you to write is what others want to see and what will lead them to connect with you, for example:
You wrote a book about "The Mystical Craft of Homemade Oils", focus on creating content (posts, photos, audios, videos) related to the creation and use of these oils, don't hesitate to take pictures while you prepare your homemade oils, maybe even you can dare to record a video of yourself in the process.
You wrote then "200 Recipes for Love and Good Fortune", don't be afraid to prepare two or three of these recipes in front of the camera while explaining:
- How do you create them?
- Where did you learn from?
- How do your recipes differ from others?
Regarding the frequency, there is no recommended publication frequency that is consistent on all platforms, each platform in social media has its own algorithm and acts entirely differently, suddenly you publish the same post at the same time and with the same photo on three different platforms, but on Twitter the post only received five views and one like, on Facebook the same post got about 20 likes (mostly from your family and friends) and a few comments, and on Instagram, the exact same post got about 120 likes and about 30 comments (don't get excited, 15 of those comments are spam).
Although there are very complicated methods to explain here how to find your own most effective frequency of publication, that is something you can discover for yourself by working on your social media and sharing content daily for about three weeks.
What I can recommend Starting with is the following:
You can start with two to three posts a day, keep it simple, no photos or videos at first, or at least not for the first few weeks.
Focus on making brief, mostly informative comments in relation to your written work (your book and craft). Try to avoid engaging in political issues that can cause a debate if you don't want to debate.
One to three posts per week are more than enough to create engagement with your niche (your audience, your people, your community), if you post too much and people get bored to the point of "skipping" your post, Facebook will interpret this action like "the post is not interesting" and will show it less and less.
If you sit in front of me in the office as one of my marketing clients, I am going to recommend you to group a folder in your phone with between 50 to 100 different photos related to your work, that folder will represent your first three months of publication (90 days) and I need you to post a daily photo with a short text (informative or explanatory) and six hashtags if you have one to two paragraphs, or between seven to twelve hashtags if you have more than three paragraphs.
And that you alternate the publication times in the most random way possible to calculate your daily engagement with your public manually, publishing certain days in the morning (the time of your choice) and certain days in the afternoon/evening (the time of your choice), so you can calculate how your followers and readers react at different times and on different days.
(C) 2021, Elhoim Leafar, All Rights Reserved.
I so needed o hear this "Being yourself is what will differentiate you from the rest, do not seek to copy what others are doing, and don't worry, in due course, they will also copy you.
ReplyDeleteBeing yourself can mean only posting what suits you, or even posting content from time to time that you know is not in your favor." Thank you!
Here for you my friend!
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