social media

A Guide to Pinterest for Fiction & Nonfiction Writers: 15 Best Practices

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This post by Frances Caballo originally appeared on Writer.ly on 8/8/14.

Pinterest and SEO

It can be tempting to get lost in the floral images, funny quotes, and pictures of dreamy kitchens on Pinterest, and that’s okay. However, there’s more to Pinterest than collecting DIY, wedding, and craft images while you sip a cup of tea or glass of wine at the end of the day. Pinterest is also a powerful network that can improve the SEO of your blog and website. Here are some tips:

Always categorize your pinboards. Pinterest has gone to great lengths to assist search engines that crawl the Web looking for new content. By using the platform’s own categories, you will alert search engines to the content of your boards.

A common pinboard title is Favorite Books. Search engines crawling the Web will notice the word Books and tie some of your entries to the more general category of books. For example, if your book cover is on your Favorite Books pinboard, search engines may link your book to the category of Books and in turn index your book, improving your SEO.

You can drive traffic to your blog with Pinterest. Use the Pin It Button in your browser to add images from your blog to your pinboards. When another user clicks on the image, they will immediately be directed to your blog.

 

Best Practices

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes 15 specific best practices tips, on Writer.ly.

 

How To Promote Yourself And Your Books On Social Media Without Feeling Like A Soul-Selling, Sleaze-Sucking Slime-Glob

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 8/10/14.

In my experience, most authors dislike self-promotion.

Some downright despise it.

And they detest it for good reason: becoming a marketing or advertising avatar for your own work feels shameless. It feels adjacent to the work — like it’s something you didn’t sign on for.

I JUST WANT TO WRITE BOOKS, you scream into the mirror around pages of your manuscript, the pages moistened with saliva and tears. I DON’T WANT TO BECOME A HUMAN SPAM-BOT, you cry as your teeth clatter into the sink, as your ear plops off, as your nose drops away. In all the gaps, a faint glimpse of whirring machinery, gears turning and conveyor belts churning, all of your mechanisms pink with the slurry of Spam…

Thing is, you’re probably gonna have to do it anyway.

Reasons?

First, publishers expect it, to some degree.

Second, if you’re an author-publisher, it becomes wholly more necessary.

 

Click here to read the full post on terribleminds.

 

How Facebook Calculates What Appears In Your News Feed

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This post by Mari Smith originally appeared on her site on 7/18/14.

The problem with Facebook organic reach can be summed up in one single graphic: Only 6 percent of your fans are seeing your content in their news feed. The other 94 percent are not.

Some sources indicate that organic reach may drop to 1-2 percent in the near future. Others say it’s destined to hit zero; it’s only a matter of time.

These stats are a big drop from the already low 16 percent that Facebook indicated back in April 2012.

What is causing the decline in organic reach?

The simplest answer is there is a significantly greater amount of potential content flooding into our news feeds on a daily basis. This bigger firehose of content is caused by several factors, including:

– The average number of Facebook friends users have is 338 (that’s a big increase compared to 130 back in 2008).

– 15 percent of Facebook users have more than 500 friends.

– There are between 1500 and 15,000 pieces of content that Facebook could potentially show in your news feed each time you log on to the site!

– The Facebook news feed ranking algorithm (some folks call this formula ‘EdgeRank’) uses more than 100,000 weights* to determine what you’ll see.

– Ultimately, out of the 1,500 – 15,000 potential stories, Facebook passes them through the mega algorithm and displays approximately 300 stories in your feed.

*Examples of weights: how many mutual friends like the person/page/content, how often you interact with the person/page, when the post was published, when the last comment was made, what types of content you typically interact with: watch more videos and Facebook will show you more videos, like more links and Facebook will show you more links.

 

Click here to read the full post, which includes charts, an infographic and 12 concrete tips for expanding organic “reach”, on Mari Smith’s site.

 

Promoting Your Young Adult Novel

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This post by Kristi Cook originally appeared on The How To Write Shop on 2/10/12.

Okay, you’ve done it! You’ve written your YA novel, and either sold it to a publisher or decided to self-publish it. Either way, it’s about to “go out into the world”! Congrats!

Now you just want to make sure that readers can actually find your gem out in the crowded marketplace. You must promote! But how? I’m going to tell you what’s worked best for me. Keep in mind that your mileage my vary.

First off, whether your book is available both digitally and in bookstores or just digitally, word-of-mouth is very important to your sales. You need to get people talking about your book–and the best people to get talking are bloggers. If your publisher’s publicity department isn’t getting ARCs (Advance Reader Copies) into their hands, then you should make sure they get copies–either ARCs or electronic galleys, or even finished copies. I’m not saying send out copies to everyone who asks, but you should definitely be out there on social media, building relationships with bloggers/reviewers, and giving some of them the opportunity to review your book without having to purchase a copy. And don’t worry–while I do think that blogger/reviewer love can actually “make” a book (i.e. bring it to the attention of readers who might have missed it, giving it unexpected success), I don’t believe that bad reviews necessarily “kill” a book. But, for better or for worse, you need to get readers talking about your book.

 

Click here to read the full post on The How To Write Shop.

 

Do You Make These Online Marketing Mistakes?

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This post by Jason Kong originally appeared as a guest post on The Book Designer on 6/4/14.

Imagine you’re making an appearance at a bookstore to promote your latest novel.

Someone approaches you to chat. This person gushes that she’s read all your books and is excited to read the latest one. She holds the newly purchased book in her hands, hoping that you’ll sign it.

Immediately you launch into an elevator pitch, explaining the genre you write in and a quick summary of your storytelling style. You conclude with the various places your books can be purchased, and that you hope she’ll give your books a try.

Clearly, a longtime fan doesn’t need an introduction to how you write and the stories you’ve written. Having the right person pay attention does little good if the wrong message is shared.

Maybe you don’t make this kind of mistake when you’re face-to-face. Can you say that’s also true when you communicate over the internet?

 

The downside of using online media

We all know about the promise.

A platform in cyberspace meant you had a stage to project your voice. Your digital words could travel far and wide, attracting and corralling those who care about what you do. With one click, you could reach just about everyone.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Book Designer.

 

Using SlideShare For Marketing Fiction And Non-Fiction Books

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn blog on 5/16/14.

I know you don’t want to think about any other sites for marketing!

But in this post, I outline why I think you should consider Slideshare and how I’m using it for both my brands, J.F.Penn thriller author, and Joanna Penn, professional speaker and non-fiction author.

 

Why care about Slideshare?

Slideshare is basically a presentation sharing network.

It’s a form of content marketing, but more visual, and if done well, it can be much more effective than writing a blog post on a topic, especially if you are unknown and your site has no ranking. Visual marketing is very much the big thing now. In an age of text overload, people are clicking more on visual content – whether that’s Instagram, pics on Twitter or Facebook, infographics or SlideShares.

It’s easily shareable and viewable on any social platform as well as on mobile devices. On the right, you can see a tweet that actually embeds the whole SlideShare so it can be read within Twitter. Awesome for twitterholics like me!

Slideshare is one of 120 most visited websites in the world, with 60 million monthly visitors. It ranks highly in Google for keywords, and you can use embedded hyperlinks to direct traffic to your site.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn.

 

Literary Criticism in the Era of the Clickbait Headline

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This post by Jason Diamond originally appeared on Flavorwire on 5/15/14.

This probably says more about the type of conversations I have when I’m not sitting behind a computer than anything, but I’ve spent plenty of time in bars debating whether book reviews are of any value to anybody, from the reading public to the author who might look to critics for notes on what to improve. (If you are that special kind of literary masochist, then good on you. Go on doing what you’re doing). As someone who writes about books, as well as the type of person who enjoys reading criticism — to the point where I’ll read books full of book reviews from decades ago — I’m always going to stick up for book reviews. I’m always going to want to read them, and I wouldn’t mind always writing them. Reviews are important. Without them, the literary balance is thrown off, and the bar can be lowered to astonishing levels.

The thing is, people really don’t talk about reviews all that much. They might read them, but for the most part, unless it’s some intense Michiko Kakutani takedown over at the Times, discussing reviews doesn’t really compare to talking about which Stark was killed on the latest episode of Game of Thrones in terms of culturally relevant conversation topics. I wish that wasn’t the case, but in this tweet-a-second world, book reviews have had to fight really hard to stay in the conversation, especially on the Internet, where an Amazon review can make any casual reader feel like they’re John Leonard.

 

Click here to read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

You’re Not Gonna Spend a Lot Marketing This Book

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This post by Saundra Mitchell originally appeared on her Making Stuff Up For A Living blog on 1/13/14.

So, I’m reading this absurd article on all the things you need to spend money on to market your own book. Oh noz, you have to pay a zillion dollars for a website, for a mailing list, for copy and editing for your website, wtf? I’m not even going to link to article because, seriously, WTF?

Here’s the deal. If you’re willing to put the time in yourself, you can do almost all of your book marketing for free. It may be worth it to you to pay for someone else to do everything- and if you’re in a position to do that, awesome! Go for it! But if you’re not, or if you’d prefer to have strict control over everything, here’s a brief guide to doing it yourself.

 

Blog/Website: More and more people are using Blog software to host their entire websites. WordPress is fantastically flexible, free and your URL can be an easily memorable yourname.wordpress.com. WordPress has about a zillion free themes so you can customize like whoa, and because it’s an integrated service, it shares your links on other blogs like yours to drive traffic. FOR FREE.

Blogger is another free host and software package that’s easy to use and customize for your needs. And you know what drives even more traffic to websites? Twitter. ALSO FREE.

 

Graphics: Graphics for your website, your bookmarks, your postcards whatnot- you can create them yourself for free, from the bottom up. Download a copy of GIMP image manipulation software, and play with it.

 

Click here to read the full article on Making Stuff Up For A Living.

 

3 Myths About Social Media For Authors

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This post by Tim Grahl originally appeared on Out:think on 12/13/13.

More advice about social media is swirling around out there than ever before. I read the posts. I watch the videos. I’m constantly looking for that secret that I’m missing and each time I’m reminded of the same thing.

When it comes to selling books, spending a huge amount of time building a social media following is a waste of time.

In this post, I’m going to debunk many of the myths about social media and how it can be used to sell books and then I’m going to share a couple of things you can do to actually take advantage of these platforms.
2 Ideas About Social Media

Tools and Tool Boxes
All of the things we use to build our online platform – blogs, email lists, social media, podcasts, guest posts, etc – are all just tools in a tool box. The focus should never be on the tool. The focus is on what we are trying to build – in this case an author platform.

However, with tools like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn and others, we often lose site of that. We decide we need to use them to sell books then run around trying to figure out the best way to do it. This is the same thing as picking up a hammer from your toolbox and then running around trying to figure out what to build with it.

You should never start with the tools. You start with a plan, then reach in your toolbox and pull out the right tool for the job.

 

Click here to read the full post on Out:think.

 

Social Media, Book Signings & Why Neither Directly Impact Overall Sales

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This post by Kristen Lamb originally appeared on her blog on 4/14/14.

One of my AWESOME on-line pals posted something troublesome on my Facebook page. Apparently there is a recent article in a major writing magazine that declares social media does not sell books and, in a nutshell, isn’t worth the effort. I’ll warn you guys ahead of time that I went hunting for the article—at the last remaining Barnes & Noble within a 25 mile radius of my home—and couldn’t find said article (and have asked Kim to get me the specific issue). But, since this type of commentary is prevalent enough in the blogosphere, I feel I can address the overall thesis accurately enough.

Social Media Was NEVER About Selling Books Directly—Who KNEW?

I’ve been saying this for about ten years, because the idea of using social circles for sales is NOT new. About ten years ago, I recognized that social media would soon be a vital tool for writers to be able to create a brand and a platform before the book was even finished. This would shift the power away from sole control of Big Publishing and give writers more freedom. But, I knew social media could not be used for direct sales successfully.

How?

When I was in college, every multi-level-marketing company in the known world tried to recruit me. I delivered papers and worked nights most of my college career. Needless to say, I was always on the lookout for a more flexible job that didn’t require lugging fifty pounds of paper up and down three flights of apartment stairs at four in the morning.

I’d answer Want Ads in the paper thinking I was being interviewed for a good-paying job where I could make my own hours. Inevitably it would be some MLM company selling water filters, diet pills, vitamins, prepaid legal services, or soap.

And if I sat through the presentation, they fed me. This meant I sat through most of them.

What always creeped me out was how these types of companies did business. First, “target” family and friends to buy said product (and hopefully either sign them up to sell with you or at least “spread the word” and give business referrals). Hmmmm. Sound familiar?

 

Click here to read the full post on Kristen Lamb’s blog.

 

Writers You Want to Punch in the Face(book)

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This post by Rebecca Makkai originally appeared on Ploughshares on 3/7/14.

This is the story of Todd Manly-Krauss, the world’s most irritating writer. He’s a good enough guy in real life (holds his liquor, fun at parties, writes a hell of a short story)—but give the guy a social media account, and the most mild-mannered of his writer friends will turn to blood lust.

Okay, so he’s not a real writer. Except that he is. At times I fear he’s me.

Because I do struggle for balance with social media. I’m supposed to use it to promote my work (it’s not just a Twitter account, it’s a platform, dammit), and if many of the highlights of my life are writing-related, I naturally want to share those. But then I think of how I might come off to someone who’s struggled for years to publish that first story. Or how I must seem when I’m the only writer (the only self-promoter, even) on someone’s feed. And I wonder if I’m someone’s own personal Todd Manly-Krauss.

 

Click here to read the full post on Ploughshares.

 

Is Digital Technology Advancing or Limiting Freedom of the Press?

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This post by Rebecca MacKinnon originally appeared on Big Questions Online on 3/10/14.

The Internet is a powerful vehicle for expanding freedom of the press. Whether this vehicle is driven successfully in the right direction, however, is not inevitable. Even in the age of high-speed Internet and always-on mobile devices, the expansion and protection of press freedom requires specific political, economic, and regulatory conditions.

Invented 25 years ago by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web is the common interactive “language” upon which revolutionary applications and interactive platforms have been built: first personal website-hosting services in the 90s, then blogging software in the early 00s, followed by social media like Facebook and Twitter. The Web has democratized and decentralized the function of “press:” One no longer needs substantial economic resources in order to share information or perspectives that have at least a small audience, somewhere.

When I joined CNN in 1992, if a person living in Kenya or Tunisia or Cambodia wanted the world to pay attention her story, she had to capture the interest of journalists working for a major news outlets like CNN or the New York Times or Newsweek magazine, whose editors would then decide whether and how they wanted to tell it. By the time I left CNN in 2004, that same person could create her own blog without needing specialized technical training. She could report her story directly onto the World Wide Web where it could be shared globally without relying on powerful media gatekeepers.

During the 2013 protest movement in Turkey which started in Istanbul’s Gezi Park before expanding nationwide, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci documented how demonstrators relied on Twitter as their main news source. Turkish mainstream news outlets were kept too tightly under the thumb of Prime Minister Erdogan to report on a movement that was directly critical of his government’s policies. “I knew there was censorship on TV,” she quoted one demonstrator in a recent article for Matter, an online magazine of science and technology. “But it wasn’t until Twitter came along I realized how bad it was.”

Digitally networked technologies certainly make it harder for governments to perpetuate blatant lies for very long. That is not the same thing, however, as having a free press.

 

Click here to read the full post on Big Questions Online.

 

Facebook Fan Page Reach: No, It's Not All Over For Free Promo On Facebook

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This post by Publetariat Founder and Editor in Chief April L. Hamilton originally appeared on her Indie Author Blog on 4/3/14.

If you’ve been promoting your brand and books on Facebook via a Fan Page*, then stories like The Free-Marketing Gravy Train Is Over on Facebook (from Time Magazine’s site) may have you in a tizzy. Don’t be.

Those articles are either intimating, or stating outright, that this is some kind of plot on Facebook’s part to force Fan Page owners to either pay to “boost” their posts or pay for ads in order to maintain the same level of exposure, or “Reach”, as they’ve enjoyed in the past. I don’t doubt Facebook is very much interested in selling “boosts” and ads, but the truth is that you don’t have to invest in either of those things to increase your Fan page posts’ Facebook Reach.

*Note that this post only applies to Fan pages, not individual Facebook Profiles (aka “Timelines”). This is because there are no tools for measuring engagement or boosting posts on Profile/Timeline pages: those pages are supposed to be for private individuals to engage socially with their private networks, they’re not intended to be used for marketing purposes. So if you want to deal in Reach on Facebook, you need a Fan page.


How Do I Know This?

I manage a few FB fan pages for my day job and I’ve been observing the ‘Reach’ trends on both ‘boosted’ (promoted for a fee) posts and non-boosted posts. The ones with the greatest Reach are ALWAYS the ones with the most “engagement”: Likes, clicks, Shares, comments. This is regardless of whether or not a given post has been ‘boosted’, and in fact I frequently see non-boosted posts far exceed the reach of boosted posts.

It’s kind of a chicken-or-the-egg loop once the post is out there, because you have to get initial Likes, clicks, Shares and comments to improve the post’s visibility in your Fans’ newsfeeds. Higher visibility leads to more Likes, clicks, Shares and comments, and so on and so on.

FB is keeping the details of their Reach algorithm secret, but based on what I’ve observed it goes kind of like this:

You post something to your fan page. Facebook says, “Okay, we’ll show this post in the newsfeed of a very small test group of your Fans, and see if it gets any engagement. If it does, we’ll show it a larger group. If it gets more engagement from that new group, we’ll show it to an even larger group.” And so on, and so on. So Facebook isn’t just blowing smoke when their reps say the new algorithm is intended to ensure that only the most ‘engaging’ stuff gets pushed to users’ newsfeeds.


Context, and Specifics: How Many People Get To See A Post Immediately, and Ultimately?


Click here to read the full post on the Indie Author Blog.

 

Ride the Tide of Group Promos!

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This post by Jodie Renner originally appeared on the Crime Fiction Collective blog on 3/16/14.

Savvy indie authors are quickly discovering the power of increasing book sales and visibility by collaborating with other authors in various ways. Here are four different avenues to explore that all work surprisingly well.

1. Create or join a Facebook group “event.”

Not long ago, a complete stranger contacted me to ask if I’d like to add my writing guide Fire up Your Fiction (which, until recently, was titled Style That Sizzles & Pacing for Power) to a group promo he had planned to put 15 books, all related to writing, publishing, and promoting books, on sale for 99 cents each for one day.

I was flattered, and after checking out the organizer and the other books on the list, was eager to jump in, especially since I’d just changed the title of the book and it has won several honors recently.

Bryan Cohen turned out to be not only a nice person, but a creative, skilled and enthusiastic organizer, with lots of great promo ideas that really worked well. He created a Facebook page for the event as well as a page on his website, and enlisted us all to help promote it on our blogs and on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. He asked us for possible giveaways and offered attendees/participants a chance to win prizes for sharing the event on Facebook and Twitter.

As a result of this great promo on February 28, which Bryan named “March to a Bestseller,” all 15 participants had a significant increase in book sales, ratings on Amazon, and visibility. For a few hours of responding to readers on the event page on Facebook (my “shift”) and promoting the event on my blog and in social media, my sales for Fire up Your Fiction increased that day by about 20 times the normal daily average.

 

Click here to read the full post on the Crime Fiction Collective blog.

 

Neil Gaiman on the Hugo Awards Controversy

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When Jonathan Ross was invited to host the Hugo Awards this year it caused a huge rift in the British Science Fiction community. Many felt the choice of Ross was totally inappropriate, as Ross is not involved in the community of Science Fiction authors and publishers, and some concluded it must be a cynical grab for more American attention.

A huge firestorm of criticism erupted on Twitter, with personal attacks being hurled not only at event organizers, but at Ross and his wife as well. In a post made to his Neil Gaiman’s Journal yesterday, Gaiman reveals that he had acted as the go-between for Hugo Awards organizers in reaching out to Ross in the first place, and goes on to comment on the whole mess. From Gaiman’s Journal:

Twitterstorms are no fun when people are making up things about you or insulting you for things you didn’t do or think or say. When scores of people from a group that you consider yourself a part of are shouting at you, it’s incredibly upsetting, no matter who you are. And these things spill over and get bigger — I was saddened to learn that Jane Goldman, Jonathan’s wife, one of the gentlest, kindest people I know (and the person who, with Jonathan, got me onto Twitter, back in December 2009) had deleted her Twitter account because of all this.

I was seriously disappointed in the people, some of whom I know and respect, who stirred other people up to send invective, obscenities and hatred Jonathan’s way over Twitter (and the moment you put someone’s @name into a tweet, you are sending it directly to that person), much of it the kind of stuff that they seemed to be worried that he might possibly say at the Hugos, unaware of the ironies involved.

 

Click here to read the full post on Neil Gaiman’s Journal.