Facebook Shares

Just a heads up, Facebook's a self-destructive and expensive promotional market to get in to. As soon as you reach a high number of likes, Facebook starts throttling your views and charging you to increase the percentage of people who see your posts -- they effectively hide you from your 'likes' until you pay.

EMaree said:

Just a heads up, Facebook's a self-destructive and expensive promotional market to get in to. As soon as you reach a high number of likes, Facebook starts throttling your views and charging you to increase the percentage of people who see your posts -- they effectively hide you from your 'likes' until you pay.

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EMaree, this is true. I hardly use my author page for promotion. Or if I do post something, I know it's not going to be widely seen. If you do choose to pay to boost your post, it shows up in the feed with the words "sponsored post," or something like that, so it shows up as an ad rather than a post to your fans, which seems to defeat the whole purpose.

jmichael, I'm happy to add to your page likes.

Feel free to like anything you want about my page. I will second the warnings above: FB is an expensive place to advertise, and gets more and more expensive as you get better. It costs me around $20/post just to ensure that people that like my page and their friends actually see my post, which defeats the whole purpose of liking something if you ask me. In terms of responses, this ad is the only one that I can say actually generated sales. I think the key was the request for interaction.

My strategy with Facebook now is a pinpointed ad: blacks and English-speaking Hispanics that live in the two ZIP codes where the action in the book takes place, with references to locales and people from the neighborhood. It's a higher cost-per-click, but they seem to be more likely to buy the book at some time.

Facebook's policies mean I only use it to post basic announcements. Such a tiny percentage of people ever see the stuff that it's not worth any more effort.

Twitter is a good social network, but you need to approach it as social rather than promotional. If an account is just links to stuff and promotion, it won't interest people. Same goes for other attempts to pad content like inspirational quotes from famous people. People expect to hear from you as a person.

Yeah, I also recommend Twitter, and Tumblr if your project has a strong visual element, but the best 'self-promotion' space will always be a self-hosted website. The terms over at Twitter or Tumblr could change any time to match Facebook's throttling -- Tumblr especially is one to watch since it's owned by Yahoo! now and is evolving to suit its new owners.

Facebook is great for early-stage audience building but it becomes an expensive problem once you hit a big audience. I'm not a fan, I find its methods underhand.

(But hey, if anyone wants to help me hit 100 likes, I'll appreciate it and repay in kind! I've added everyone on this thread. I do like shiny three-digit numbers.)

Pinterest is great for giving your written projects a visual side. It's good in the brainstorming/first draft stage as a motivation tool, and good as a bonus for readers later -- you can show them a little scrapbook of what inspired you. It's not good for building an audience, really, just for entertaining your existing one.

Tumblr is good for strong visual projects, and for any content that's of an 'shareable' nature. Potential for building an audience, but it's easier if you have artistic skills. It can be a hard 'market' to break in to and there's a bit of a learning curve to the site.

Twitter is good if you have a chatty social personality, but steer away from too much promotion. Twitter is all about communicating with others, interacting with the community. Self-promo should be, at the absolutely MAXIMUM, 10% of your tweets. Strong potential for building an audience (or, y'know, just making friends) here because it's a text medium and well-geared for writers.

It's also beneficial for a writer to have a Goodreads page -- set up an author page, update it with books you're currently reading, ensure you books have correct pages set up so that readers can add them.... but whatever you do, ignore the review section. Don't even look at it. Avoid avoid avoid.

Goodreads is a weird network because a lot of it (eg the reviews, the annoying private messages) is best left ignored, but having pages up for your books and running the occasional convo can have a long-lasting benefit. With Goodreads you set up the starting details and let your readers take control from there -- writing reviews, having discussions, adding the books to lists etc. After a push from the author it becomes entirely reader-driven.

My Facebook Page | My Twitter | My Goodreads | My Pinterest

(I have a Tumblr too, but it's not specifically for me a writer -- I just use it as a normal Tumblr user would, being part of various fandoms. I've considered making a 'writing only' Tumblr but really that's not something I need to worry about until I have an upcoming book to promote.)

I'd rank the social networks as follows, when it comes to ease-of-use and benefit to writers:

1. Your own website
2. Twitter
3. Goodreads
4. Tumblr / Pinterest (these cover some very similar ground, you can use both or just pick one)
5. Facebook

I agree with everything EMaree said.

I'd be happy to like everyone's FB page & wouldn't mind a few likes in return

I just wanted to add that personally, Goodreads has been the best for me to find my readers, get sales and reviews. But, I have to admit, I do read the reviews lol

I did not know that with Facebook and the like thing. That's nuts!

Good info here, thanks.

Why shouldn't you read the review on Goodreads? You don't need to engage the readers, but I find all comments about my writing to be interesting at some level.

EMaree said:

Yeah, I also recommend Twitter, and Tumblr if your project has a strong visual element, but the best 'self-promotion' space will always be a self-hosted website. The terms over at Twitter or Tumblr could change any time to match Facebook's throttling -- Tumblr especially is one to watch since it's owned by Yahoo! now and is evolving to suit its new owners.

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Also for the website, make sure it has a complete bibliography. I'm amazed at how many author sites miss this off, when it's one of the most commonly needed pieces of information for readers visiting the site.

Thewitt said:

Why shouldn't you read the review on Goodreads? You don't need to engage the readers, but I find all comments about my writing to be interesting at some level.

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It depends on your personality. Some people will be utterly crushed by a one-star review and want to stop writing. Some will find it very hard not to reply. If you can read reviews with some distance, I think it's a useful thing to do... but if you know you'll react badly, it's better not to.

Aye, sorry, my advice about not reading reviews was a generalisation -- some writers can handle it and benefit from the feedback, but most don't so I always advise against it.

Please pretend I preface all my posts with 'There are no rules, but if there were...'

Our brains are programmed to remember negatives more than positives, which can be a dangerous hit on already fragile writer self esteem. Also, writers with perfectionist tendencies (*points at self*) will be frustrated and potentially discouraged because they're receiving feedback on a work they're unable to change.

Polenth said:

Also for the website, make sure it has a complete bibliography. I'm amazed at how many author sites miss this off, when it's one of the most commonly needed pieces of information for readers visiting the site.

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Oooh, good advice! And one I'm guilty of not following, need to fix that.

Another piece of advice: HAVE A CLEAR CONTACT PAGE, FOR THE LOVE OF SHAKESPEARE. This applies to writers at any stage: published writers want to be easily reachable to readers, and querying writers want to be easily reachable to agents.

I don't use social sites but do have social sharing buttons on my website.

All of my social shares are from strangers who like my content. The shares are the equivalent of "deep links" (links to pages further within the website, rather than the home page). There's another guy in the same genre as me who has literally 100's and 100's of social shares of his website content, while I get about 3 - 6 per month and I am doing better than him in the eyes of search engines.

I suspect he is getting lots of shares from the same profiles that don't have any other activity (gaming the system) and Google knows this. If only Amazon used GSRank (fat chance).

As an educational non-fiction writer it's easy enough to think of content. For a fiction writer it is harder but by the same merit you could have more possibilities, like, a zombie diagram with numbered parts such as "This piece of brain hanging out has dark grey parts among the mold as it still functions anaerobically" and "the teeth remain in good tact as the virus recognizes this to be one of the most important parts of its hosts anatomy for the purpose of eating flesh". You'd need to get some artistic talent in.

Wow, I too had no idea about Facebook charging you for your viewers to see your posts!

So, what is considered a high number of likes? I have myself on Facebook, but to stop the overlap between family and professional posts, I was thinking of/about to launch an author page, with similar friends as a colleague of mine. Mine would most likely only reach 100 likes in the near future, but since many of our colleagues run in the same circles, it is possible I could at some point hit about 900 likes (I think that is what it is called). My colleague just did, and again most of us have mutual interests (in academia).

But, am I to understand if I posted under an author page, and were to get a huge number of likes, I would have to pay for my followers to read them?

Or, is this only for those using paid marketing strategies? I am familiar with google Adsense, but not much with Facebook ads, and I have no plan of marketing that way on Facebook.

If it truly is charging for post views, I may develop my google plus author page more instead and send redirects there... Grrr

I've been using a two-step strategy for the last couple of months. First, I'd post a link or image (images get more interactions, links get more of the interactions you want, i.e. clicks; but you kinda need both), then share it via my personal profile. Which has never been that personal anyway - I joined FB to do some promoting, not host party pics, and the real-life friends who connect with me there better get used to my promotey posts. Since a lot of would-be fans went straight for the profile instead of Liking the page anyway, I seem to have more friends than followers now anyway.

The thing is, FB prefers posts that generate interactions. That's why you need the image posts every now and then - they tell FB that you're likely to generate interest. So the more interaction you get out of the initial few views your original unpaid-for post gets, the better.

Sharing the posts makes them more interesting for FB to show to more followers because their algorithms react to that. (They use percentages of your follower base for that, so having many Likes on your page doesn't always help if those people aren't actually that interested.) That and the fact that I can generate more views than my page makes for about ten times as many eyeballs. And hopefully, the resulting exposure will generate some actual sharing or clicking or Liking activity in turn, which is when the real fun starts.

Of ocurse, FB has announced changes in their dispolay algorithms for next year, to make it even harder for unpaid-for posts to get seen. No idea how that will work out for my little system.

atthebeach said:

But, am I to understand if I posted under an author page, and were to get a huge number of likes, I would have to pay for my followers to read them?

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It's not only if you have a huge number of likes. My author page, which I update only infrequently has less than 100 likes and my posts are throttled back to around 25%-30% reach now.

Facebook promo

There is a paid facebook promo and there is free promo. You 'fund' the paid promo and the facebook drones deliver the item you're promoting - that can be your website or a blog or your page or 'page likes' or whatever you have - daily until the amount of money funded (yeah, you have to give them your credit card number) and which you allocated (they can't go over the stipulated amount) is depleted. You set the time over which you want this promoted - usually a month but the money can run out in couple of weeks and then the dear facebook will ask you for more funding. Basically, you can authorize more to be charged to your credit card and this can get very, very addictive but even if in the month of promo your website or your page would have reached a million targets, your sales might see very little if nothing at all.

Facebook loves to drag you in this way, entice you if you will, but the truth is that the free promo through the promo groups that are on the facebook just for that reason, will work just as well if not better. The problem with this is that you do have to post on these groups at least 2 times a day - some authors have the time to post continuously when promoting a new release but most of us have to work for a living and that kind of promoting dedication is just not possible.

Don't fret about your 'likes' or page views or anything else. Post on your own page, maybe every couple of days to keep your hand in, so to speak, and pick your promo groups carefully and then promote on them. That's about the most practical use of the facebook I found...mildly effective. Best of luck, Edita

Edita A Petrick said:

There is a paid facebook promo and there is free promo. You 'fund' the paid promo and the facebook drones deliver the item you're promoting - that can be your website or a blog or your page or 'page likes' or whatever you have - daily until the amount of money funded (yeah, you have to give them your credit card number) and which you allocated (they can't go over the stipulated amount) is depleted. You set the time over which you want this promoted - usually a month but the money can run out in couple of weeks and then the dear facebook will ask you for more funding. Basically, you can authorize more to be charged to your credit card and this can get very, very addictive but even if in the month of promo your website or your page would have reached a million targets, your sales might see very little if nothing at all.

Facebook loves to drag you in this way, entice you if you will, but the truth is that the free promo through the promo groups that are on the facebook just for that reason, will work just as well if not better. The problem with this is that you do have to post on these groups at least 2 times a day - some authors have the time to post continuously when promoting a new release but most of us have to work for a living and that kind of promoting dedication is just not possible.

Don't fret about your 'likes' or page views or anything else. Post on your own page, maybe every couple of days to keep your hand in, so to speak, and pick your promo groups carefully and then promote on them. That's about the most practical use of the facebook I found...mildly effective. Best of luck, Edita

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Hmmm, I'm not so sure about this. The promo group idea seems good in theory, but does it actual lead to sales?

I would never follow a promo group on Facebook (why would I want more promo stuff on my feed? The ads are enough already!), and I imagine most of the members are just there to post their own promos and move on. And if you get likes, it's likely going to be from other promo-ing authors trying to boost their own numbers and they're rarely guaranteed readers.

Edita, you mentioned that this was mildly effective for you. Do you actually see a change in sales figures as a result?

EMaree said:

Hmmm, I'm not so sure about this. The promo group idea seems good in theory, but does it actual lead to sales?

I would never follow a promo group on Facebook (why would I want more promo stuff on my feed? The ads are enough already!), and I imagine most of the members are just there to post their own promos and move on. And if you get likes, it's likely going to be from other promo-ing authors trying to boost their own numbers and they're rarely guaranteed readers.

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Yeah, I have the same feeling about the different groups and tend not to participate as far as promotional-type posts go. For example, I'm a member of one particular authors group, but I've yet to post promotions for my own book--it's all authors promoting their books to other authors. It seems too circular to me. And I have known struggling indie authors to post constantly in different FB groups, yet all that work doesn't seem to pay off in sales. (One friend told me she was a member of 50 groups and confessed that the groups where authors were supposed to cross-promote usually ended up with her promoting others but not getting much promo back in return.)

Edita mentioned "pick your promo groups carefully," and that's got to be the key. Maybe there are a few that are effective. I think that's one of those magic things we try to figure out.

My Facebook and Twitter are clogged with author promos. Unless it's a friend I want to support, I ignore 99 percent of it. There's just too much out there.

On the other hand, I do sell books on Facebook, but I think the majority of sales are to people I know or they recommend me to their friends.