Underwhelmed by Facebook for book promo

To use it for communicating with readers and/or peers you need to work out how to get networked with those groups. I know some authors have extensive friend-networks with their fans and so can mobilize them very quickly to buy new books, enter contests etc.

I'm still working on building my FB fan page. FB doesn't really list by categories, so you can only proceed through who you already know somehow, and hope it expands from there. The best way to do that is active participation on other pages.

And IMHO it is a good idea to have a separate page for this, not use your friends/family account.

Face Book has become a dim stilted wasteland of book promotion. Self publishing is fine by me, but the promotional assault is too much. People are a little overwhelmed

Personally, I don't think I would have sold half the books I did without it, but I don't promote there. I talk about what stages my books are going through and people have become interested because of that

It doesn't hurt to have a page. That way you can put book stuff there and not annoy all the people who added you for other reasons.

I have a fan page set up. It's pretty sad, actually because there are only about 20 people on it.

Jersey Chick said:

I have a fan page set up. It's pretty sad, actually because there are only about 20 people on it.

Click to expand...

Don't feel too bad. I have a page for my fabric art and can't seem to get more than 5 people interested, so you can at least claim to be doing better with your endeavour than I can.

Another thought on this... some bloggers integrate with faceook and twitter (and I imagine G+ by now...). What this means (at least on Live Journal) is that when you post a non-friends locked post it will (unless you tell it otherwise) post a link to Twitter with the title of the blog post and also post the text of the blog post as a Note in facebook. So, by enabling this option, you notify any of your facebook or twitter followers about it as well.

Go to other authors FB page. Mine is listed below. Go to my friends and filter by interest and type in the genre of books you write, or similar authors. You'll then find my friends who like those kinds of books. Send them friend request and build your fans that way. Best of luck.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/mmurfy68http://www.facebook.com/#!/mmurfy86

The thing that puts me off FB every time I go back is the compulsory two-way friending. On Twitter people can follow me without my having to follow them back or give them access to the information that I want to share with my real-life friends. Google Plus is better in this respect, but still too new to be very useful...

FB would not be so bad a user interface if they'd left it well alone and not changed it so many times... it used to be a good, stable site now it is ropy as hell because of all the features they added...

Still figuring it out myself. Right now I'm trying to get the folks who are interested in me as a writer to "like" the writer page, so that the rest of my friends and family don't have to put up with all the writer stuff. Slow going.