Social media really is my Achilles heel

I don't know much either but I have figured out twitter is more for following trends, so it might be good to have a twitter as well. I have some author friends on Facebook from AW who have a personal account and a separte author page which any one can "like" without being your friend. You can post your book stuff on there. YOu can set up your twitter to just be for promotion as well. There are tools like hootsuite that you can link your sm accounts to and create one post to go on all the platforms, you can schedule them so you can create them ahead of time, so you can make all of them for the week on one day or what have you. Don't forget instagram. If you use hootsuite or a similar site, you don't need to link the accounts. but if you want you can set instagram to post on your facebook and twitter and just post on instagram. I don't like that because instagram is photo based, but when it moves to twitter, it's a link back to intagram, and you can't make it post to your fb page, so you have to have it post to a Fb user account then share it to your fb page.

I use wordpress for my blog and set it to post on my twitter and facebook when I post a blog post.
Don't know if I helped or made it more confusing. Good luck.

OP: A good source of research is kboards.com . They are a forum that specializes in indie publishing, and there are any number of conversations and FAQs about just this.

Having said that, from everything I've been able to read, both here and there, marketing your indie book is a lot of work. And not just any work. Marketing work. Sorry, but that makes a dead-end, soul-destroying office job sound not so bad, really.

Some people don't mind it. Some people actually enjoy it. I don't intersect with either of those sets.

Hey nice to see another Fantasy Faction face around here! If you want to add me on Twitter (link is in my signature, signatures are a good place for social media links) I'm on there a lot, along with a few other Fantasy Faction regulars like forum member Theo and blogger Leo. We all have our faces as our avatars so you don't need to worry about us being faceless strangers -- and if you check the media pages on our Twitter pages, there's plenty of daily life photos and pet photos to help us feel even less like unknowns.

Tons of AW members are also on Twitter, and I think most of us have signature links. The rest can be found in this thread.

I'm not good at using Twitter for marketing, honestly, and I'd recommend you stick with mostly friendly social tweets and the occassional promo tweets (80/20 fun-to-promo is a good ratio, or 90% social and 10% self-promo). Twitter can be hard for autistic friends, it's easy to make a joke that reads poorly and accidentally offends someone, so if you ever need something read for tone feel free to ask on here, or you can use the @-reply feature to ask on Twitter.

Twitter's best used to form proper connections -- see our tried and true AW social media guide, how to promote like a human beings -- rather than for self-promo. But I will say it's far better for self-promo than Facebook, which throttles and restricts your posts and makes it damn near impossible to reach your target audience.

On Twitter, if you tweet, all your followers are able to see it.
On Facebook, if you post, only a algorithm-selected group of your followers see it and you have to pay to increase the broadcast range.

Goodreads is hard for self-promo, it's swamped with people trying to sell their books.

Fantasy Faction has strict no-promo rules but it's great for making reader friends who can learn about your work as they learn about you.

Instagram is fun if you enjoy visuals, and has less pressure on writing words, so can be good fun if you enjoy that.

An absolutely essential place to start is the following link.

How to promote your book like an intelligent human being and not an SEO Dweeb

It's short, clear, practical, and very accurate. You need read no more, but the discussions that follow in that thread are very helpful.

I'm a software engineer with 40+ year experience so when I had the same question you did I did research. Lots of it, including the very technical stuff that only an engineer would bother with. You are unlikely to ever find a better intro in promoting your work on the internet.

A very important point the first and later posts made is that your "social media presence" is about more than just promotion. It is your first public step to joining the larger community of writers and those who support and care about them and about writing. By joining in you cease to be alone, and the help you give others in that community will be repaid to you many times over.

As has been stated above, social media sites are more fit to being engaged with a community than to self-promoting. Or, if they are the latter, they're usually swamped with self-promotey stuff and it's hard to reach anybody there who's not mostly focussed on themselves.

On the good social sites, listening is more important than speaking. Get in on the conversations going on there, offer perspective, be helpful. That will open doors for you. Online promotion used to be about becoming a brand. Social promotion is about becoming (or getting known as) a person first. The same is true for forums. Nobody wants to know about your books going in, but if you're the kind of person people want to knowt, they will want to know about your books eventually. I second the recommendation to have a signature that can do the job for you and otherwise just stick to whatever the topic is.

That said, social networks do allow for occasional self-promotion. But even that should be less about sales and more about offering stuff. If you have a blog, feel free to post links to your latest post. It's even okay to point out a post you wrote earlier in a thread if it's really on topic and offers something new. Just don't overdo it.

When I post a link on Facebook, I usually start by posting it to my FB page. About half an hour later, I'll share the post from my personal account to give it more exposure. (Facebook rewards sharing, even if you do it yourself.) My personal account, though, is not that personal. I have some friends there, but mostly colleagues and readers. If you want your FB account for personal stuff, this is not the strategy for you. Facebook also encourages mixing the post types, so you'll get more exposure from posting pictures sometimes and links other times than from posting either individually. Generally, it's good to have pictures.

What Facebook thrives on is interaction. Interact a lot, have people interact with you, and it's more likely they'll see what you have to offer. (I'm not sure if their policy of not showing your posts to everybody also applies to personal accounts, but in any case it's better to be known.

Twitter is more democratic that way. It shows everything to everybody (unless they have a timeline algorithm activated that Twitter also offers). Downside of that is, your posts will get lost in a flood of other posts. Some people recommend posting a link more than once because of that. I'm not so sure, I very wary of annoying the readers who got it the first time. To get more exposure, be aware what the trending topics are and use common hashtags generously. I usually take a couple of mintues to figure out what the common hashtags for a topic are (Tweeetdeck's search function does that just nicely) if I'm not aware of them from reading.

Most of all, though: Not every social site is for everybody. It's better to find one that you're comfortable with and stick to that than to do all of them, poorly.

efreysson said:

I am on the autistic spectrum and socialising is really hard for me. Yes, that includes online. Consequently I have never really learned how online socialising really works, as I find it hard to get interested in faceless strangers. But writing is my one ambition, and I have to TRY.

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I have a friend who is in a similar position - he wants very much to be a writer but while he handles himself well-enough in personal encounters trying to work on social media sort of spooked him.

What seems to be working for him (he's only been trying it for a few months) is having created Twitter & Blogger accounts under a fake name just to learn the ropes. He's not promoting himself or his work in anyway that I know of, but he's following authors & publishing professionals on twitter to see how they're using it, and he's posting random blog posts to get the feel for it all and most importantly, it's letting him see how ugly people can be so it won't take him by surprise if he picks up a troll of his own.

You can't do that on Facebook, which to the best of my knowledge has very specialized rules for those using names that differ from their government ID, like Native Americans using a tribal name, but on any other platform you might just want to try a few fake names to ease into it.

Just what ARE mailing lists? How do non-friends see posts I put up on the FB page I have set aside for book matters, and how do I make better use of it? These are the kinds of things I need to force myself to learn.

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A mailing list is used to send newsletters or other information to a group of people who have signed up for it. A forum site like AW might offer a mailing list for people receive a summary of all new posts in a certain forum. Their option to send email notifications about new posts under the thread subscription is a form of mailing list. As for how an author would use it, the best way to learn that would be to sign up for some. For instance, I don't care for Janet Evanovich's books, but I know she handles her own marketing and seems to do well at it. She has a mailing list which you could join in order to see what she puts in her newsletter: http://www.evanovich.com.

Who are your favorite authors? What social media platforms do they use and how do they use them? If they have blogs, what do they post there? Looking into it from that angle should give you all the info you need as to what the possibilities are. Then it's up to you to decide what is likely to work best for yourself.

efreysson said:

I am on the autistic spectrum and socialising is really hard for me.

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A lot of people share your experience, though theirs may not be so extreme.

One technique public speakers use may help. They will focus on one member of the audience and speak just to them. Then a few minutes later re-focus on someone else. That way speaking becomes a one-on-one activity where you say you DO function.

Also, if you expect your "social media presence" to be mostly a selling tool, it will most likely fail. People buy books, not web sites or witty or wise commentary, or whatever you may contribute to your sites (typically a Facebook page and a pro - not personal - web site). Social media work best as a social experience, where you become part of a larger community of writers and those who care about writing. If you praise any books, make it those of others not your own.

Your pro site is useful for content such as the first few chapters of your books, maybe background info such as family trees or mini-histories leading up to you books or series, or collateral activities. For instance, if you are a horse person and also write historicals (where horses are an important element) announcements about upcoming equitation events might also be interesting to the fans of your books.

Have you read the other threads in this forum discussing social media? There's a lot of useful info in them.

I don't like socializing at all. In person is even worse than online, but after a while, social media wears me down. What was suggested to me is to focus on the platforms you like and use the others sparingly or not at all. I like Twitter, because it's better suited to quick check ins and things move fast. I hate Facebook. I only use Facebook because the debut author group is on Facebook so it keeps me connected, but if I use Facebook too many days in a row, I feel like I never want to speak to another person again!

So while it's not really help, per se, I think it's important to find what you like and makes you comfortable. You'll be more authentic there and it will be easier to engage with people in a good way.