image by SEWphisticate
Self-promotion isn’t the most famous naughty s-word, but it can still feel like a bad word to today’s authors. I hate self-promotion, you might say. I’m so sick of talking about myself on social media.With more and more options to reach readers directly comes an expectation that authors will do more and more to reach those readers themselves, often without publisher assistance.
So! How do you sell books without a single self-promotional tweet, post, or video?
Simple. In most cases, you actually shouldn’t be promoting yourself. If the goal is to sell books — or at least make people you don’t know personally curious enough about your book(s) to take action — you are not the product. “Buy my book!” doesn’t work if the reader doesn’t know you or know anything about the book in question.
Instead of self-promotion, think of the path to getting your book in front of readers on social media as a railroad track, with two parallel rails: be yourself, and take yourself out of the equation.
Be yourself. There are lots of names for this, and most of them sound like awful corporate-speak: curation! Branding! But let go of the labels. Being yourself on social media doesn’t mean sharing every last little thing. You’re not going to see Instagram posts from me about taking my car to the mechanic last Tuesday or the ancient celery I just found in the back of my produce drawer. But it means posting or talking about the things that interest you, especially where those things overlap with the books you write. If you’re spending some of your time on social media connecting with people who enjoy reading the books you like to read, chances are that when you have a book of your own to talk about, they’ll enjoy hearing about that too. Which leads to…
Take yourself out of the equation. Have a book coming out? Want to promote it on your social media? Do it! Just do it as if it were someone else’s book. Many people find it way easier to say nice things about our friends and their books than it is to talk about ourselves. And I don’t mean to literally pretend you didn’t write the book. I mean to talk (post, tweet, whatever) primarily about what the book is, not the fact that it’s yours. Is the book a steamy, spicy romance for people whose favorite trope is Only One Bed? Is it searing historical fiction based on a heartbreaking true event? Did another author describe it as “the best book I read this year”? Talk about those things! Present the things about the book that excite you to potential readers who might also find those things exciting. The fact that you wrote the book can’t possibly be the most interesting thing about it.
Last thing: I recognize the limits of this strategy. If you hate social media completely and don’t want to do it at all, this is going to feel painful, and you don’t have to do it. The truth is that no one really knows how many books social media moves, and it may not be worth it for you to spend time on any particular social media strategy, including this one.
But, if you’re looking for a different way to approach this task, just think about the railroad track. It might be the right way to get your engine chugging forward and picking up speed.
Q: How do you promote your books on social media without feeling like you’re just shouting about yourself?