Social media is a powerful promotional tool. You can use it to build relationships with readers, launch a new book, or promote your work in general. Social media can help you to get more exposure for your work, no matter how little known you are and no matter how little your budget.
Using social media to promote a book requires more than just setting up a profile and posting some updates. You have to create a strategy and use special tactics to get noticed. There are a number of ways you can use social media to your benefit, but here are just a few ideas for how you can use it to promote your book:
Create a Teaser Trailer
Movies use trailers to drum up excitement and to get more people to come to the theaters. Why not do the same thing for your book? Create a teaser trailer for your book and post it to YouTube. You can record a simple voice over and use pictures or stock video that is appropriate to the theme. You don’t have to create a high-production value video. Something short and clever can make a big impact. A teaser trailer can create buzz on YouTube and can easily be shared across other social networks, helping you to get more exposure for your book.
Organize a Contest
If you are publishing your book yourself, you can drum up excitement for your work and get some free cover art in the process by holding a contest. Users are asked to submit their best photos or graphic creations to be used for the cover of your book — with the prize being publication. This can build up a lot of buzz and get more exposure for your book even before it has been published.
If you want to do something more simple, you can simply host a giveaway for a free copy of your book (or several free copies to several winners). The giveaway will build up some good publicity, and the winners may even like your book enough to leave it a positive review.
Share Excerpts
Your social networks are a captive audience. You can take advantage of this and share excerpts of your book to build excitement for it. You can share brief passages or even whole chapters. Once readers get a taste for your writing style and the story, they will be encouraged to buy the full book.
Be careful not to over share! It can be easy to lose track of how many excerpts you have shared or where. Make sure you don’t share too much and that readers still have a good reason to go buy your book.
Make Sharing Easy
Make it easy for others to share you content on social media by including sharing buttons on your blog, below the listing for your book, and even within the chapters of your book. Make sure you are providing that opportunity wherever your readers may be encountering your book. The more people you can encourage to share your book, the more exposure you will get. Every person who likes or shares your content is increasing your exposure exponentially.
Social media can make it very easy to promote your book and to increase awareness of your work quickly. Try using some of these tactics to promote your work the next time you publish a book and you are sure to see your buzz and your sales increase quickly.
How do you use social media to promote your work? Tell us in the comments!
Catie Keeler is the primary researcher and writer for mortgagerates.info. Her most recent accomplishments include graduating from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill with a degree in business and communications. Her current focus for the site involves amortization table and best mortgage rates ny.
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Stacy Juba has written sweet and sassy chick lit novels, mysteries about determined women sleuths, and entertaining books for young adults and children. Her books include the Storybook Valley chick lit series and the Hockey Rivals young adult sports novels.
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I mainly use blogging and Twitter and am a member of Triberr, so my blog posts are repeated by many. My publisher made some awesome book trailers and I have them on my blog as well.
Other than when the book is released and during my blog tour, I almost never promote them. I spend more time focusing on my blogger buddies’ books and accomplishments than anything else. But I’m asked to do a lot of guest posts, and someone is always featuring my book. That keeps it going so I don’t have to!
Thanks for coming by, Alex! I’ve found Triberr invaluable as far as drawing more traffic to my blog. Sharing the posts of my tribemates also gives me some interesting things to tweet on Twitter. I created a couple low cost book trailers, which are nice to have, but I wouldn’t put any money into having trailers made. I agree, it is always fun and rewarding to network with fellow bloggers!