Is online book marketing a waste of time? One writer's results.
Over the last two months, I've made a push to boost my online presence by blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking, Linking In, GoodReading, Search Engine Optimizing and more. Each week, I spend one full day on this stuff, plus another eight hours here and there.
My results have been middling at best. I've increased my blog traffic, number of connections/friends/followers but not by a huge amount. Haven't gotten anything to go viral.
Worse still, I just read some articles by a respected writer that claimed that blogging and social media can be useless for building a book marketing platform and selling books.
Though it's only been two months, the articles still depressed the hell out of me and led me to ask...
But other experts claim that this is a gradual process, so I'm going to keep at it for another few months.
My results since my online surge began May 1, 2012.
1) Linked In: 1,002 connections (increase of about 200)
- Currently adding about 5 a week.
- Relatively easy to increase: send out about 10 new requests per week.
- Adding mainly writers, agents, book editors and other publishing people -- not a potential audience for my novel.
- Re: the agents and book editors: When it comes time to query, will I have a leg up? will anyone care if I say: "Hey buddy, we're connected Linked In." Also, not sure if these folks will respond to a direct note on Linked in. (many have as many connections as I do, so they can't possibly be familiar with them all. Linked In maybe useful joining groups in which agents and editors hang out and post pithy comments to get my name under their noses.
2) Facebook Author Page: 2,010 (increase of 125)
- Currently, adding about 5 a week
- Disheartened by small number seeing my posts. (Facebook limits the number of fans you can reach to about 15 percent if you don't pay up. (So, my posts only reach 300 or so of my fans.)
- I've joined a few groups frequented by other writers. Will they buy my book? Not sure.
3) Twitter followers: 560 (increase of 300)
- Currently, adding about 10 a week
- Using Hootsuite, which makes it easy to pre-schedule and send a couple of tweets a day.
- Hootlet makes it easy to send new articles. (go to article, click hootlet icon and send.).
- I'm following some agents and publishing people. They are not following me.
- Still unclear how this will be useful for either finding a publisher or selling books.
4) Blog: 1,000 unique visitors a month, up from 625.
- Been blogging weekly: A good blog takes me four to eight hours to write.
- Getting more traffic than ever, but mostly I drive it myself by posting in various Web sites, forums, and Linked In groups.
- Few people signing up for blog-- what you really want because then you have direct connection.
- SEO seems to be helping, but still not getting big numbers (I need to get 100 times what I'm getting now to impress anyone.)
- Added a donate button -- nothing. Signed up for Google adds in hopes of generating some income. Earned a dollar and my site was cluttered with ads. I canceled it.
For more online book marketing articles:
- Tools for measuring online book marketing progress.
- How writers can earn a living (Content warning: men eating lightbulbs, being run over by cars, hit with sledge hammers.)
- Greetings from Twitter Hell.
Over the last two months, I've made a push to boost my online presence by blogging, Tweeting, Facebooking, Linking In, GoodReading, Search Engine Optimizing and more. Each week, I spend one full day on this stuff, plus another eight hours here and there.
My results have been middling at best. I've increased my blog traffic, number of connections/friends/followers but not by a huge amount. Haven't gotten anything to go viral.
Worse still, I just read some articles by a respected writer that claimed that blogging and social media can be useless for building a book marketing platform and selling books.
Though it's only been two months, the articles still depressed the hell out of me and led me to ask...
But other experts claim that this is a gradual process, so I'm going to keep at it for another few months.
My results since my online surge began May 1, 2012.
1) Linked In: 1,002 connections (increase of about 200)
- Currently adding about 5 a week.
- Relatively easy to increase: send out about 10 new requests per week.
- Adding mainly writers, agents, book editors and other publishing people -- not a potential audience for my novel.
- Re: the agents and book editors: When it comes time to query, will I have a leg up? will anyone care if I say: "Hey buddy, we're connected Linked In." Also, not sure if these folks will respond to a direct note on Linked in. (many have as many connections as I do, so they can't possibly be familiar with them all. Linked In maybe useful joining groups in which agents and editors hang out and post pithy comments to get my name under their noses.
2) Facebook Author Page: 2,010 (increase of 125)
- Currently, adding about 5 a week
- Disheartened by small number seeing my posts. (Facebook limits the number of fans you can reach to about 15 percent if you don't pay up. (So, my posts only reach 300 or so of my fans.)
- I've joined a few groups frequented by other writers. Will they buy my book? Not sure.
3) Twitter followers: 560 (increase of 300)
- Currently, adding about 10 a week
- Using Hootsuite, which makes it easy to pre-schedule and send a couple of tweets a day.
- Hootlet makes it easy to send new articles. (go to article, click hootlet icon and send.).
- I'm following some agents and publishing people. They are not following me.
- Still unclear how this will be useful for either finding a publisher or selling books.
4) Blog: 1,000 unique visitors a month, up from 625.
- Been blogging weekly: A good blog takes me four to eight hours to write.
- Getting more traffic than ever, but mostly I drive it myself by posting in various Web sites, forums, and Linked In groups.
- Few people signing up for blog-- what you really want because then you have direct connection.
- SEO seems to be helping, but still not getting big numbers (I need to get 100 times what I'm getting now to impress anyone.)
- Added a donate button -- nothing. Signed up for Google adds in hopes of generating some income. Earned a dollar and my site was cluttered with ads. I canceled it.
For more online book marketing articles:
- Tools for measuring online book marketing progress.
- How writers can earn a living (Content warning: men eating lightbulbs, being run over by cars, hit with sledge hammers.)
- Greetings from Twitter Hell.
15 comments:
I have my google ads on my website. I've made $26.00 since February. You probably should not have remove it since there's no loss. I hate the fact that facebook has only allow your post to be seen by 15% of my fans..because I have 6,785 fans on that page and all of a sudden, only 8% sees my posts. Took me years to generate so many Likes on that page (been on facebook since 2004). I was able to generate majority of my book sales through facebook. Now I would have to figure out new strategies to increase online book sales. Hmm, thinking...
Author Arnold Henry
www.arnoldHenry.com
Hi Arnold,
With Google Ads, I was concerned that it was possible causing people to ignore content in my right-hand column, where I beg for donations and followers. Since removing the ads, I've gotten neither. Re: Facebook: Have you seen the link to how to get fans to modify setting to get your posts? I'm thinking of paying to reach all my fans and sending a post with instrux:
http://alwaysupward.com/blog/for-fb-page-admins-how-to-reclaim-part-of-your-missing-audience/
The bottom line here is an annoying IT DEPENDS. For every one person who tells you something doesn’t work there will be another for whom it has. The big problem with all the things you’re doing is that they take time on a weekly basis and it will take time for you to see the benefits of your efforts. The real question though is: Who is your market? Most of us market to those we can get to and most of the people we can get to are people like us with books to sell who really are only giving us the time of day because they hope we might review or at least buy their book. I noticed this especially in the groups on Facebook, in fact I’ve said more than once: You are marketing to the wrong people, folks! I review books. I also have books that I’d like people to review. I try and avoid exchanging reviews unless I know the person and know they’ll write an honest review because they know I will. I may not be cruel but I am always honest. I am more than happy to consider anyone’s pitch but the bottom line is that I review three books a month and that is it and that includes the big publishers who are always sending me stuff so the fact is I don’t have time. Like most reviewers I have a shelfful of books that will never go away until I drop dead and my daughter carts them all down to the nearest charity shop.
How much time do you spend reading entries on Facebook and Linked In and Twitter and how much does any of it go in? The number of friends-in-the-Internet-sense-of-the-word you have is unmanageable. Everyone else will be in the same boat with too much to read and not enough time to do digest anything. The ratio of effort to return is probably not worth it.
I am puzzled why you’ve only got 3 followers on your blog after being around since 2007 but I see that you’ve not been faithfully posting weekly since then. I post every five days—it used to be twice a week—and I’ve been doing that for five years now; I typically get about 8000 hits a month but I do a lot of promoting. Commenting on blogs has been especially helpful in building a fan base for want of a better word although it is a very small fan base. I still have just over 200 followers but those I do have like what I do which is write long, involved articles and book reviews and that’s not something that many people have time for but that’s who I am. You might find this article of some help which I wrote a few months back. The blog carnivals I used are no more but I do check for new ones. I’ve also added Digolet to my routine.
One month is nothing. Nothing. A regular blogging schedule is good but it is only a start. Ask yourself: Would I subscribe to my own blog? You need to give reasons to people to choose you. If you’re not doing anything new or saying anything new then they will go elsewhere where the same nothing new is on offer but in a more engaging way than you’re not saying it.
Agents and publishers are interested in people who have written books and clearly have more books in them. They are businessmen before anything else. Is a “compelling third draft” a finished book? The books need to be finished and that means professionally edited and proofread and ready to go. Times have changed. With many choosing to go down the self-publishing route I would actually think that things might be improving here but then bookshops are closing to counter all of that. It really is the best of times and the worst of times to be a writer just now.
Traditional marketing techniques don’t work very well online. Being a decent bloke who takes a genuine interest in other people and isn’t always selling at them does … but not quickly.
I feel your pain. As a publicist of 35 years, I'm now learning the new ways of publicizing and promoting books via social media and other online tools. I've even developed a blog called "Dear Author: A publicist's view of the ever-changing world of book PR" http://www.janelassar.wordpress.com
You seem to be doing all the right things, in my opinion, and the fact you're trying to *measure* the effectiveness of your efforts shows a healthy professionalism for your work. My advice is to continue to try everything and see what "sticks." And certainly don't give up on traditional book publicity (print book reviews, radio, TV interviews, etc). I believe the best PR model right now is a combination of many methods-- new and old.
Jim and Jane thanks for great comments.
Finding other writers is indeed the easy part and finding readers is much tougher.
I also read very few entries on Facebook and Linked In -- most are crap and just authors hyping their stuff. (I've been guilty of that in the past.)
Finishing my book would no doubt help my cause and spending in on book marketing is a great excuse not to finish.
Well, the voice of experience answered this through the gmail reply box, so I guess that doesn't work. I offered life changing pointers, but I wouldn't know where to start to do it over. My last Amazon promo reached over 8,000 people in four countries and has resulted in a measly 36 cash sales so far, But it gets better each time. You need to reach readers, not writers, and the Select freebie reaches the most readers. Results may vary.
Attempting to measure things works well over a longer time. The short term results are interesting. A problem is that preferences are measured by websites, and then they continue to present us with more writers, editors, publishers, and the like. They do buy the odd book. Reaching 'readers,' and a whole lot of them, takes a lot more time.
John Locke obviously had a lot of success with Twitter and that's because he had a very specific way of writing his blogs and was very good at sending them to the appropriate people on Twitter. I have a friend, Carol Davis Luce, who is a suspense writer and she also used Twitter and Facebook very effectively to be in the top 100 books sold on Amazon a while back. She was making quite a bit of money per month. I haven't talked to her in the last two months about this but she was doing very, very well. I agree with the people who commented here that it takes time. Also, the month that I wrote a blog called The Top 5 Romance Books for Couples and included a really cool book by a man who has 600,000 followers on his Facebook page, he posted a link to my blog on his FB page and that month I sold more ebooks than I ever have before.
Randy, you ignorant slut.
1) I agree with those who notice your evaluating after a reasonably short period of time. To me, it's akin to starting a new exercise program and complaining that you haven't lost all 100 pounds after the first week.
2) I note that you have a number of really substantive comments to this post. I have more unique traffic than you do, but not by much, and practically all my comments are written by piece workers in China, leaving ads for Michael Kors hand bags.
3) I didn't know there was an FB limit, or paid FB level, so you informed me. Thank you (Hmm.. if (I say) you're an ignorant slut, what does that make me?)
4) I have read of these authors doing great business via social networking and self-publishing, but they are certainly not the rule. We are not likely to hear about all those who get nothing from their efforts, or of those who have to build a following, just as writers long have sought to.
5) For me, building the platform is just part of what I'm working on. When I have the killer "new thing," I need to have it in place. I have no guarantee that I'll ever be there, but I can be fairly sure that if I do create it, I will have wanted to be prepared. That's a different issue than building a platform so that a publisher will buy my book.
I think you're doing just fine.
Hi Randy,
you can get free promotion for your book here: http://askdavid.com/free-book-promotion
Best,
David
Can you explain to me how not ALL the fans are seeing your page. I've never heard this. I'd love to know what you mean. I don't have many fans yet. But does that mean only a small percentage see my posts?
Please explain. I'm a bit lost.
J.P. On a Facebook Fan page, under each post, there is something called "Reach." That is the number of people who are actually seeing your post. This number is a small percentage of your total fans. Feel free to email me directly if you have further questions.
Writers are surely in danger of being drawn into an electric swamp?
Getting connected by internet with mostly other writers, who are also becoming daily connected with all other writers...makes me think of something like the Everglades!
Wouldn't it be better if we all got out into Real Life with book launches,get our books into local bookshops, talks in libraries, visits to schools, writing to/for local newspapers and so reach out to people WHO AREN'T OTHER WRITERS?
I say all this looking at the edges of the swamp and being cautious about getting further in. So far I'm only on facebook, Linkedin, Goodreads,Wordpress* and that is already eating up a lot of time.
* Have already discussed this as a new Bermuda Triangle that writers may become trapped in.
On the other hand,you certainly have already built up that massive network and it will prove helpful next year,as you have a well-established platform.
Good advice, Pat!
Post a Comment