Social Media for Marketing: An Overview (Part I)

Since beginning my adventure in self-publishing, I’ve identified several key tools for creating a social media network that will help market your story. I’ll touch on each aspect briefly here, and then devote a full section to each one.

Let’s start with Facebook. As tempting as it is to think your hundreds of current family and friends will be an instant market and take your story viral as soon as you put up a post on your Timeline, I’m here to tell you that simply is not going to happen. You’ll actually need to create a unique presence with an Author page (see here for an example) build up a legion of followers (people who “Like” your Author page) and then use some very specific promotions to generate downloads and sales of your story.

This leads us to Author Karma. Founded by Emlyn Chand from Novel Publicity, Author Karma is an initiative that gets indie authors supporting one another on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, etc. It’s an invaluable network and the best way I know to rapidly build your following. That said, remember that these aren’t “real” fans. They probably will not download your story – remember, they’re writers first, and readers second, and they’re focused on building their own networks, not reading your great American short story. However, they have lots of their own fans and followers, who are readers, and who may well discover your work through them. And, sometimes they actually will download your story – I have discovered a few authors whose work I’ve bought through Author Karma, but it’s literally a one-in-a-hundred case for me. That said, I've also found some other excellent sites and resources by reading the pages and posts of these authors, so this is high up on my "must join" groups for indie authors.

Goodreads is Facebook for readers. Well, not quite, but it is probably the biggest and best of the websites where readers congregate to list their own digital libraries, recommend books to others, search for new material, join virtual book clubs, etc. It’s a key place to establish your presence as an indie author. 

LibraryThing is a similar site, although it’s a bit more technically challenging to negotiate, and seems to attract a more high-brow crowd. That said, LibraryThing offers you the ability to offer a “book giveaway” featuring your e-book; something Goodreads does not yet do.

Twitter is a great way for getting a short message out to a lot of people. A lot of people. The beauty of Twitter is how far and fast the extended network of “followers” can distribute your message. Here’s an example. When I was testing promotional methods, I sent a Tweet about a free download for one of my stories to 44 people. Out of those 44 notes, 21 were re-Tweeted – that is, the person I sent it to forwarded it on to all of their followers. I did a little calculation to see how many people that one note reached (assuming it was never re-Tweeted by any of the people who read it on one of my followers Twitter streams) – the answer? That one note, sent to 44 of my followers was read by 97,292 of their followers. It doesn’t take a genius to see that you don’t need a very high percentage of Twitter readers to actually click through and download your story, because even a small percentage, multiplied by a big number like 97,292 is going to result in a lot of sales.

Now, if you’re going to use Twitter, you definitely need to use Bitly. While it’s not a social networking site itself, it lets you take a long web address (like  http://www.amazon.com/Happily-Ever-After-ebook/dp/B006RQUZ3I/ ) and shorten it down to the more manageable http://amzn.to/JeTTfd. Completely free, and vital so you can make the most of your 140 text characters in a standard Tweet.

Another site that builds on the power of Twitter is Triberr, which lets you band together with other authors to share your blog posts automatically through Twitter. This does a few things; most importantly, it raises your social capital with people in your “tribes” because they see you reTweeting their posts, and will be more likely to return the favor; and their followers see your blog posts, which means (if you’ve set your blog up right) that they are being exposed to your stories, your writing style, etc. Again, case in point; my 4 tribes, which have a total of 30 members, has a social reach on Twitter of 24,824. That means every time I have a blog post, the title blurb is going out to 24,824 people. Again, even if only a small percentage are interested, that’s still a lot of traffic for my blog. Want to join a Tribe? Send me a Tweet to @E_H_Carpenter and I'll send you an invite!

OK, that's a start, and definitely enough for one post. But there's more. Stay tuned!

Best always,

Edward

KDP Select “FREE for FRIDAY” Promotion Recap

Continuing the analysis of the KDP Select program and particularly the use of “free” days to promote short stories, I recently concluded the third of my planned “FREE for FRIDAY” promotions.

The genesis, some of you might recall, was that when I released Happily Ever After as a KDP Select title, I used all 5 free days at once, and while the book did well, with 190 downloads on the first day (and 656 total) the number of books downloaded for free dropped off considerably after the first 2 days of the promotion.

Thus, with Seven Lives to Repay Our Country, I decided to test the effect of 1 and 2-day promotions, and also to find out just what effect social networking played on the efficacy of such giveaways.

Finally, I wanted to establish a baseline for the “KDP Select Bump”, if such a phenomenon actually existed.

So, what did I learn from this promotion?

Well, a few interesting things.

Results: Seven Lives to Repay Our Country rose to #8 on the Fiction/Genre Fiction/War list, and #35 on the Fiction/Short Story list, with 102 copies given away.

Observations:

• Social networking saturation. The first “FREE for FRIDAY” event got 45 signups on FB and 11 on Goodreads. This one got 5 and 6, respectively. This shows that a potential disadvantage to splitting up your promotions may be that you lose the attention of FB / GR fans on subsequent promotions. For example, suppose you have 100 fans on each site. The first time you do a promotion, you invite them all, and 60 sign up. They download your book, but on a subsequent campaign, they probably won’t sign up since they already have it.

• People don’t Share. I posted a couple of notes on FB that specifically asked people to click “SHARE” to help the note go viral. Total shares? Four. My observation is that unless something is really cute, sad, funny, or bizarre (and usually image-based) people simply don’t share. They may “LIKE”, but that doesn’t have the same impact.

• Effectiveness of Twitter. Since I didn’t really use Twitter intensively in the first promotion, it’s probable that my Tweeps didn’t suffer from the same sort of saturation, and Twitter is also a platform that lends itself better to sharing a link and a short blurb with a lot of people. This time, I sent 22 total tweets (@ an average of 2 people per tweet) and got 21 Re-Tweets as a result (about a 50% return.)

• Guest Blog / Author Interview. I had a an author interview at Shut Up & Read and a guest post at Believing in Horses, both of which referenced the promotion. Judging from the scarcity of the comments at both sites, I believe these probably did not measurably impact the current campaign, but since they’ll be out there for a while, they may lead to paid sales in the future.

• Staying Power. When the promotion ended at midnight on April 6th, this story was ranked 12th in Fiction/Genre Fiction/War list, and #35 on the Fiction/Short Story list... But the interesting thing is that it stayed on the free list for the next five hours, actually rising to #10 by 3 am, and #8 by 5 am, before finally disappearing from the list at 6 am.

• The “Kindle Select Bump” - it's too early in the month to tell, but past data indicates there should be an increase of about 4 times sales over months without a "free" promotion.

Analysis:

There was little apparent impact from the Facebook / Goodreads events and the guest post / author interview. And based on the second “FREE for FRIDAY” (where I intentionally did no promotion) we know that no promotion = low free downloads. Thus, the only factor that seems to have driven downloads was the Twitter campaign.

Those 22 Tweets to 44 followers generated Re-Tweets that reached approximately 97,292 people. If we subtract out the number of people who probably downloaded just based on the story being on Amazon’s “free” list (using the number from the un-promoted free day as our baseline) we see that about 80 downloads were probably due to Tweets that sparked a reaction.

Thus, we hypothesize that in the future, we can expect 4 downloads per Tweet sent out, and of course, we’ll test this with our final promotion.

Finally, we may have a partial explanation for the “Kindle Select Bump” – if the book stays on the “FREE” list (even though the price shows 99 cents) for 5 hours Pacific Standard time, that means anyone picking books off that list as late as 8:59 am on the East Coast, or 1:59 pm in Europe will see the book at or near the top of the list, but if they click to get it, they’ll see that it costs something – a price they may be willing to pay based on its ranking.

Future Plans:

Based on this information, I will plan to use the last 2 “free” days for this title to run a promotion that ties together everything learned from this one and the 3 promotions which have preceded it, and tests the hypothesis about the “return on investment” for Tweets, the optimal length of a promotion, use of a “Core Group” of supporters, and the extent of the “KDP Select Bump”, which so far appears to increase sales of all books by 4 times the number sold in a month without a promotion.

Hopefully this synopsis will be valuable food for thought for any authors currently planning their own future promotions, so if you know anyone who might benefit from this information, please forward them the link!

Best to all,

Edward

ROW80, Listopia, eTLC, etc

Greetings, fellow readers and writers, from chilly Newport, Rhode Island, with a warm welcome to everyone arriving from the Beck Valley Books blog hop, and of course everyone participating in ROW80.

First, a small request for everyone who is a member of Goodreads - would you please consider clicking this link and voting for Happily Ever After (#3) and Seven Lives to Repay Our Country (#6) on this list of 99 cent fiction?

And, before we go much further, a link to a little humor - this office really knows how to pull together as a team to accomplish their goal! Kudos to Nicole Basaraba for inspiring me to try to put a few smiles in my ROW80 updates!

ROW80 update: It turns out I've been both more and less productive than I'd originally planned; I'm ahead in some areas, behind in others, and in at least one case, have gone totally off the reservation!

1. Submit 1 book proposal - DONE!

2. Publish 1 non-fiction book.

• Translate all material: 10 Jan - DONE!
• Edit all material: 15 Jan - Rescheduled to: 15 Mar
• Publish: 16-21 Jan - Rescheduled to: 25 Mar

3. Publish 1 non-fiction article or essay online.

• Finish draft: 20 Jan - Rescheduled to: 20 Feb
• Submit for editing: 25 Jan - Rescheduled to: 25 Feb
• See published: Apr issue of “Current Intelligence”

4. Publish 1 more short story on Amazon.

This is the interesting one. The story I was originally planning to self-publish was just submitted to Glimmer Train's "Short Story Award for New Writers", where it will be competing with an estimated 4,000 other submissions for selection and publication. Yes, I really do think it's that good. If it's not selected, it will be a tough call whether to use it as a "control story" as I test the traditional publishing vs. self-published e-book route for short story writers, or simply to enroll in at once in the Amazon KDP Select program and let the market, rather than editors, decide how good it is.

That said, to meet the original goal, I now need to write, prep, and publish another story by February 21st, all while traipsing across the United States and Europe. Can I do it? Stay tuned to find out!

A few final notes. I've just enrolled Seven Lives to Repay Our Country in the Electronic Text & Literature Cloud (eTLC) - authors and readers, you might like to check out this resource for independent literature, and Wednesday is the time to join Novel Publicity's Author Karma event on Goodreads. Join the group, RSVP to the event, and meet a few more fans and friends.

Best regards,

Edward