What I’d like to do with this commentary is discuss various social media platforms and tools you can use to promote your work, and then ask you what you use and their effectiveness. The more we talk and share, the more we all can be successful in our literary endeavors.
BLOGS
Just about everyone has a blog today. They are free, and they allow any and everyone with an Internet connection the opportunity to have a voice along the Information Superhighway. Two of the most popular platforms for blogs are WordPress (http://wordpress.com) and Blogger (http://blogger.com). You can go free with them, or you can, as I have done, bought domains and use the WP platform to develop my sites/blogs.
Whatever platform you use for blogs, you want to be mindful how you use the blog. You don’t want to just provide a dumping spot for text for people to read. Blogs allow you to interact with your audience, and you need to be mindful of that component so that you can develop content that not only keeps your blog “sticky” (return to that particular website or hold their attention and get them to spend longer periods of time at that site), but also keeps your reader wanting to develop a relationship with the content via responses/comments and conversation with you and/or other blog readers.
Twitter is a microblog in which you have 140 characters (or less) to make a statement. Some might wonder how exactly you can use such a small space to make a big impact on book promotion, but there are ways.
First, it’s important to have a centralized location for your branding—whether that’s an official website or an official blog. This is the place that all information about you and your book and your activities regarding the book is located (and archived). Twitter can be used to broadcast new information that is at the centralized location to generate traffic to the main site or blog. Remember, you only have 140 characters, so it’s important to use an URL shortener like bit.ly or TinyURL [and now Google has one, too, for Chrome users: link] and to think of your message as a HEADLINE and use vivid nouns and verbs to spark readers to click your link and learn more about you and your product(s).
You can also use Twitter to promote you work by publishing a line from your book with a link to learn more about the book to a link to purchase the book. Take a month where once a week you will publish 5 to 10 lines from your book each week along with link. Last month, I did it for my latest release, Death at the Double Inkwell (http://shonbacon.com/ddiw), and it intrigued people enough to message me about the book and go to my website to learn more about DDIW.
Another thing you can do with Twitter is create accounts for main characters of your work. Let people learn about your book through the characters developed within the book.
Want a fan page? Start one on Facebook. There are plenty of authors who are using Facebook as a one-stop shop for all things about their literary wares. You can use the fan page to discuss book signings, latest releases, current writing projects, new book trailers, and all things book related. It’s a great way to have a spot where you can collect fans and feed them with material to keep them interested in you and your work.
Some people use their general FB page in order to do this, and that’s cool; I do. My one FB page is a one-stop shop of EVERYTHING me, but people expect that from me, so no one’s ever had a problem with me doing that. Despite this, I would argue that it might be a good idea to have one place dedicated to you as writer and collect friends that are interested in you as writer and in buying your writing.
Any writer that is serious about having a long writing career needs to have a platform. Often, this platform comes from the themes, the ideas that permeate your writing. Think about the themes that follow you from one story to the next. Is there a way that you can generate content or find content on those themes online to showcase to your audience? If so, then using Squidoo to help develop/promote this content might be a good idea.
“Squidoo is the popular publishing platform and community that makes it easy for you to create "lenses" online. Lenses are pages, kind of like flyers or signposts or overview articles, that gather everything you know about your topic of interest--and snap it all into focus. Like the lens of a camera, your perspective on something. (You're looking at a lens right now).”
So, you can create “lenses” about you (as author). You can create lenses about your book in which you populate the lenses with articles, links, etc. about your book, including pieces about the themes that resonate with your book. For example, with Death at the Double Inkwell, in addition to all things related to what the book is about, I might have commentaries about self-esteem, sisterhood, types of men and how to avoid particular types, family, relationships, lies – all themes and ideas that find themselves within the book.
PODCASTS
The cool thing about the Internet is you don’t have to provide people with just text. You can provide audio, too: enter the podcast. I use Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), a free program you can download online, and a pair of HP headphones with mic to develop my podcasts, and I have a subscription to Podbean (http://podbean.com) where I can upload my MP3s and showcase them on my page (http://shonbacon.podbean.com).
You can showcase excerpts from your books, themes that resonate within your books, and your journey to publication, among other things.
You can use music to intro and outro your podcasts, but you want to be mindful of copyright laws. In the past, I used snippets from music my friends created and gave me permission to you. You might check out Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), a nonprofit organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration, to find possible music.
It is a good idea to write scripts for your podcasts and not just “wing it.” It will help to make your productions more professional sounding.
If you want to bring live interactive broadcasting to your book promotion efforts, then you definitely want to consider Ustream.TV.
As the Ustream website states, “…anyone with an Internet connection and a camera [can] engage their audience in a meaningful, immediate way.”
People are using Ustream to broadcast a myriad of things, to include:
• Major political events such as debates, speeches, rallies
• Talk shows
• Movie premieres and 'red carpet events'
• Concerts
• School and business events and training
• Conferences
• Sporting events
• Personal milestones such as holiday gatherings, weddings, graduations, parties, even births
• Interactive games for viewers to watch or join
How can you use this technology to promote your work?
• Book club discussions
• Book readings
• Conferences/talks that center around the themes found within your books
• Book signings
• Book release parties
There are, obviously, other avenues people are traveling to bring social media into their book promoting, such as using YouTube to publish video (like book trailers). And many are using the tools I presented above in ways not discussed here.
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