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Facebook?

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
I don't get any advertisements on my Facebook wall.

That said, I had a better response to comments about my book in Google+, simply because of the way Google+ works. Instead of simply having friends and family and people who have some connection with as part of your circle of contacts, with Google+ you generate circles based on common interests. So I have a number of people interested in publishing and promotion, as well as a number of writer, editors, readers, and so on in my circles. Seems like a more targeted approach.
 
I'll probably bite the bullet and set up a Google+ page for THE QUEEN OF MAGES. Can't really hurt, I suppose, although I'm wary of spending even more time curating various online presences.
 
I've tried facebook. It failed. People were more interested in posting their advertisements and such on my wall. The entire site is one great big web of billboards.

Really? that is strange, but then again most of the people who hit up my page are people I know.
I have a few random people who follow the page that I don't know that seem interested in the book, and more people on twitter who mail me asking about its release etc. But, I like to think that since I linked my FB page with my twitter acnt that it helps build the audiance a little.
 

Sieryn

Dreamer
I agree. I ran a three month facebook campaign, didn't see any increase in sales...waste of money as far as I'm concerned.

Frankly I got more sales out of a woot.com deal post than facebook.
 

Ankari

Hero Breaker
Moderator
You can't use Facebook as an advertising medium. You have to think it as finding and developing your potential customer base. This requires more than just coughing up a few hundred bucks for an ad campaign. You need to engage with your followers, give them reason to invest into your artist creation.
 

@nbcauthor

New Member
But how?

You can't use Facebook as an advertising medium. You have to think it as finding and developing your potential customer base. This requires more than just coughing up a few hundred bucks for an ad campaign. You need to engage with your followers, give them reason to invest into your artist creation.

Not sure how to engage...

?
 

Ankari

Hero Breaker
Moderator
I'll try my best.

Marketing isn't about selling something so much as it is about generating interest in a product. Those are two different concepts. You would consider the used car salesman as selling you something and the hype that Apple creates for its Iphone line as marketing. The problem with most authors is that they've never worked in retail. Even if you haven't, you are a consumer and you have to reflect on what works to get you to buy a product and what doesn't. Since this thread is about Facebook, I'll try to limit the concept of marketing as it applies through facebook.

Why Should Someone Follow You?

You have to give regular content to be consumed by your potential customer base (consumers). What are you offering your fans that isn't a sales pitch? "Hey, buy my book. It's great!" Doesn't cut it. We don't need another commercial in our lives. You can see from the amount of DVRs being sold that people are willing to pay money to avoid commercials. Don't turn your facebook page into a commerical.

Content Suggestions

Pictures: I know that everyone is able to afford an artist, but if you can, get one. People love pictures. Look at your phone and find out how many megapixels the camera has in it. We are extremely visual, as it gives the consumer immediate gratification. Pictures are like gateway drugs: once they like what they see, they'll want to know more about where it came from.

You've seen the drawings I've posted in the World Building Forum. Each one has received a few hundred views. Well, in facebook my racial album has received over a thousand.

Snippets: We are writers, which makes this an easy item to offer. Snippets should be short, clear enough to convey the proper emotion but vague enough to keep the consumer guessing. It doesn't matter if the snippet is from your book or if it's from the lore of your world. I've posted two snippets that are directly from my book but I am going to post a others that give further insight to the world building I've done.

Milestones: People like to see that they are part of a thriving relationship. Milestones allow you to convey a level of success that your fans can share in. I'm currently at 91 likes. When I hit 100 I will turn that into a milestone. Customers want to be the reason why you've succeeded. How many times have you suggested to someone an author that they didn't know? Didn't it feel good that you enlightened them? Didn't it feel good to know that you found another fan for the author you love? That is a milestone.

Engage Your Fans

A lot of celebrities ascend into a legend solely based on their ability to keep their fandom growing. Ashton Kutcher did this when he entered a challenge with CNN on who can reach one million followers on Twitter. He won. He did this because he was better at engaging his fans. He gave them updates, randomly read his fan's tweets, and responded to them. As a budding author, you need to engage your audience. Make them more than just fans, make them your followers. If someone posts a comment on a status update, respond back to it. Simple, but a very important habit to adopt.

The Earlier the Better

Some are afraid to enter into marketing before their book is finished. Their reasoning is that it will distract them from writing or that fear of offering something when the product isn't completed. I understand the first point, because I feel that way now. I don't understand the second point. If you follow my reasoning, you're not offering them a product to buy, your interaction with your fans is what they are consuming.

I've said this before, but it's an important lesson I learned. I attended a seminar about this very subject during my SuperCon visit. The author told us that she started a facebook page after she completed her first chapter of her first draft! She would start off by sharing snippets of her writing. She gained 1,500 fans by the time she finished her book!

Moral of the story? It's never too early but it can be too late.

Facebook Ads

You can pay facebook to advertise your facebook page or an external website. Here are a few points I've picked up.

Visual is Better

I advertise my racial album. Remember, visual products give the consumer immediate emotional gratification. That little thumbnail of an ad needs to be as attractive as possible. If you have the money to create a facebook ad, I'd suggest you hire an artist to create a few pictures.

Filter Your Exposure

You can tell facebook what countries you want your ad to run in. I picked all the English speaking ones that I could remember. You want to get the best bang for your buck. You can also tell facebook to advertise your page to people that like certain pages. For instance, you can tell facebook to only display your ad for people that like Lord of The Rings, Dragon Age, Skyrim, Wheel of Time, etc.

Be careful which page you tell facebook to filter to. There are many unofficial fan pages for popular intellectual properties.

Set Your Bid

Facebook allows you to set your bid (the cost per unit for your ad). It suggests a certain amount (mine was $0.30) but I decreased it by 50% ($0.15). I average about $0.12 a click. Also, you can select if you want to pay per click or for exposure frequency (1000 views increments). I chose the per click method.

I think I've covered everything I can concerning facebook. If you have any questions, post them and I'll do my best to answer them.
 
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Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
Maven. The strategy I would recommend for doing well on Facebook is called being a Maven, which means being the go-to place for consolidating the best material of interest to a particular group - that is, people who are interested in the same things you are.

Chances are slim that you can create enough content on your own, but if you can consolidate and share the right bundle of the content available everywhere, and mix it with your own related content, then your facebook page can become a go-to resource instead of an obnoxious advertiser.

This also works well with twitter, but there's a lot of other strategies that work well with Twitter, too.
 
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Short of already being famous, I gather that the best Twitter strategy is to write things that are funny so that people retweet you, which is likely to gain you followers. That's what I'm trying to do, anyway.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
Short of already being famous, I gather that the best Twitter strategy is to write things that are funny so that people retweet you, which is likely to gain you followers. That's what I'm trying to do, anyway.

Yes. The other strategy is to follow a lot of people and chat with them, since anything they say to you will mean a link to you on their feed, and vica versa. Mixing the three is probably best, but chatting can get spammy if you aren't careful.
 
Yes. The other strategy is to follow a lot of people and chat with them, since anything they say to you will mean a link to you on their feed, and vica versa. Mixing the three is probably best, but chatting can get spammy if you aren't careful.

I sort of tried that at first when I started on Twitter, but it was really time-consuming. I also don't want to be someone who has 5,000 followers and also follows 5,000 people. My metric for success is that I have way more followers than follow-ees. :)
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
I sort of tried that at first when I started on Twitter, but it was really time-consuming. I also don't want to be someone who has 5,000 followers and also follows 5,000 people. My metric for success is that I have way more followers than follow-ees. :)

That's going to be hard, but I suppose it's less time consuming. It's simple enough to create 140 interesting characters each day, and it's easy enough to latch onto a trend. Can you find something funny and fantasy related to say when you log in and see that today, what's trending is #MentionADateYouWillNeverForget?

Your followers build more slowly at first because you need a slew of tweets before people will follow you, but then pick up.

I would still suggest doing some of the Maven thing. There are people that your audience is already following. Swapping tweets with those people, and consolidating some of their content, is the fastest way to reach them.
 
Yeah... I just don't have time. Actual writing and directly related tasks already chew up most of my available free time each day. I can barely spare enough time to squeeze out occasional blog posts and tweets; actually organizing those efforts into something is probably beyond my capacity.

Or maybe I'll slowly get better at it, and it'll seem less overwhelming, as times goes on...
 

ALB2012

Maester
I am not eager enough to set up twitter, I have facebook, google+, pinterest and also a couple of forums.

With writing and work I need some time away from the computer
 
I'm not sure if it's been mentioned or not, but pages are definitely the way to go for creating a public entity (which any published author is). I have a Google+ page for my book +The Throne of Ao, and I have a Facebook page for my author-self, facebook.com/zawota

The analytics feature of Facebook's pages is also quite nice for seeing how many people you are reaching.

Chatting with people is an interesting thing to do on twitter that for some reason I had not considered -_-

When I started I went the route of following people that were interested in Tolkien and fantasy type things, but I ended up with too many follows and Twitter suspended me temporarily until I explained myself. They said I was "aggressively following people" and that I needed more followers before adding more people (this was over a year ago). Now that I am actually getting interested in twitter, I have been going through and deleting any person that's not a publisher, writer, someone I know in real life or someone I am interested in following.

My goal is to get it down to a number of people that I am actually interested in hearing about! But it's slow going. I've only deleted about 100 so far. Once I get down to a good number I will start actually using Twitter for more.
 
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