Build Your Tribe on Facebook as a Published Author

Module 0: Opening Thoughts

Welcome! By now, you’ve probably realized how difficult it is to stand out as an author in today’s ultra-crowded environment. Let’s say you’ve managed to write, edit, and publish a book. It even has a listing on Amazon, and a couple of stellar reviews. That might have been sufficient in 2007, when Amazon first launched Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. But today, there are at least hundreds of thousands of authors who publish through KDP (Amazon is very secretive about the exact number). Your book could very well be one of millions available to readers through the service. How can you market your book (and yourself) when there are so many options to choose from?

While there’s no surefire way to become a successful author, there are many critical ingredients: you must write well, and write often. A catchy book cover doesn’t hurt, and positive book reviews can only help.

But none of these will bring readers to you. If you want to sell books, you have to go to your audience. And where can you find millions of people who might be interested in your books? The Internet of course.

An Online Presence is Critical for Today’s Authors

An author without an online presence is a leader without a tribe. In the Digital Age, it is difficult to reach your target audience, establish your brand, and promote your book without engaging online. While most authors maintain a personal website, many also have one or more social media accounts. The largest social media platform is Facebook, which has over 2 billion users, many of which are active daily. If you’re an author looking to establish a social media presence, a Facebook author page would be a good place to start.

Why You Need a Facebook Author Page

If you’re not on Facebook to sell stuff, then why be on there at all? Because you won’t have customers until you have fans, and the chances of gaining fans increase when you’re on Facebook.

There are also other practical reasons for having a Facebook Page:

Visibility. A lot of your audience is already on Facebook. Engage them where they are and are likely to be.Author recognition and authenticity. Most fans want to know that they’re following a person whose values align with their own. A Facebook author page is a great opportunity to let your audience get to know the real you over time.Curated content. Facebook uses robust algorithms to curate individualized content for their users. This is why many users go to Facebook for their news and information first, rather than visiting individual sites. Think of Facebook as the Google for social media.Advertising. Facebook has many different ways of reaching out to fans and potential customers. Facebook Analytics also has dozens of metrics you can use to monitor traffic to your website, among other things.Promotion. Facebook is a great place to advertise book launches, announce giveaways, start contests, and other ways to subtly promote yourself and your products.

Why You S houldn’t Create a Facebook Author Page

There are three immediate goals of developing a Facebook Page: to inform, entertain, and foster community. Notice that selling things isn’t one of them.

In fact, Facebook has intentionally limited the amount of public content from businesses and brands in favor of fostering meaningful interactions between people. This means that if you use Facebook simply to sell things, you won’t be very successful. People go to Amazon to buy things, not Facebook. Therefore, you should go to Amazon to sell things, not Facebook.

However, there’s no point in having a social media page that doesn’t point to and help you promote your books. You want to sell your books through social media, not on it. The best way to do this is to use social media to develop a large group of loyal fans who can’t wait to read your new book. Then you can direct them to your book’s online listing.

Using social media the correct way—to engage users instead of selling your books—is very time-consuming, but it’s playing the long game. You want to sell books to your audience, but your audience wants to form a relationship with you and like-minded individuals first. As an author, you’re also your own business, and a good business always places its customers’ needs first. If you prioritize selling your books over developing a loyal following, you will lose fans. That’s because your fans are on Facebook for the right reasons—to socialize—while you’re on the platform to promote and sell stuff. Once your followers realize that you see them more as customers than fans, they will leave. So avoid this strategy on Facebook. This eBook will emphasize the correct way to use social media as an author.

Create an Author Page Instead of Using Your Personal Page

A lot of authors already have a personal profile on Facebook, and it would be a lot less work to use that instead of creating a new fan page. There are a lot of practical reasons why you shouldn’t do this:

Your Facebook friends may not be fans of your work. To maximize your Page’s visibility and usefulness, you want to target your audience, not your friends.Your personal profile may contain sensitive content or content that differs from your author brand. It’s really hard to establish yourself as a professional when your fans have access to your pictures from college. A lot of people also post pictures or other information about their families and where they live on their personal profiles. You DO NOT want your fans to have access to this kind of information. You also don’t want disgruntled or former fans harassing your loved ones or appearing at your doorstep.You want to keep your author persona separate from your day job persona. For example, you’re a preschool teacher who writes erotica. Or, you write about political or religious themes that may not sit well with those in your community. There are a number of reasons why you’d want to create an “author persona” on your Page that’s different from the persona you maintain in your private life. And it’s really hard to keep those separate if you use your personal profile as your fan page.You write pseudonymously. You don’t want your fans to know your real name. You don’t want your family to know that you’re I Am Writer. You don’t need a reason to write pseudonymously, but you do need a standalone Page if you do.You want to utilize Facebook Analytics to monitor your Page’s traffic. You can’t do this with a personal profile.You want to benefit from Facebook’s built-in indexing for Pages. There is no such SEO  options for personal profiles.

This eBook will focus on developing and interacting through your Page, not your personal profile.

How this eBook is Arranged

Facebook has morphed from a site for college students into a site for everyone, including authors looking to increase their brand’s visibility. That being said, maintaining a Page in a way that attracts followers is difficult, especially if you want those followers to eventually become customers on their own volition. It will require a lot of planning (Module 1), building a Page (Module 2), and establishing your online voice (Module 3).

And that’s just getting started. Once you have established yourself online, you have to gain and interact with your followers (Module 4) in a way that won’t cause them to leave (Module 5). Finally, you might want to explore new ways of interacting with your followers to keep your content fresh (Module 6), and to monitor your progress with Facebook Analytics (Module 7).

Again, if you want to know how to use your author page to sell stuff, you’re in the wrong place. But if you want to learn how to use your Facebook Page to develop a loyal following who will be excited to purchase your products, this eBook is for you. Are you ready to get started? Let’s talk about the research and planning that goes into creating an author page.

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