Partying on FB

Tonight (Saturday, January 31, 2015 from 7-10 pm est)  I’m going to be participating in one of my first Facebook parties. I’ve been to one before a while ago, and this past Thursday my anthology co-authors and I had a test-run party taking over the Chicks4books FB page. But I really wanted a better idea of what I should be doing at an FB party, so I asked the always knowledgeable people of my home RWA Chapter the Washington Romance Writers. I got three fantastic responses.

The general consensus was that no one should go it alone. Have a group of author friends drop in throughout your party (that works well for the party my anthology friends and I are hosting tonight—there are nine of us in the anthology). Authors should have between 15 and 30 minutes as “their time”.

You begin by deciding why you’re there. Are you there to make friends—a fantastic reason to be there! Or do you want to build your “brand”? Or to sell one book in particular? For tonight’s party, we are all selling our anthology, but I’d also really like to get to know people and have them get to know me and what I write—so I’m going in with the goal of a mix of all three, really.

So what does one post in order to achieve these goals? Well, here’s a run down as proposed by Carlene Love Flores (I’m linking to the wonderful authors’ Facebook pages so that you can get to know them better and “like” them – because they’re really likeable people, truly!!):

Introduce yourself. Let people know who you are and what your write. Link to your Facebook page and your author website so that party-goers can pop over to check more about you.If you selling a book, post a SHORT (she really stressed short) excerpt from your book. That makes a lot of sense. People at a party don’t have a lot of time to sit and read a long excerpt. There is so much going on, they’ll have maybe a minute to read what you’ve got. Make it quick and enticing.Post 1-3 “games” for people to participate in. These are usually in the form of trivia questions which party-goers answer for prizes (Hope Ramsay told me to be sure to decide who will pick the winners of the prizes before the party begins. If you’re not the host, it’s best to let the host pick the winners because they’ll know more of the party-goers than you, most likely).

Carlene also said to be sure to decide before hand when the winners will be picked. You want it to be some time either at the end of the party or even the following day so that late-comers will have a chance to win as well.

Avery Flynn (who actually wrote a great post about FB parties at Romance University) suggests that your games be in the form of trivia questions to which people can post fun pictures (hot guys are always popular for romance readers).

Hope had some terrific ideas for fun questions:

            For people who have already read your books: post pictures of a hero or heroine from your books and have people try to guess which one it is.

            If you’ve got animals in your books, have people post cute pictures of that animal.

            Always a prize-winner: having people post selfies of themselves reading one of your books, either in paper or on their e-reader (with the book clearly visible in the picture).

Also, if your promoting a book, having people answer trivia questions which can easily be found in the book’s blurb or somewhere on your website is useful. Even better is if a picture can be posted (by the party-goer) to answer the question. For example, if I was promoting my new book Bridging the Storm (which I’m not—at least, not a this party), my hero is a red-head. I’d ask party-goers to post pictures of red-headed actors who they think would be good stand-ins for my hero.

Also good are asking party-goers to post pictures of places named in the book, even just general places, so if a book is a Western, a picture of a farm or a stables would work; is it a small-town contemporary romance, pictures of such places work well. You get the idea.

At the end of your allotted time, don’t forget to post a “goodbye” and thanks to the host. Along with that be sure to include all of your social media links and website address—anywhere on-line where people can find you and follow you, as well as a link for readers to sign up for your newsletter.

The time goes really, really fast in these parties. You are constantly refreshing your browser so that you can see all the latest posts. There are multiple people posting to multiple conversations all at once. It gets a little crazy at times when you’re responding to three different conversations all at once, so be sure to have a drink in hand, a good keyboard at your fingertips and a sense of humor (it is a party after all!).

So, tell me what you think of Facebook parties! Worth it? Love them? Hate them? Have any good ideas of “games” people can play? I need all the help I can get! And please stop by our party tonight! Or tomorrow—we’re going to be leaving our trivia games open until Sunday evening so that even if you can’t make it to the party, you can still win something. See you there!