Writing Workshop – The Practicalities of Longtail Book Marketing

In the last post I shared my thoughts on the theory of longtail book marketing.  In this post I will explain how I put that theory into practice.

The social web (web 2.0) is the gift that makes internet self-publishing possible.  Social networking drives the self-publishing world; without it, indie authors would be all but invisible.  And as we all know, invisible means irrelevant.

However, there are so many good social networks out there –facebook, twitter, pinterest, instagram, etc – how do you choose which ones to use?

Some publishing sites (the ones usually selling you a service) suggest you must have a presence on all the main social networks.  This, I believe is a mistake, unless you want to spend the rest of your life doing nothing but socializing on the internet, in which case go ahead.  I, however, have a life outside the internet, so I need to narrow the field a little.  But which ones are best?  The answer, I believe is this:

Market your books on whichever social networks your target audience use.Tweet this!

Wait!  You mean I need a target audience?  But I write for everyone.

If you truly have a good, well written book that will engage a generic audience, don’t self-publish.  Novels with generic appeal are exactly what the publishing industry are looking for.  However, if you are self-publishing, a target audience will certainly help narrow your aim when it comes to marketing.  Yes, you may need to edit your manuscript again to make it fit a specific genre or niche, but it will be worth the extra effort in the end.  Remember, Amazon still make the majority of their publishing profits from specialist markets.

The internet is a brilliant tool for selling to niche markets.Tweet this!

There are plenty of comparison sites out there to inform you who uses what social networks. So do some research, but keep one thing in mind:  you are looking for a marketing tool for your business, not a network that will win you a personal popularity contest.  In fact, I would strongly recommend you separate your writing accounts from your personal accounts.  I use a pen name, but if you have already published under your own name it will be too late for that, so maybe you can set up accounts under the book / series / character name instead.

I use only two social networks, which is about as much as I can manage.  These are Twitter and Wattpad, and there are good reasons why I use both:  I find my dystopian steampunk stories have two natural audiences:  a young adult audience, looking for dystopian fiction, and a more mature 40+ audience looking specifically for steampunk.

My two audiences tend to use different social media: young adult dystopian readers are often found on Wattpad, and the more mature steampunk readers are often found on Twitter.  Both audiences almost certainly use other social media too, but I find I am most comfortable with these two networks for my commercial activities.  Interestingly, both audiences are mutually exclusive: very few of my followers have accounts in the other network.  Twitter is the network into which I put the main effort.

After some experimentation, I have worked out how to use these networks effectively and in a way that fits with the rest of my life.  The lifestyle fit is important to me if the marketing effort is to be sustainable, low impact, and scalable, see my previous blog:  The Theory of Longtail Book Marketing.  Both networks require different techniques to achieve the same goal.

The first thing for an author to learn about Twitter is this: it’s useless for selling books.  Sending out a stream of tweets saying “Buy my book.  Buy my book,” is like hitting your head against a brick wall.  However, Twitter is brilliant at driving traffic to a website (95% of all traffic to my website is via Twitter), and you don’t even have to worry about search engine rankings for your website and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

In the next blog in this series, I will explore suitable website content for longtail book marketing, before returning to the use of twitter in conjunction with a website.