Social Media for Authors
There are a lot of very good sales people touting their services to us poor, independent authors who are doing our best to try to figure out this crazy, crazy world of writing, publishing, and marketing a book. Some independent authors appear to be outrageously successful. You don’t hear as much about the millions who aren’t. There are services and then there are services to help with the services. There are organizations who offer help in sorting through the services. But I suppose, the same thing is true with colleges and universities. You really don’t know what you’ve got except by reputation. Unfortunately many of the services, schools and individuals who offer help and guidance to struggling authors, have no reputations except among themselves. So you have to do whatever research you can, test the waters on social networking, and then jump in and try. So that’s what I did.
I’m not very good at social networking. I always loved those advertisements that showed the father sitting outside his housing torturously typing in, “I’m sitting on the patio”. I could never see the point of telling the world everything that I am doing. If I was living an adventurous life, I wouldn’t have time to type that information into my phone. I wouldn’t be able to pause and type one letter at a time, “Well, the squirrels are back in the attic.”
So I signed up for “Social Media for Authors” from the Self-publishing School”[1] I want to start out by saying that the promotions for these kinds of courses are remarkably good. They know how to push the right buttons, the buttons that you and I are looking for, answers to your most pressing questions like become a bestseller, sell more books, become a top selling Amazon author today, sell a 1000 books in the first year. I listened to one person who said, “If you’re making a five figure income with you books now, I want to get you to a six figure income. And if you’re making a six figure income, I want to push you to a seven figure income.” Really? Where do I sign up? And another thing, it is amazing how similar these pitches are. It’s like they all went to the same school to learn how to do this stuff. Well, they better be good at it, I guess. It’s what they’re professing to teach you how to do.
The young lady who teaches this Self-publishing School course is very enthusiastic and bubbly. It must have been hot where she talking from because she seemed to be sweating. The audio was good. She scrolled through things like my kids do – at a rapid rate, which was okay because since it’s recorded you can go back and figure out what you missed as it flew by. There is a lot of hype at the beginning talking about how important an author platform is which I knew because that was why I plunked down the money (or the credit card) for the course. There was a lot of fluff when there could have been substance. “Show don’t tell.”
The description of the course says that it will cover all the fundamental social networking platforms – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. She starts with Twitter and spends the most time there. She provided information about cleaning up your account. (I think it looks pretty good: https://twitter.com/paul_raymer ) She did a good job of showing how to search through hash tags. She talks about following people and using the daily Twitter hash tag “games” like #1linewed and #slapdashsat, things that I would never have known about.
When she moved on to Instagram, she related that the content that performs best are stories, your real face, your real life, and use of aesthetically appealing images of your book. Quotes do really well. She talked about Linktree (https://linktr.ee/ )which is a really cool way to squeeze in a bunch of connections when you only have one link to connect with.
Facebook, she said, is an older audience. I didn’t need to take this course to hear that. My kids have told me that! But that’s fine for me since the profile of my average reader is an older, well-educated audience. She provided guidance in how to clean up that profile as well. But there were little pieces of information missing like how do you set up a page as opposed to a profile. She said Facebook needs to be a very professional snapshot of what’s going on in your writing life.
When she finally got around to LinkedIn, the information was pretty thin. She made it clear that she didn’t think it was the place for fiction. I have had a page on LinkedIn for my professional profile for years and have many more followers there than on any of the other social networks. So I have taken it as a challenge to make it work for my fiction efforts. And that’s okay.
★★★☆☆
So in the spirit of the star rankings, I would give this course three stars, both for content and for value for money. I learned stuff, no doubt, but I’m not in a hurry to take other courses from these folks no matter how many times they bug me to do so. I am hopeful that there will be better places to spend my scarce, hard-earned writing dollars.
Oh, and one more thing. In the Master Class program, I love the way the instructors talk to me. They address me as ‘you’, as though it’s just the two of us sitting there talking. The instructor in this course talks to ‘you guys’ as though there are a dozen of us sitting here in front of my computer. Well, I certainly hope not.