Melodee’s Rules for Authors — Number Thirty-Seven

Number Thirty-Seven

Don’t Pass Up Free Promotion

In this post, I’m going to pick on Twitter only for the sake of simplicity and clarity. The same concepts apply to other social media sites and to promotion in general, so try to expand your awareness to those other areas as well.

Promotion of your books is, by and large, hard work. Probably more work than actually writing the books. Promotion is also, by and large, a royal pain in the ass. With these things in mind, why, in God’s name, would anyone want to make it even harder???

There are countless people on Twitter (myself included) who send out weekly tweets for #MM (Mention or Muse Monday), #WW (Writer Wednesday), #FF (Follow Friday), and other hashtags related to writing and/or general social contacts. Usually, people mentioned in these tweets will retweet them. To make a long story short, a typical #MM tweet will be seen by nearly a million people in the first 24 hours. Stretch that out to a week, and 5-million is not unreasonable.

So, if your author account is mentioned in that tweet, your name (and brand) is seen by a LOT of people. If we assume you are mentioned in six #MM/#WW/#FF tweets a week, your brand could be seen by as many as 30-million people! Just for fun, let’s assume that you gross $0.50 on every book you sell and that 0.05% of the people who see you mentioned buy a book, that comes out to $7,500.00. A week. That’s nearly $400,000 a year. Would you like to have that in your bank account? Better yet, can you afford to leave that money on the table?

I can hear the nay-sayers out there…those numbers are wildly optimistic. OK, so if we assume that the numbers are inflated by 90%, you would still make an extra $750 a week or almost $40,000 a year. Even if you only sell twenty more books, you made enough to go to KFC and get a $5 Fill Up meal. The point is, you will see an increase in sales.

See Rule Number Thirty-Six as well, because the things I discuss there apply to social media promotion, too.

The trick to all of this is getting other Tweeps to mention you. This may be in the #MM/#WW/#FF tweets, by means of retweets, likes, and other things. How to make this happen varies from one Tweep to another, but as a general rule, they will mention (or retweet) people they follow and who follow (and mention) them back.

For our business, the best bang for the social media buck comes from other authors. Follow them and, if they follow you, follow them back. Make use of Twitter’s List functions to organize them. Retweet their tweets. Mention them.

As a side note here, one way to get a two-for-one deal is to retweet something where one author is mentioning another author. With one tweet, you mentioned two Tweeps who will, hopefully, mention/retweet you.

Yes, this takes some time, but the odds are you’re spending more time than that now and not actually doing anything positive. Twitter (and other social media systems) are huge time-sinks. Most people waste staggering amounts of time there chatting with “friends”. All you need to do is change your attitude and behaviors so you are interacting in a way that promotes you and your books. Get your name/brand out there.

In short, you can get a lot of benefit from a small amount of effort.

Keep Loving!