So there I was, in the middle of teaching a class on selling short stories, and on my “post sale” slide I included “announce sale on social media after contract is signed” and “post again when the story is live, with links to view or buy.”
A student raised her hand. “Do you have to be on social media? What if you’re not… good at that?”
I grimaced. “Nowadays? Yes, you have to. I wish that wasn’t true, but it is.”
I immediately wondered, did I answer too quickly? It seems a truism of the industry. But is it really true? Does it help, or merely keep us busy so we don’t stress out about our rejections?
There was a recent article on Vox about this, about how self-promotion has become expected. My favorite line?
“A society made up of human beings who have turned themselves into small businesses is basically the logical endpoint of free market capitalism, anyway.”
Rebecca Jennnings, for Vox
OOF.
This is the dystopian hellscape artists exist in. The article above begins with an anecdote about an author who was negotiating a big deal for her book, only to be told that she didn’t have a big enough following, sorry, so they dropped her.
This is a story I’ve heard many times. And, sadly, experienced. I’ve gotten a rejection letter that said, basically, “I love this book, but you aren’t already successful enough for our house to take you on.” It was heartbreaking. You pour your effort into perfecting your craft, only to be told, “We won’t help you unless you don’t need help.”
After that rejection, shortly after the New Year, I vowed that I would buckle down and actually do the dreaded self-promotion. I wasn’t going to accept my fate. I had to make my existing books sell, and sell well, so that I could some day actually get a big publisher deal or an agent. (The things that I once thought would help my books sell?)
And… it’s hard to go begging. Hard not to see it as begging.
Experiment: 5 a week
I sat down and did some googling. I forget where, but I saw an article that said I should post five times a week:
- 1 brag
- 1 blog
- 3 Unrelated Things to Entertain the Audience
That seemed eminently doable? I already post a blog post (almost) every Thursday. I set Mondays to be my “brag” day and set up first to post about the Galactic Hellcats Audiobook, then the second Monday, I posted about The Gods Awoke getting “Hugo Finalist” added to its cover.
I set myself this schedule:
- Monday “brag” – promote a thing (Twitter, Mastodon, Bsky, FB, Insta)
- Tuesday complaint (Twitter, Mastodon, Bsky) / Tiara Tuesday (Insta)
- Wednesday share some science-ish news (Twitter, Mastodon, Bsky)
- Thursday blog (Twitter, Mastodon, Bsky, FB, Insta)
- Friday whatever I feel like posting (Mastodon, Bsky)
I’ve managed to make all five posts about 75% of the time, and I’ve made at least two 100% of the time. I admit, I was scared. I thought people would notice I was suddenly “selling out” and bothering them with promotional ads instead of content. I thought I’d lose followers.
Actually, I gained followers, on all my social platforms, but most especially on Instagram, which went from just over 30 to 529 followers! I’m not sure how? But I guess they are right that if you post regularly, that’s good? Even if I’m just reposting my blog and one promotional item a week. I hadn’t previously done any promotion on Instagram. It had mostly been Tiara Tuesday and pictures of my dog or neat bits of nature I passed on my daily walks.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still posting the dog and random flowers! But oddly, the promotional images get more likes? Mostly I take old photos I have and add text on top. (This makes me shudder as a web dev, I’ve spent so long telling people NOT TO PUT TEXT ON IMAGES, but on Insta, few people read the copy!) Here’s one:
Did it affect my following numbers?
My bird site followers haven’t changed – still hovering at 4.4k. I doomed myself by setting a square in my “Career Bingo” to “5k Twitter followers.” I got up to 4.8k, and then … you know… Elon Musk happened. These days, I just re-post to Twitter from BlueSky, my five posts a week. Additional, extemporaneous content I keep to BlueSky and Mastodon.
Mastodon followers haven’t grown, still the same 210 it was when I started this adventure.
Bluesky has grown, but that may have more to do with it opening to the world recently. I started with 198 followers and now I’m at 421. Still, double is nice, even if it is a big drop from 4,800.
TikTok is killing me. I am trying to post once a week, but I have no idea how other people make these nicely edited videos, and I’m dragging my feet about learning. So I’m mostly posting a few seconds of pretty nature or my unedited self.
I have 63 followers on TikTok, but some of my videos have had 800 views? The “few seconds of silliness” and “date night” posts seem to do the best. The best post by far (2100 views!) was my brother-in-law demonstrating his marble maze he built from a kit.
By the way, if you want to follow me on anything, I list all my socials on my contact page.
So, first observation: self-promotion definitely does not harm your social following numbers. (Why does that disappoint me?)
How much work is 5 posts a week?
At first, I set aside an hour on Friday afternoons to plan and schedule my five mandated social media posts. This resulted in three straight Fridays of anxiety and procrastination. So what I’m doing now is setting Friday as a deadline to have five for next week, and planning and scheduling those five as they occur to me throughout the week. Basically, I’m just social-media-ing a week in advance. (Or, okay, often a day in advance throughout the week.)
I timed myself twice, and both times it took about an hour to plan out 5 posts. I included my weekly “I hate Tuesdays” post in the five. This hour included time spent photo-doctoring in Preview. I found I had to crop images to square for Instagram, but image size didn’t matter as much as I feared. The vast majority of time was spent coming up with ideas.
One time I sat down and spent three hours just looking for something to promote. So I started a document called “Promotion Rotation” that I can refer to:
- The Gods Awoke
- Galactic Hellcats
- Appearances / Events
- Short Stories
Every time I post, I update the document to add the date I posted that topic on. Then next week, I do the next topic.
The key to not spending forever on self-promotion is to make the decisions simple, or take as much decision out of it as you can.
Other Steps Taken
Another thing I did was sign up for a Facebook “Author” page, which has 171 likes and 401 followers and if I want, I can make an ad. I haven’t yet. I may eventually, when I have spare money?
I started a newsletter, advertising, as a class on promotion suggested, a free ebook to all subscribers. I have 112 members already! Wow! You can sign up on my contact page. I’ve sent out two posts so far. My plan is to post quarterly. So far it doesn’t take long to make a newsletter. I simply slap together:
- my latest 3 publications
- my next 3 appearances
- Any news items or award nominations
- a link to the blog post that got the most hits this quarter
- Something cute or fun (like a dog picture or a flash piece)
I signed up for the Amazon Affiliates program so I can get a kickback if people follow one of my links to buy on Amazon. Feel a little dirty about that.
I replaced the footer in my email with a link to buy a book. I plan to rotate this.
And, of course, I continue to seek out in-person events, book fairs and bookstore signings.
Results after one quarter: Has it worked yet?
So, having, as my husband says, “Boiled the ocean” for self-promotion, what results have I gotten, really?
Sales figures for 4th quarter 2023
I don’t have numbers from TGA, just the earnings report:
| Galactic Hellcats | 10 print | 8 ebook | 3 audio |
| The Gods Awoke | print sales: $34.23 | ebook sales: $27.34 | n/a |
Sales figures for 1st quarter 2024
| Galactic Hellcats | 13 print | 5 ebook | 5 audio |
| The Gods Awoke | print sales: $78.74 | ebook sales: $14.86 | n/a |
Not super conclusive. Galactic Hellcats sales are slightly up in both print and audio, but down in ebook, TGA is HELLA up in print but down in ebook. There’s no way to isolate the variables to see how much self-promotion helps. Maybe the increase in TGA sales has more to do with the fancy new cover? Maybe people are less likely to buy ebooks this time of year in general? It does feel like I’ve done a lot of work for little gains.
So… yeah. Not “worth it” at this point, however the hope is the increased following will slowly metastasize into increased sales? I suppose I will keep at it for now, see if I can compare this year in total to last year, but alas, it is clearly not enough of a difference to justify hiring a social media intern. 😛
