Using Facebook to Grow Your Readership Base

Among your many challenges as an author, two critical ones are: getting your book noticed and creating the ‘buzz’ so your audience will buy it. 

If you are being published by one of the “Big Five” publishing houses, they do much of this for you. However, if you are self-publishing or are with an independent publishing house, meeting these becomes a little more, ah … exciting.

Fortunately, we live in a Social Media world, where you can join with friends, family, associates, and your other ‘followers’ to spread the word. Social Media can be an inexpensive tool helping you promote and sell your book. Understanding how to leverage the various Social Media platforms, you can amass a large following, gain enthusiastic readers, and achieve successful book sales ‒ if you have the proper strategy ‒ and you implement it consistently. But your success via Social Media will require some attention to detail and a strong online presence before your book sales are actually launched.

Even as the number of Social Media platforms explodes, Facebook remains king. Facebook boasts more users than any platform. According to Zephoria Digital Marketing, Facebook had more than 2.25 billion active, monthly users as of October 30, 2018, a ten-percent increase over 2017.

Why It’s Smart to Set Up an Author Page

No one wants to go to jail, but some authors have landed in “Facebook jail,” violating their terms of agreement by using their personal Facebook profile as a business portal. Avoid this with an author/business-page in your Facebook account. Use your author-page – which you manage from your profile – to share information about your book, its promotional events, its link-to-purchase, etc.

On it, you can create targeted ads to appear on your most-promising purchasers’ user-profile timelines. You can target these ads only to those who have ‘liked’ your author-page. So on it, simply run a contest for a copy of your book! For example, excite your loyal readers and followers, incentivizing their entry with exclusive offers, a newsletter, or other goodies they’d want. You can even focus your ads to specific age or location, or to groups with high potential for intense purchase-interest and widely-repeated ‘word-of-mouth’ endorsement.

Here are the key elements for heightening author-page momentum and gaining followers:

• Plan ahead! Publish your author-page well before your book to build anticipation among your followers. And include its Facebook address in the “About the Author” portion of your book.
• Post your author-page link on your website, LinkedIn, Twitter, and personal Facebook pages ‒ including it in your email signature and mentioning it in your blog, too.
• When it’s up and running, invite your Facebook friends from your personal page to ‘like’ your author-page.
• Contact selected people from your email list, but don’t email your entire address book.
• As your audience begins to grow, offer promotions like book giveaways, free chapters of your next book, merchandise, and more.
• Stay active on your author’s page. 

As you spend more time and effort on your page engaging with your fans, you’ll see its results. Keep interacting with them, offering incentives to return to your page and for spreading the word about your book.

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Overcoming Facebook’s Changing Algorithms

One of Social Media users’ frustrating challenges is its providers’ ever-changing algorithms ‒ especially Facebook’s. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, they change it, and you have to adjust again.

Facebook implemented algorithms so users could see on their timelines such items as content, pages, and profiles with which they actively and regularly engage. Today, this means that for their page to show up on their follower's timeline, you must be actively engaged with your author-page. This means commenting, sharing, and reacting to others’ posts and comments. As you do, Facebook will tell you how many people saw and interacted with your post. So, your goal is to create posts that stimulate conversation, evoke responses, and create buzz within your audience.

Promoting your book is hard work, and there is no shortcutting the process. Once you’ve written a great book, do your best to implement the basics of book promotion and use Social Media. By leveraging your Facebook author-page, you can grow your reader base, create buzz, and engage your follower-fans. At Leadership Book we’ll not only help you write, edit, and publish your book, but engage on Social Media as well. Contact us today to get started.

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If you have a story to tell, let Leadership Book help you tell it!

Leadership Books Publishing is an emerging powerhouse in book publishing. We’ve joined the two worlds of traditional and self-publishing into one company that can help do it all. Our capabilities and relationships allow us to create targeted and integrated book campaigns that mobilize high-profile contacts in your niche, capitalize on word-of-mouth marketing through social marketers, and extend your reach into the most prominent media publications. Our authors have the unparalleled service of an Executive Editor, one who will work with you in putting your story ideas into book form. Once that’s completed, our professional designers will work with you to design the cover and interior to make your book ready to sell.

Leadership Book markets your book by distributing to every major book seller on three continents.

About Michael Stickler

To set up an appointment to speak to a Literary Agent:
Email: Alfredo Baguio
Call: (702) 605-4354