Ballantine Philippa - Social media for writers : marketing strategies for building your audience and selling books

Cincinnati, Ohio

Social Media for Writers. Copyright 2015 by Tee Morris & Pip Ballantine. Manufactured in the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published by Writers Digest Books, an imprint of F+W Media, Inc., 10151 Carver Road, Suite # 200, Blue Ash, OH 45242. (800) 289-0963. First edition.

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WritersDigest.com

Cincinnati, Ohio

Youre a writer over here. And over there is the wide world of social media.

Youve got your Faceyspaces, your Circlesquares, your Tinders, your Grindrs, your Blinders, your SexyPalFinders, your Bloobs and Gloobs and Innertubes. Okay, so only a few of these Seussian techno-monstrosities exist, but if I said Facebook and Twitter and Ello and Tsu, in five years they might not exist, either.

The point is, youve got this world out there. This connected world. This web of bridging threads that connects you, me, our phones, our computers, and probably soon enough, our refrigerators. It moves fast. The ground shifts under our feet daily.

On the one hand, social media is easy, right?

Get on it. Say hello. Say other stuff. Squawk into the void to see whos listening. (Spoiler: My refrigerator is listening and my refrigerator would very much like you to go pick up a six pack of beer. Dogfish 90-minute IPA, please.)

But then, what about that other side of it?

The writerly side. The authorial side.

Im a writer. So are you, Im guessing.

And youre wondering, how do I bridge those things? How do you tie together you as a writer and you as a person on the social media thingies? Is there value for you as a writer? Is there danger and peril for you as a writer? Yes to the first, and hell yes to the latter.

Can you tell stories on Twitter? (Yes.) Can you find an audience on social media? (Sure.) Can you burn your audience on the Internet? (Most definitely.) Can you sell books this way? (Yes, to a point, but please dont get spammy.) Do you have to sell books online and be all Author Person? (Nope.)

But how? How do you accomplish all of this? How do you keep up with what works and what doesnt? Dont different networks and services offer different ... well, networks and services? A value add here, a subtractive function there?

You need help.

And so, Ive written this book

* is handed a note *

Ah. Okay. Sorry. Turns out, I did ... not write this book? I didnt. Okay. Sorry. I write a lot of books and it all kind of blurs together.

I did not write this book.

Which is probably a good thing.

Because you need not just one Sherpa to lead you up this mountain of authorial social media enlightenment. You need, in fact, two.

And so, I give you: Philippa Ballantine and Tee Morris. They are going to hold your hand and take you on a tour of all of the weirdness and wonder that social media has to offerand theyre also going to helpfully point out the pitfalls, too.

Because boy howdy, are there pitfalls.

You wanna do this I am an author on social media thing right?

Then you need their help. You need this book.

Though, before you read any further, Ill offer my one piece of social media advice. Take it or leave ithug it close like a dear friend, or discard it like an old sock.

That advice is: No matter what network you use, no matter whom you talk to, no matter the blog or the service or the size of your audience, be the best version of yourself online.

Dont be somebody else.

Dont be a sales machine.

Dont be an asshole.

Be a fountain, not a drain.

Be you, with all the best stuff dialed up to 11, and all the worst stuff shoved under the bed so that nobody can see it.

So endeth the lesson.

Now: Reach out and take Tee's and Philippas hands. Its time to take a walk. Its time to take the tour. Its time to buy the ticket and take the ride.

See you online.

Chuck Wendig, Author, Blogger, General Wiseass

So whats your platform?

This has become a common question that agents and editors ask writers, be they beginners or best-selling authors. Once upon a timelets say back in 2007, which is several generations ago in Internet timesocial media was considered a distraction to up-and-coming writers and a fad to the established wordsmiths.

Within a decade, that attitude has changed. Dramatically.

The beautiful thing about social media is that its easy to pick up. Its designed in such a way that anybody can set up an account and get started. The problem is that writers and social media suffer a disconnect. That is, plenty of writers hate the notion of promoting their work. They simply dont want to be that snake oilselling writer. And while they may feel very strongly about that, the reason authors must self-promote is a simple one: If you do not talk about your book, no one else will.

What complicates matters for writers, social media, and the relationship between the two is what happens when self-proclaimed introverts pick up a megaphone and blindly go about promoting into a void. As you might imagine, things can and do go horribly, horribly wrong.

Thats where we come in.