Yesterday, I talked about choosing a Social Media Scheduling service, and I recommended Hootsuite. I did send in a feature request for Hootsuite to make their “hootlet” browser plugin available for Opera browser, so we’ll see. I really love the Opera browser, which is 99% the chrome engine anyway – but that 1% difference prevents a lot of plugins from working.
The thing to understand is your demographics. Now, I know, with authors, it’s really easy. Nobody sits to deliberately write a book that’s going to appeal mostly to left handed dentists from Toledo Ohio in their mid-40s. You write your book for people who’ love to read and have seventeen dollars in their pocket.
By the way, I remember buying novels for $3.25 new. I also remember going into a used bookstore and buying novels off the shelf for $0.25 per book. you could buy BAGS of books for $10.
Now, however, little things like saying, “My books will appeal mostly to female readers” can be the one little extra thing that causes an undecided literary agent to decide in your favor.
And I will say this – I went to a LOT of major publisher’s web sites, and all of them had a variation on this wording – “we only take on authors who have Literary agent representation and who have an existing writing platform.”
No kidding. If you don’t have a Twitter feed, you’re not getting published today.
For me to be able to tell a prospective agent, “I’m published, and my Twitter feed is NSReicher” is two points in my favor, over a guy who lives in his mom’s basement and has fictionalized detective novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Victor Hugo joining forces via a time machine to pursue aliens from outer space.
I absolutely hate, by the way, when I make a joke, and then read it and think, “you know, that’s got some ZING to it…”
Yesterday, I talked about Hootsuite Academy, which is free. It costs you $100 per certificate if you plan on using it for a job (certainly, if I was applying for the social media job at Michael Hyatt’s company, I’d take that plunge and get the certificates).
Take the first two units at Hootsuite Academy. It explains first how to use the Hootsuite interface (which is a little complicated at first). The next unit explains Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You may say, “Yes, yes, I’ve got all that… I know how to do those.” But can you tell me which service is mostly read by women? Can you tell me which service is mostly used by people ages 18-25?
Now, a word – I set up a Facebook author page, and posted to it for a few months – and got zero followers. And for quite some time I’ve been reading about Facebook’s constant change of their algorithms. Facebook keeps making their algorithms that much harder for an author to get established on it – unless of course you pay for ads.
If you’ve been on a particular social media platform for a while and had zero impact, don’t flog a dead horse – leave that service. I found that Facebook just wasn’t my medium, that’s all. I’m doing well on Twitter and I plan on using LinkedIn. You may do well on Facebook but not Twitter, or Instagram.
I’d recommend LinkedIn for authors, as it helps prospective writing clients, literary agents and prospective publishers to find you and connect with you. I think that’s the number one media for being taken seriously by people who make their living in the printed word. You’ll probably be asked by literary agents and publishers, “What’s your website? What’s your Twitter feed? Do you have a LinkedIn page?”
They may not ask about the LinkedIn page – they may just automatically search for you on LinkedIn when they get your query letter.
Conclusion
You need a social media presence to be published today – most agents won’t work with an author unless they have one. To learn demographics and which social platforms you should work with, try Hootsuite Academy ($free).
