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How Book Authors Can Promote Their Work with Social Media

Social Networks and Media

As I have written before, publishers are increasingly leveraging their authors’ own personal platform to market their books. With more than 400,000 books published each year, it is harder to make an impact without a platform strategy.

Authors can learn a lot from the personal branding and social media marketing advice of Chris Brogan who recently offered 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media. Of course, Chris is not speaking about books in particular, but that’s the beauty of his advice – it can be applied to many different situations where your personal brand and growing online network can make a difference.

I’ve written quite a bit on the subject here as well, but with a focus on book publishing. Check out the following and the Related Posts links for some of my thoughts on how book authors can promote their work with social media.

(Image credit: emdot)

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  • Hi Chris,
    Great post! We launched a new product at the Frankfurt Book Fair called iPublishCentral. Since launch, we have had more than 90 publishers till date get on the platform. This has been at the rate of almost 2 new publishers signing-up every day! This includes publishers that are large to individual authors with self-published books. This clearly shows that publishers are in fact looking at social media channels to market their titles and in turn proves the efficacy of our product as well.

    iPublishCentral helps authors and publishers to leverage social media by creating widgets and book previews. The widgets can then be added to FaceBook, My Space, Shelfari and a host of other places. All that the publisher/author needs is the PDF of the book and title metadata.
  • You can increase your book publicity at BiblioScribe.com, a site where authors and publishers can still market their books in the same place that they can be purchased. BiblioScribe.com allows members to use free article and Press release tools that embeds their book as part of the article, and readers have the opportunity of locating and buying the subject book directly from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, as well as corresponding UK and Canadian online booksellers. Additionally, the Biblioscribe.com members’ public profile provides links to multiple books specified by the member, as well as the member's own website. BiblioScribe membership is also free as well as an account on the BiblioScribe Blog.
  • Hi Chris: Great post. I've been talking to a lot of our authors lately about the importance of creating and maintaining a presence online. A link to this post is going to be included in materials I send them. Thanks!
  • Good read! I can see where you've thought out how authors can move books. Working for one of today's prolific publishers, Wiley, I wonder if you can offer any thoughts along the lines of how book designers can make a good cold impression with publishers and thereby score work?

    Thank you.
  • Well said Erika. I'm glad you found some value here, and I thank you for being part of the conversation.
  • Great post and the links are as well. I've been thinking about this very thing lately, since platform is so important (esp. for NF authors) and there are a lot of (new) writers who don't quite understand platform/platform building, and there are even some publishers who might not be as SM-aware as others. I wonder, how many *are* listening (lurking anonymously, even)? I esp. think that the things listed on your questionnaire are things the author should be thinking about when writing their proposal, esp. when different publishers have different amounts (levels?) of marketing that they do. It's not enough to just write the book...the author can hopefully sell the book that they've bled, sweat, and cried over for x months or x years because they've given birth to it, so to speak.
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