Back when Twitter was still a thing, I had two accounts. One was my personal account for everything, and one was just for writing. After a couple years of trial, I ended up with a way to promote my books. For each of my books, I worked up fifteen or so tweets with the title and link. Most were nearly identical, with me just rearranging the order of hashtags. One day, on my personal account I’d tweet out something for Book X, and the next day on my writing account, I’d tweet out something for Book Y. And I’d just go back and forth. The reason I did different books was to try to see which account I got more sales from, but what usually happened is someone would buy Book Z. I knew what I was doing was just screaming into the void, but it was Twitter, that’s what you did.
When I went to Mastodon,
and later Bluesky, I was tempted to just do the same thing. But I saw a lot of posts going on and on about
how these sites didn’t want to just carry over the bad stuff from Twitter. So I held back, and only occasionally promoted
my books. Was that the reason my sales –
not great to begin with – basically disappeared? Probably, although I will admit there are
other real world reasons people aren’t spending money on ebooks from
Amazon.
Lately, I’ve been trying
to do more shameless self promotion of my books. But I don’t want to just go back to my
Twitter system. Occasionally, I’ll get a
follow from someone and when I check out their profile it’s just post after
post after post for their book, and it’s like, I want to block ads, not follow
an account that is nothing but ads. On Twitter,
I did other things so it was more, ad for a book, funny video, ad for a book, thought
provoking video, and so on. But my
latest attempts at self promotion have been … barely noticeable. It’s more like, funny video, link to a story
I wrote on my blog a couple years ago, thought provoking video, ad for a book,
and so on. Instead of doing very little,
I’m trying to do a little bit of everything to see if anything works for
me. Early results are … nothing’s
working, but some of my ideas I’ve only started a week or two ago.
Promoting myself is like
pulling teeth. Yes, I did stuff on
Twitter, but that was basic, simple and ultimately of little value. Can I find a way that works and that I can actually
do? Only time will tell. But, for now at least, I’m trying to do
something. Which has to count. Right?
#
How was this a tip? Oh, ah, don’t limit yourself to what you’ve done before or are comfortable with.
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Image from Pixabay.
