Managing Social Media for Multiple Books

I’ve seen a lot of people on my Facebook and other writing groups recently ask the same question. How do I handle social media promotion when I have multiple books to sell?

Since I publish two different series, I’m a decent person to ask about this. It’s a pain, I don’t mind telling you. I only do so much social media-ing to start with. So to balance two books is sometimes a downright pain in the ass. Then we throw in any other events I’m planning or attending (like my poetry month challenge or the B2B Con earlier this month). And I don’t want to spam people, of course.

I have a list of simple rules that I follow when it comes to social media. They’ve worked well for me so far.

If a book is coming out, promote the other ones in the series.

You Can’t Trust The AI came out earlier this month. Two weeks before that, I started promoting only Seeming. I made a big point about getting the book before it’s sequel comes out. This made a lot of sense because a lot of people were showing interest in book two who didn’t grab book one yet. Also, while you can pick up book two before you read book one, that’s not going to be true later in the series. So I want to get my readers in the habit of reading them in order now.

Besides that, it’s not a terrible thing to read two books instead of one.

For real, don’t spam people.

I’ve brought this up before. In fact, every time I talk about social media I mention this. If you work to create a platform, you don’t want to kill it by spamming people. You’re not even going to get a platform built if you’re spamming people.

Once again, the most accepted ratio is eighty percent content and twenty percent advertising. So for every promotional post you write, you should post five other things. Here’s a short list of things you can post. It’s by no means exclusive, and I highly encourage you to think outside of this list, but here are some ideas to get you started.

• Updates about your life that are interesting and relatable.
• Information about books, tv shows, movies and anything else that relates to your genre. I share as much as I can about other indie writers who write speculative fiction. If you like my writing, I assume you’re also interested in Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman. (See what I did there?)
• What are you reading? I would love to know what Tamora Pierce and Stephen King are reading right now. I think you all care what I’m reading, as you can probably tell. I’d love to know what you’re reading right now. Why? For the same reason I watch every single ‘Sephora Haul, Ulta Haul, best and worst product haul’ video on Youtube. I am nosy as hell, and I want to know what you’re doing.
• Anything random that might interest your readers. A lot of this depends on you knowing your ideal reader. I write for adults, mostly parents. Parents, I think, focus so much on creating magic for their kids. We work hard to make holidays and other special occasions happen, even making dinner happen nicely. We tend to squeeze the magic out of our own lives to create it for the kids. That’s why I write speculative fiction for adults. So, when I’m filling up my Buffer feed, I include fun things for parents. Like Tasty videos. There’s no reason to include those, they have nothing to do with speculative fiction. But they do appeal to parents.

If you have free books, use them to split up your paid books.

If you write a book, or a collection of short stories, to promote your name and get new readers then you should promote them just like you do your paid books. Well, maybe not just like. I mean, I scheduled several book signings and online events for my last book release. But I do post about my free books as much as my paid books. After all, nothing gets people’s attention like ‘free’.

Talk about the most recent book you’ve got.

Now that You Can’t Trust The AI is out, I don’t post about Seeming. I post about AI instead. Now, I might go back to posting about Seeming or at least tie it into promotions I do for AI. I’ve been promoting Seeming for awhile now. There’s no sense in continuing to do it when I have something new to share.

Just make a list and talk about them in order.

This is kind of a no-brainer, but it’s what I do if I don’t have anything major going on. I just make a list of books, write out some solid social media promotions, and post them in order. Really, this is one of those things that can be made as automatic as possible. Because really, the whole point of social media is to talk about your writing and let your readers know what you’re doing. So don’t stress over it so much.