Between authors spamming online groups daily, twitter
hashtags that are increasingly flooded with tweets, and Facebook pages that
despite having a large “like” base being hidden from view, is Social media a
place to sell books?
I’m guilty of all of the above. I belong to countless
facebook groups for authors, readers, reviewers, etc… I regularly schedule
auto-tweets, and use hashtags. I practically live on facebook. But, I do not
see the efforts helping to push any of my books into the spotlight.
I’d venture a guess to say that other authors have noticed
the same trend.
This won’t be a post filled with answers. If I had them, I
would certainly share them. What I’d like to talk about is the why rather than
the what do we do aspect of this.
When the market was smaller and being an author was more a
dream than a reality, advertising was easier. But, with the ease of
self-publishing, more people are realizing the dream. A bit of a double-edged
sword. The down side of that is that everyone is publishing, and I do mean
EVERYONE.
Anyone who has ever had the desire to penn their first novel, is. The
market is quite literally flooded with books of all shapes and sizes. Anything
you can think of has and is being published. And, social media is the place
where EVERYONE is taking their books.
I open up facebook and look at my notifications. Over 99 in
just a few hours. The majority of them… You guessed it, post about new books
and sale books. I can hardly find post by friends anymore because of the
absolute wall of book advertisements. And, like I said, I am guilty of posting
as well, though I limit myself to no more than 8 a day. Still, even with my low
post count, it is only adding to the white noise.
The same applies to twitter. A quick scroll through recent
posts in the last five minutes turns up the same results.
If I go to blogger and look up blogs I’ve signed on to read
and 90% of them are blog tours advertising new books.
It’s enough to make you want to scream at times. Nothing but
sale, sale, sale, and New Author, and
Debut author. Yes, authors need to be
able to reach the market to sell books, but this is just not the way.
So, I put the question to you. Are you guilty of this? Do
you feel it really helps? And, if not, what do you do to help sell your books?