More on social media

Back Home having come out a couple of weeks ago, I've been quite occupied with promoting it, rather than with writing anything new. I think it's now time for a long, hard look at what I'm doing and whether I should keep on doing it.

Launch party

This time, for the first time, I had a "proper" launch party – that is something at a public venue with assorted Accent authors and Editor Greg there instead of just a few friends round my place. It did sell a reasonable number of books, though I discounted the price because I hate charging friends (and quite a lot of them were friends) full whack. As a result, I doubt the profit will have come anywhere near covering the cost of food and the sales won't have contributed to my Amazon ranking. It definitely made me feel better and we all enjoyed the party (or I hope people did) but I'm not sure that it makes any sense at all as a promotional effort.

Blog tour

I did a blog tour. This involved my writing pieces for nine blogs. Different people wanted different things, so there were a couple of excerpts, an interview and pieces on different aspects of writing historical fiction. I'm immensely grateful to everybody who helped with this but I have no idea whether it makes any real difference to sales. I'm not alone in this. I read something recently that suggested that blog tours are now a tired way of promoting new books which probably bored readers and had no real impact.

The argument in favour of blog tours is that they get your books (or, rather, posts about your books) in front of people who would not normally be exposed to them. That's a really good argument. I'm always happy to have people write about their historical novels on my blog because they can reach an audience of people interested in historical novels who might not have already heard of them. But to what extent does this apply more generally? Are people who read blogs that are generally about other genres really interested in suddenly being exposed to Back Home? I hope they are. I hope that it gives them something a bit different from the usual post that they would see and makes them think that there might be something in this historical fiction malarkey. But I have no idea if this is the case. There were very few responses to the blog posts I wrote, so it's difficult to know. I don't even have any way of knowing if people read them.

Before anyone thinks that this is a really good reason for never hosting a blog tour again, I would point out that there are advantages for the host. People whose book is being promoted on a blog tour will usually use their own social media to encourage people to visit each of the sites hosting them. In my case, Accent produced rather a nice banner with everything listed. Hopefully this attracted people to these blogs who would not usually have visited and some of them may turn into regular readers. But, again, this seems to be an article of faith and I have no idea if this is happening or not and, as far as I know, neither does anyone else.

My own blog

If anything, I have a slightly reduced activity on my own blog in the last couple of weeks, as my posts have been popping up in so many other places. Generally I try to blog about once a week. I've read that you are more likely to get regular readers if they find new content on each visit. More than once a week seems a bit excessive but once a week has suited me for a while now.

My blog posts run about 700 – 1,000 words although many are shorter and a few are longer. I've read that it's better to write shorter blog posts, but I'm trying to attract people to read historical novels that are generally 70,000 - 80,000 words long, so if they find a blog post of a thousand words is more than they are comfortable reading, they probably aren't in my target market.

Blog posts are more likely to be read if they are broken up with photographs and I increasingly try to do this. There is a small, but real, chance of being sued if you use copyright material on your blog, so I try to avoid legal issues by taking a lot of my own photographs and editing them for publication. Getting decent pictures, whether you take yourself or find them from copyright free sources online, does take time – often longer than writing the text.

I enjoy writing my blog. I’d probably do it even if I didn't have books to sell. Readership fluctuates quite a lot, but at the moment it’s stabilised at around 1,500 page views a month. That's not many compared to some of the more successful blogs, but it seems a reasonable number to me. I have hardly any people who have registered as followers, but I think that's because I'm using Blogger and unless you're on Google+ (and who is?) there's really no benefit to following a blog like this. With so many page views, I'm assuming that most must be repeat business, so presumably I'm doing something right.

I do have a Comments box on my blog but I don't get a lot of comments. I generally reply to those that turn up. I'd love to have more, but I can't think of any obvious way to get them.

As far as promotion goes, the big question is: do blog readers buy my books? Well, I'm certainly not selling 1,500 copies a month. More significantly, sales in the USA seem very weak despite the fact that I have far more views from the US than from the UK. This does make me wonder just how effective the blog is at shifting books.

Facebook

I didn't used to have an author page on Facebook, but I really recommend that you get one (assuming you're an author, of course). Having an author page means that you don't end up ‘friending’ a whole bunch of people you hardly know just so they'll see updates about your books. (Yes, I know that for some people friending a whole bunch of people you hardly know is what Facebook is all about, but some of us aren't entirely comfortable with that.) Even more importantly, it means that your actual real friends don't get annoyed by continually being told they should be buying your book, which they hopefully bought ages ago. An author page means you can separate real life and this sort-of-public-persona that writers are now supposed to have.

I don't put a whole lot of posts on my Facebook page. I may be wrong, but I feel that it's not necessary to be posting all the time as I think that Facebook posts have a reasonable "shelf life". I post when I've just put up a new blog or when I think I have something interesting to say, so it doesn't take a great deal of time. The fact that people can easily "like" Facebook posts or comment on them means that there is some sort of feedback, which is always nice to have.

As with everything else, I'm not sure how effective it is, but given that it is not particularly demanding, I'm happy to keep doing it.

Twitter

So we come to Twitter.

I'm terribly conflicted about Twitter. There are people who are Twitter "naturals" and find the whole thing very easy, but I most certainly don't.

I am a million miles from being good at Twitter but there are some things I have learned. The most important is, I think, that there is no point in being on Twitter in a half-hearted way. I know somebody who uses it for their business and only posts when they feel they really have something to say. They frequently go weeks between tweets and then they just put out one tweet and go back into hibernation. I follow this organisation and cannot remember the last time that I saw one of its tweets.

The awful truth is that, while opinions differ on how long a tweet lasts before vanishing into total obscurity, the answer is measured in minutes and not hours. That means that an effective Twitter presence means tweeting at least three times a day.

Everybody agrees that people who only tweet about the book they want to sell are unlikely to be successful. Their Twitter feed is simply boring. Different people will take different approaches to making their feed lively. I try to make at least a third of my tweets general stuff, a third blatantly selling and a third about my blog. In addition I retweet stuff, which further dilutes the sales material. But doing all this three times a day takes a lot of time. I find myself taking photos just to have stuff to post.

Some people claim that they just toss off the odd tweet while they’re making a cup of coffee or, in the case of one author who shall remain anonymous, while they’re in the loo. I'm not convinced by all this multitasking, unless they're making an awful lot of coffee or spending an awful lot of time in the loo. (I suppose the two could be connected.) There's lots of research that suggests that stopping what we're doing to deal with an e-mail makes us less productive for the next twenty minutes and I suspect that producing a tweet has much the same effect. In any case, I keep being told that I should engage with people on Twitter. Given the short life of a tweet, this surely means coming back in five minutes to respond to any witty remarks that people have made. Maybe I misunderstood. All I know is that if I'm doing serious tweeting (as during the blog tour) everything else suffers.

The obvious question that people ask me is why, if I don't like tweeting and I see it as hard work, I don't just stop doing it. The answer is that I have looked at the effect on page views on my blog when I do or don't tweet. A couple of times recently I have put up blog posts that have not been publicised on either Twitter or Facebook and the result has been a completely derisory number of page views. Just being on Facebook pushes the page views up quite a lot, but the real boost comes from Twitter. Although I have only a couple of hundred followers, some of these re-tweet me to thousands and every time I tweet about a blog post I can literally see an immediate response in terms of page views. Anybody who writes a blog without using Facebook and Twitter is essentially talking to themselves and a few close friends. If you want your blog to be read, you must use one or the other. If you want it to be widely read, you must use Twitter.

If you are going to use Twitter, should you have a whole marketing strategy and buy software to enable you to run it more effectively? That's a separate question that I will explore in another post. For now, I'll just say that Twitter does definitely up my page views and I think this would be true for anybody else.

Bottom line

So I've used Twitter and Facebook to drive visitors to my blog to an acceptable number. I've run a successful blog tour and probably thousands of people must have seen one or another post about Back Home. What has been the net effect of this?

Authors tended to be coy or downright dishonest about their sales but I'm going to come right out and say it: the net effect has been miserable. Back Home is a sequel to Cawnpore, which did not sell spectacularly well but did receive very good reviews from people who read it. You could reasonably expect Back Home to start from a similar sales base. Accent’s edition of Cawnpore was not the first time it had been published, so, if anything, Back Home should have done better because it had not already been available for sale by another publisher. Yet Back Home’s sales have been horribly disappointing. All the marketing effort has had no measurable impact at all. Sales are markedly lower than the initial sales of Cawnpore.

Of course, this could change. Word-of-mouth takes time to build. People who saw a blog post last week may not have rushed out to buy it immediately. We are still waiting for some reviews, which should help things along. But, at this stage, I can only compare the sales of Cawnpore, with no Twitter presence, no established Facebook author page, a very low-key launch party (essentially just a few friends) and no blog tour, with the sales of Back Home, which has had all these advantages. And the conclusion that I might reasonably draw is that all the promotional effort has made no difference at all.

Is it time to give up on social media? I'd love to know your views, especially if these are based on personal experience. Let me know in the ‘Comments’ below. I'll be reading your views and thinking things over and posting again in a week or two