Training #651 — Social Media for Authors in 20 Minutes a Day

Click anywhere within this unedited transcript to jump directly to that part of the training.

Welcome and Meeting Jason Brick

Blaine Moore: Hello, everybody. Welcome to another Apex Authors Live Training.
We do have a special guest with us today, Jason Brick. He joined us six or seven years ago at this point, to talk about mindset and being productive as a writer, because we got to know Jason really well — he was doing a lot of writing for us, for the website and our emails, for quite a few years.
Today he’s going to talk about how we can do much better with our social media without having to spend a lot of time on it. Based on his focus on being productive and getting your writing done, that’s probably a good impetus for why you’d want to limit your social media time while still taking advantage of it, because you do need that time to write.
So Jason, thanks so much for joining us and sharing what you know with us.
Jason Brick: Thanks, y’all, for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to everybody. As you say, I’ve been working with Apex Authors for quite a long time, and I love your community and what you do for writers.
Please feel free to interrupt me with any questions you have, any curiosities you have. Tell me if you think I’m full of crap. Whatever you want to do, just raise your hand.
And you’re not going to see any slides today, because I’ve found that when I give presentations with slides, people pay attention to the slides and go on ahead, and then we’re not really engaging the way that I like. But if anybody wants to email me afterwards, I’ll send you a copy of the file I’m using for my notes, so you have those. My email address is [email protected].
What we’re going to talk about is author social media in twenty minutes a day. Social media is important no matter what kind of author you are. I usually give this talk at writers’ conferences, where we have a mix of people looking for traditional publishing, a mix of self-published authors, and a mix of freelance writers.
With the Apex Authors community, I think we’re skewing very heavily towards self-published authors. Is there anybody here who’s looking at traditional publishing, or at freelance writing as well? Or are we all self-published all day long, all day strong? I’m on my phone here, so it’s not showing me the chat.
Blaine: We do have some people who have done some hybrid deals, but for the most part everybody we’ve been working with is self-publishing, or at least independent publishing at this point.

Which Publishing Path You’re On

Jason: Okay, so I’ll gloss over the traditional and freelance publishing concepts and spend most of my time on the self-publishing options. And again, if anybody wants me to dive deeper into anything, just raise your hand and holler and we’ll dive into it.
The reason we want to be involved in social media with self-publishing is that it’s still the most cost-effective way to find new fans and build our mailing list. But that only happens if we approach our social media in a focused, systematic, and engaged fashion. If all we’re doing is getting on there and talking about our books from time to time, checking in with our high school reunion and getting into arguments about politics with strangers, we’re not going to get the growth we need to fuel whatever engine we’re using to get readers and buyers.
One way I like to think about it: you can use your social media to turn strangers into acquaintances, acquaintances into fans, fans into customers, and customers into friends. We do that through a combination of efforts we’re going to talk about today.
For those of you who are freelancing a little, you can connect with editors, publishers and potential clients on social media. It gets to the point where editors and some acquisitions agents will go on with hashtags telling you precisely what kind of writing they want, and that’s an open invitation to reach out and get those gigs. If people are familiar with Manuscript Wishlist (#MSWL), that’s something literary agents and acquiring editors use to say, “I really wish somebody would approach me with a book exactly like this.” This isn’t necessarily for all of us self-published authors, but anybody looking at hybrid operations, or using a self-published program to build a foundation for that moonshot for the Big Five deal, can approach it that way too.
So we need to be focused, systematic and engaged. But that raises the question: focused on what? Systematic how? Engaged with who, precisely? And then the other big question — who has time for it?
We’ve got lives. Most of us have jobs, families, commitments. If we spend all day building that social media following, we don’t have time to write our books, and then what are we going to sell? For the next little while I’m going to answer those questions as best I can, so you can make solid progress on your social media platform with just twenty minutes a day, ideally in two ten-minute sessions.
I’ll take a short minute to give some credentials as to why you’d want to listen to me about this at all. At present my Facebook feed, which is my main social media initiative, is getting about half a million views a month. I’ve written full-time as my living since 2009, and during that time I’ve used social media — advertising, and connections with people — to drive book sales, get freelance assignments, find ghostwriting clients, arrange book tours, all of it.
So I’m not the world’s biggest expert on social media, but I’ve done a handful of things and they’ve worked out pretty well. I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I’m going to share what I learned so you can go on to make new, unique and exciting mistakes of your very own.

Who Actually Buys the Book

Erin Moore: We do have quite a few children’s book authors still, Jason, as I’m sure you remember from before. So if you have any thoughts for them, I’m sure they’d love to hear those.
Jason: Absolutely, and I’ll try to remember to touch on that a little later. But the top-level thing to remember for children’s books, middle grade and young adult — especially children’s and middle grade — is that our reader is not our buyer.
We need to remember who we want to engage with as we go through the process, because the seven-year-old is not going to go and buy the book. The mom or the grandma or the uncle is going to buy the book for them. Whereas if you’re writing fantasy, you’re connecting directly with your reader.
There’s another challenge, especially when you’re dealing with teenagers. There’s a temptation to connect with a teenage reader online. But, for example, I am an overweight middle-aged man. I should not be directly communicating with any teenagers I don’t already know on the internet. So there are unique challenges to children’s books, and we’ll touch on a few ways to handle them.
Let’s start at the beginning — Julie Andrews says that’s a very good place to start. First, platform. There are hundreds of social media platforms out there, and if we try to have a presence on all of them we’re not going to do any of them right. We won’t have the time. Our efforts get divided and we don’t get the traction we need.
What I really recommend is that you choose two platforms, just two, and do them really well. If you’re short on time, pick one, get it to the point where it’s functioning for you, and then replicate that effort on a second. Whatever else is going on, ignore it for now.
We’ve all got that FOMO thing — TikTok’s really big right now, YouTube’s really big right now, your friend just exploded on Instagram. But taking on those additional platforms dilutes our effort to the point where it’s usually useless.
So: two platforms, and those should be Facebook plus something. The reason for Facebook is that Facebook is where everybody is. Its market share is double its competitors’. That includes you even if you write for teens and middle schoolers — teens and young adults are less likely to be on Facebook, but the people who buy books for them are. It’s like asking whether you should open a restaurant in New York City or in a small town. It’s where the people are, and it’s where the buyers are.
The second one depends on what’s going on with you, what kind of writing you do, and where you already are. If you’re already on a platform besides Facebook and it’s doing well, stick with that one — you’re there. If not, it depends on what you write.
If you’re a nonfiction writer and you’re comfortable with video, TikTok. TikTok is exploding, and it doesn’t look like they’re going to make it illegal the way they were threatening to for years. Short pieces of nonfiction advice do very well there. If you’re comfortable enough with video that making them isn’t going to eat your whole day, that’s where to start. YouTube still works well if you know the platform, so an existing YouTube presence — or a friend who can really help you out there — can work too.
LinkedIn is for when your nonfiction is tied to your career. There are folks who write nonfiction because a topic fascinates them, and there are people who write a nonfiction book as an extension of a career in a specialised field. If you’re the second kind, LinkedIn. Otherwise Instagram works pretty well.
For self-published fiction, Instagram and TikTok both work — unless you have a Reddit account. Reddit gets really, really specific, and you’ll have a smaller group watching you, but if you get into the right subreddit it’s a smaller group of people who are precisely interested in exactly what you’re writing about.
It’s not r/fantasy. It’s not even r/urbanfantasy. It’s r/urbanfantasy/werewolves/Chicago/civil war. You can find the thread that is exactly what you write about and engage with people passionate enough to hang out on Reddit all day talking about the thing you’re passionate about.
If you’re looking at traditional publishing or freelancing, Twitter is where most of the agents, editors and acquirers hang out. And if X gives you the ick — which is reasonable — Bluesky is attempting to establish something like it, although so far they haven’t been very successful. So the fastest road to success there is to hold your nose and be on Twitter.
For children’s literature: again Facebook, but Instagram works pretty well, because that’s where the grandparents are hanging out. For middle grade and young adult, TikTok works pretty well too. And if you’re chasing library sales, Instagram and Reddit again, because that’s where the librarians and the school librarians hang out. So — any questions about which platforms to use?

Why Two Platforms Beat Six

Blaine: You’re recommending a maximum of two platforms. Would it make sense to create an account on the others just to claim your name and point to your website or to your active platforms, even if you’re not going to be active on them? Or is it better to just not have a presence?
Jason: It’s better not to have a presence, because an ignored presence looks sloppy and unprofessional. And in terms of claiming — getting @blainemoore on Instagram before some other writer named Blaine Moore comes along and does it — it’s so easy to come up with a cool, unique handle that uses your name that it isn’t a factor, in my opinion. You want whatever you do on there to look reasonably professional. If you want an example of how not to do that, look me up on social media, because I’ve been on all kinds of platforms and I’m only active on a couple.
So stick to two and ignore the others. If you get to a point where your writing is locked in full time, but it only takes you half a day and you have extra hours, then maybe consider popping up on a third one, or hiring somebody to help you with it. But while it’s just you and your writing and a full-time job: do two, own them, and pretend the other ones don’t exist. Any other questions on which platforms to be on?
Blaine: I don’t see any in the chat.
Jason: All right. Well, feel free to hop in if anything occurs.
Richard Prygodzicz: I just want to clarify something, please. I write picture books and middle grade. I’ve been told Instagram would be best, as you said, because of grandparents. So for middle grade, should I stick to Instagram as well?
Jason: Yeah, I’d go with Instagram and Facebook on that one. Meta makes it easy to cross-post between them — in fact it’s really easy to accidentally cross-post between them — and that helps you get more traction with less effort. On Instagram in particular, if you’re writing for children, you have an opportunity to share some of your art, which Instagram really rewards and supports.
Richard: All right, great. I like that — I like less effort.

Author Page or Personal Profile

Jason: Another question about platform is whether you should have a professional page — on Facebook, say, or a professional account on Instagram — and then a separate personal one. I don’t have a definitive answer for you. There are advantages and disadvantages.
If you have a separate professional account, you can talk on your personal account about things you think might alienate your audience. You can focus your targeting, because you can see who’s following you on the professional side and who isn’t on the personal side. There’s a bit of a line between your professional and personal life. All of that is true, and all of it is a benefit.
On the other hand, it’s duplication of effort again: two Instagram feeds, two Facebook accounts, and then tracking all of it separately. I personally have everything under my one account — but that’s a personal opinion that has worked for me. I’m not telling you to do it or not do it, I’m just sharing my experience.
It’s also worth noting that the main position I write in is martial arts and personal safety. I’m a middle-aged, aging jock, but I’m still a jock, I’m a 200-pound black belt, so I’m not too worried about a stalker. If you’re an attractive woman in her mid-twenties, those lines might be more important.
Then there’s writing under a pen name — if you’re writing under one, do you want to keep them separate? It depends on the purpose of the pen name, and on how open it is.
I have a somewhat open pen name: I have my books about martial arts and safety, my young adult books about being honourable, and I also have books about sex, drugs and crime, all happening at the same time. For those novels I use my grandmother’s name, who helped me write some of them, just so somebody looking for my young adult books doesn’t accidentally buy the other ones that no child should ever know exist. But I’m pretty open about them being my books.
If it’s a closed pen name, where you’re trying to keep your real name secret, then yes — I really do recommend a separate social media account. I even got to the point, when I was trying to keep them separate, that logging back and forth was such a hassle I kept my old laptop logged in to the pen name and my work laptop to my personal accounts. So it depends on whether the pen name is just a way for people to divide up your work, or whether you really are trying to keep your own name secret.
Now let’s shift a little into goals. We have our platform — what are we doing with it? Sharing cat pictures and arguing with strangers is of course the traditional use of social media, but it isn’t going to sell your books.
So we start with what I call the results goal: what is your success state for your writing? Where do you want this writing project to take you? Getting enough freelance clients to quit your day job; selling enough books that this is what you do for a living; getting a literary agent; building a mailing list of a thousand people so you can launch every book with a hundred sales — whatever it looks like for you.
When I do my full-length workshop I have people spend five or ten minutes on that. This is a pretty savvy group and we’ve only got the hour, so take some time in the next couple of days, if you haven’t already, and define what you want your writing career to look like five years from now.
I’m sure I wrote at least one article on SMART goal setting for Apex at some point, but if you just look up SMART goal setting the internet will tell you all about it. It’s five characteristics of goals that work — because a goal with metrics is a goal, and a goal without metrics is just a wish. Setting down the metrics for what you want your writing career to do for you is the first step.
And if you reach out to me afterwards, the presentation file has a worksheet to help with it. I’ll send it over, no problem.
Once you’ve set out where you want it to go, the next one is your strategic goal. The first goal is what your writing career is going to do. The strategic goal is what social media is going to do to help you achieve it. The first is your destination; the second is the road.
The trouble is I can’t tell you here and now exactly what you need, because I don’t know your goals — and two people with similar goals might have very different ways of getting there. What you want to do at this level is identify the social media metrics that will get you what you want.
Some examples, and not all of them will apply to this group. If you’re an author looking for an agent, you want raw follower counts and raw view counts, so the agent looks at your social media and thinks this person has a million followers, that must mean they’re worth representing, and that’ll sell the book better to a publisher. How much those people engage matters a lot less.
On the other hand, if you’re self-publishing — which I think most of us here are — an account with a thousand followers who all engage every day is much better than an account with a million followers where only a few hundred are engaged. Those engaged followers are the ones who will follow your work, back your Kickstarters, and buy your books. So think about what metrics on social media apply best to what you want to accomplish with your writing career. Does anybody have questions about that?

Engagement, Not Follower Count

Erin: That makes a lot of sense, Jason. Could you give us an example? Let’s say we do want to raise awareness of our books among our followers. Can you give us an example of how to apply that?
Jason: We’re going to get to that next — but that’s a great question. What you want is followers who lead directly to book sales.
So the number you’re going to chase with your social media presence is engagement. Not how many people saw your video or your posts, and not your follower count — how many people commented on your stuff, how many shared it, how many paid enough attention to your material to do something with it and to remember your name. You click follow on a whole bunch of people and then never think about them again. You want the people who will actually read your stuff and act on it. We’ll get to some of the ways to make that happen in a little while.
So: the first goal was your results goal — what do you want your writing career to do? The second is your strategic goal — how will social media help you get there? Quick show of hands, how many of us have a mailing list?
Blaine: We’ve certainly got one.

Turning Followers Into Subscribers

Jason: One metric that works really well is how many people you get to sign up for your mailing list via social media. Twenty-five is twenty-five more than zero — everybody starts somewhere.
A couple of other points on strategic goals. We’re talking mostly about self-publishing, but if you’re chasing freelance or ghostwriting gigs, your metrics are going to be direct peer-to-peer connections: conversations, private messages, exchanges on the Facebook or Instagram feed with people who could potentially buy your services. Each strategy is different. If you’re happy with what you’re doing now, fantastic, keep doing it. If you want help, the community here at Apex is great — or reach out to me, because I nerd out about this stuff all the time and I’m happy to nerd out about it with you.
A couple of questions have come in. “I’m very bad at putting out a newsletter.” That’s a really good point — if I’m having you do this social media work and a newsletter, that’s more time you spend not writing, and we already exist in a severe state of time famine.
The cool thing about newsletters is that you don’t have to do them every week, or every month, or every day. You can do them whenever you want, as long as your audience knows what cadence to expect.
If you promise once a month, do it once a month. If you promise once a quarter, do it once a quarter. And if you promise, “You’re not going to hear from me often — you already get a hundred newsletters a week from other people, so you’ll only hear from me when I’m really excited about something I want to share!” Then set that expectation. Not only does it take the pressure off, it also makes people more likely to open it, because they know they won’t hear from you unless you’ve got something good. It’s a very common lament.
The second one: “What’s the best way to get social followers who engage to sign up for my list and grow it?” The best way is to ask. Sorry if that sounds a little wise-ass — but ask about once every other week. If you ask more often than that it starts coming off as desperate and salesy.
Sometimes it’s a straight ask: get on video and record a quick, “hey folks, the best way to get hold of my stuff and support me as an author is to be on my newsletter.” Talk a little about the content, tell them the URL is in the comments, please join us, it’s a fun time.
Other times make it a contest: the first ten people to sign up this week get a free copy of an ebook, or the first chapter of my work in progress. One of my favourites is, “I’ve just put one of my books at 99 cents on Amazon — post a screenshot of the review you left, then join my newsletter.” Just something interesting, something fun, every other week, tends to build the list.
Once it’s rolling you can start talking to other people — find an author here at Apex who writes very similar to you, and each of you promotes the other’s newsletter. That’s getting a little further from social media, but they’re ideas. Do one of them every other week.
I want to take a moment on something close to my heart, because there’s pushback I get in every author community I’m ever in: we’re not comfortable with sales. Raise your hand if you love doing sales. Right — so here’s the thing.
If you are married, or have ever been in a romantic relationship, you sold something once and you enjoyed every second of it. You sold being married to you. You sold being together with you. If you’ve ever recommended a book to a friend who read it and came back and thanked you, you sold that book to them. Your friends sell books to you all the time and you love it.
Sales has a bad rap because we always picture the used car salesman. But sales is really just being so nerdily passionate about something you love that it becomes contagious. So be nerdily passionate about your book, about your writing — so passionate it’s contagious. And if you can’t be that excited about your own stuff, go back to the drawing board and write better stuff.
Yes, but you shouldn’t push it consistently, should you? Pushing it consistently is a mistake, but pushing it passionately is something we often don’t give ourselves permission to do, because we don’t want to feel salesy. Western culture has this issue about people who brag — it feels braggy, it feels salesy. But you wrote a damn fine book and people should read it. It doesn’t really matter what book you wrote: there is somebody out there whose life will be better because they read it. How dare you deprive them of that because it’s a little uncomfortable to talk about your book. Anyway, that’s my sales soapbox.
And to address the question directly — you don’t want to come on every day pushing your book, because you don’t want to be the channel where if anyone looks, it’s just a guy talking about his books. You find ways to talk about the themes in your books. You recommend books similar to yours. You engage around current events or holidays that have nothing to do with your book. You don’t mention the book; you become the person who talks about the things your book operates around. Any other questions before we move on?
Blaine: It looks like we’ve answered what’s come up so far.

Asking for the Sale Without Dreading It

Richard: How often should you push sales, then?
Jason: About once a week — do something, and make it exciting, make it interesting. I don’t even do it that often. But most people find that if you do it once a week, as long as you’re posting regularly, it isn’t going to affect things negatively.
Richard: As I said, I’m bad at putting out my newsletter. I’m trying to get into the groove of issuing one once a month and I’m still yet to achieve it — so I honestly don’t want to push sales on a monthly basis.
Jason: A couple of solutions there. One is to sit with it for a while and work out what’s holding you back. Is it just that you don’t have time? Is it that you’re not comfortable with sales? Is it that you think the book needs another couple of editing passes? Find whatever’s holding you up and address it.
Another thing that works really well for a lot of people — and this applies to writing time too, especially around the holidays — is to promise yourself once a quarter instead. Then you’re not telling yourself to do it monthly and getting into the habit of failing. You create the habit of doing it less often, but succeeding.
Richard: It does make sense, especially to me, because it’s the ideas as well — thinking of ideas of what to say. But you’ve just given us a lot of good ideas, so perhaps I’ll hop to it tomorrow.
Jason: I’m glad it’s helpful. That’s another piece of it, especially if you’re doing it regularly — at one point I had a newsletter going out three times a week. Give yourself enough time and space to think of something you’d be excited to write, because if you’re not excited to write it, they won’t be excited to read it.
Richard: I’ve just gone for a new book cover for my children’s novel, so I’m thinking of sending that new cover out to my readers’ list and seeing whether they like it or not.
Jason: Absolutely. One thing that has worked very well for a number of people I’ve worked with over the years, if you have the cash to do it, is to get two rough draft book covers and ask your followers to vote. Matt Dinniman, who writes Dungeon Crawler Carl — if you want to talk about self-publishing success right now, it’s amazing what he’s done — actually has a Discord group where he gets people to vote on what’s going to happen next.

The Four People You Engage With

Jason: So we’ve talked about the results goal — where you want your writing to take you — and the strategic goal, how social media is going to get you there. Now we’re going to talk about tactical goals. The thing about the other two is that you can’t control them. You can’t control when or if your books sell enough for you to go full time. You can’t control when or if a particular post gets you a thousand followers.
The only thing you can control is the effort you put in, and that’s what the tactical goals are. You decide what you post and when. You decide how consistently you post. You decide what the content is, and how well you stick to a schedule once you’ve committed to it.
I promised you twenty minutes a day, and we’ve got about twenty minutes left in the call, so I’m going to try to explain it in twenty minutes. What you’re going to do is engage with three categories of people you find on social media — well, four, and we’ll talk about the fourth in a minute.
The first is fans. This is your fan base: the people who like your work even better than your mum or your spouse do. If you look at their feeds, they’re the ones posting or liking your posts most often. They’re first to arrive when you share something new. They’re already sharing your material, asking you questions, asking when the next book is coming out. Make a list of the people who do that for you. Subscribers to your newsletter aren’t necessarily your fans — but the people who reliably open your newsletter probably are. That’s the first category you engage with.
The second category I call friends, and these aren’t your real-life friends. Here’s the thing about real-life friends when you’re an author — it’s maddening, but true. They’ll help you move. They’ll spend a weekend moving you house for nothing but cold pizza and warm beer. But they won’t read your books. They won’t leave an Amazon review. I don’t know why, but it’s a common lament among every writer I know.
So those aren’t the friends we mean. Friends for this purpose are the people who are about where you are on the journey as a writer — your peers. People in this presentation are friends for these purposes. People you met at a writing conference, other authors. These are the ones who will absolutely review your book, absolutely share it, buy a copy knowing you’ll do the same when their book comes out. You want to foster relationships with a few of them.
The third category I call famous people. These are folks a couple of steps ahead of you on the journey — famous authors, or movers and shakers in your genre or industry. What you want is two or three tiers above where you are. If you’ve got a thousand followers, people with ten or twenty thousand are who you target.
I write in fitness, and Arnold Schwarzenegger would not be a famous person I chase, because he’s just too much bigger than me — he’s never going to engage with me meaningfully. But that Movement by Jake guy, who’s got a hundred thousand followers or so, he might pay attention. I’m actually really trying to get Tank Tolman, because I think he and I would get along. Find two to six famous people you can engage with, and hopefully engage their fan base as well.
So sit down and make a list: start with ten fans, five friends, and three famous people. They become the seed of the social media cohort you’re going to engage with.
Our fourth category is lead generation — how you get the attention of strangers who might become fans or friends. Things that make those people realise you exist: anything that catches the algorithms of attention, using hashtags, joining Facebook groups related to what you write, any kind of influencer outreach, paid advertising. All the things that lead people to know you exist in the first place.
So those are our four categories, and what we’re going to talk about now is how to engage with them meaningfully in twenty minutes or less per day. Before I jump in, any questions about the four categories?

Twenty Minutes a Day, Broken Down

Jason: For the first couple of weeks this might take you closer to thirty minutes, but as you get into the habit you can usually get it down to twenty. Here’s the whole thing:
Let’s go through it in more detail.
First, one general post, which takes about a minute. This is a post on your main feed that says something about you, or your work, or your genre — something that engages the fandom that would be interested in your work, or hooks a current event into what you do. It can be a joke one day, a screenshot of your work in progress the next, a review of a book you liked. Anything your fans and friends will find useful, valuable, or at least entertaining.
The second is a share for your fans. Find one of your fans and share something cool and related that they did, on your page, with proper credit — a link or a tag depending on the platform. Think about it this way: think of some of your favourite authors, the ones you really respect and admire. If one of them shared one of your posts, you’d be over the moon for a week. There are fans who feel that way about you. Making sure that once a day you’ve shared content one of your fans put out is what turns a fan into a super-duper fan.
To me, the true north of fan service is the Iron Maiden concert T-shirt. I’m a huge heavy metal fan, I’ve been to six or seven Iron Maiden concerts, and they want me to spend sixty dollars to wear an advertisement for Iron Maiden on my chest. We do it all the time, we’re damn proud to wear it, and I’ve had whole conversations at bus stops with other people in different Iron Maiden T-shirts.
That’s fan service, and that’s fandom at a level we can reach. It starts by making that little personal connection — saying to one of your fans, “Hey, what you said was really darn cool.”
Next we share something for our friends. Sometimes they’ll have a project you can help boost; sometimes they’ll just have content you thought was interesting. Share something by one of your friends to foster that relationship, that professional courtesy, so that when you have an ask they’re ready to carry it out.
Then five comments for your fans. Same reason as the share, only a slightly lighter touch. Just comment on five posts by your fans. It can be this is cool with a like, or a question, or an oh — and also, did you think of this? Any way for them to see your name engaging with them.
Then one action for the famous — and this gets to the question Richard asked. The way it works with the famous is that you don’t reach out and say, “Hey, would you like to partner with me?” Because they’re not going to listen.
You start by stalking them. You say something intelligent, ask a smart question, say something supportive on a post they made, and over time you develop a relationship. You share things they post that you think would interest your fans. As that relationship develops, eventually you get to the point where you can reach out and say, “Would you like to collaborate on something?”
There’s another important thing those actions do. If they post something relevant to what you do and you say something smart or funny, a certain number of people on their feed will go who’s this person who said something smart and funny — and go and check out your feed. Some of them will stay and follow you, because you are in fact smart or funny, or both.
And finally, one action that generates leads — something that gets the attention of strangers. Each platform has different strategies that work, and those strategies change season by season, so do your research on what works best for your situation, your platform, and how comfortable you are spending advertising money. But do one thing a day that gets the attention of people who might not have heard of you.
Once you’re used to it, all of that takes about ten minutes. With the other ten, you reply to people as they engage with the material. Ideally you put the stuff out for ten minutes in the morning, then come back in the afternoon or early evening and spend ten minutes replying. That’s your twenty minutes.
If you only have twenty minutes a day, do alternate platforms — one day Facebook, the next day Instagram. If you have forty, do both each day. And other than that, don’t get stuck on the process I’ve just described. It’s a framework to begin with and to deviate from. Default to it, but if you find opportunities or inspiration that look different on a particular day, do your thing.

Weekly Metrics and Finding Your Weirdos

Jason: You do also need to spend some time on your metrics — I do it once a week on Friday, just before I shut down for the weekend. Find out which of your posts did really well and which didn’t. Which got a lot of comments but not many views. Which got a lot of views and not many comments. Read those numbers and find what insights you can about your content, so that next week you post according to what you’ve discovered.
There’s a whole science to it. I’m not particularly good at it, but I know some really smart people who are, so if you reach out and ask I’ll connect you with resources that have done me some good.
And finally — just have fun with it. The world is full of weirdos just like you and just like me. So go find your weirdos. Find the people who are so weird that they’re going to really enjoy your books. Chat with them, celebrate their passions, and sell some books to them.

Showing Up Live, Not Just Posting

Blaine: You were saying that one of the first things you should do is make a post for your fans, something they’d be interested in. Is that something we should be doing each day directly on the site, or could it be scheduled out a week in advance and go up automatically? Do you have any advice from that point of view?
Jason: Ideally you’d do it live, in real time, while you’re there at the computer — because the magic of social media isn’t what you post, it’s you engaging with people around that post. If you preload them in advance, which is sometimes easier, you’re not going to be there to engage when it goes live. However, if you’re really busy and the only way it works is to set up your seven posts on a scheduler on Sunday just before dinner, then that’s better than not doing it at all by a large margin.
Any other questions, folks? I know we’re coming up on the top of the hour and everybody’s got a day.
“I’m about to set up a pen name on Facebook. What’s the best way to get people interested there?”
That’s the challenge — if you want the pen name to be secret, it’s really difficult to tell your existing fans you have one. But on Facebook, the best thing is to have that pen name join Facebook groups that celebrate what the pen name writes about. And as a hint: if your pen name is Robert Smith, then the Facebook name Robert Smith, Author subtly tells people you write, without you having to tell them with every darn post. It piques their curiosity and gets more people looking.
Then there was a question: “What do you think of engagement from Bookstagram accounts? Are any valid?” Bookstagram can be awesome. Never pay a Bookstagrammer who asks you to pay up front, because there are scams out there.
Do pay attention to the numbers. As usual, the back-of-napkin metric is to go up one order of magnitude from your own following if you want to try a partnership or collaboration — if you’ve got a thousand followers, people in the ten thousand range will probably work really well; if you’re at ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. Anybody bigger might not think you’re a big enough fish, and anybody smaller probably won’t do you much good.
“If sourced in India, are they scams?” Scam is a hard word. They’re less likely to be useful. If they’re not asking you for money then there’s no harm, no foul. They often have massive follower counts, but those followers are all in India and might not be interested in buying your book — or might not have the funds, because we’re dealing with North American price points and wages and they’re dealing with Indian price points and wages. But if they’re not charging you, why not? If they do come to you and ask for money, then yes, stay away.

Pen Names and Separate Identities

Richard: Sorry, Jason — could you clarify what you said about the pen name? Did you mean use the pen name with “author” behind it? I write under the pen name Jersey Jones.
Jason: So if your Facebook name was Jersey Jones, Author, then even when you’re not talking about your writing, people know you’re an author, and that piques some people’s curiosity. You get a way to tell people every day that you’re an author without sounding like you’re talking about your books all the time. I never said any of this wasn’t cheesy.
Erin: Here’s a long one — let me read it to you, Jason, since you’re on your phone.
“If your goal is simply to manage two legitimate accounts on one computer, separate browser profiles are usually enough. For authors who want to keep a pen name separate from their personal identity, an anti-detect browser combined with a dedicated proxy can provide strong technical separation and make it much harder for followers to connect the accounts. However, no technical setup can guarantee anonymity.”
That’s not a question, it’s a comment, but there we have it. All of that is accurate. I think a lot of our authors use a pen name simply to have a separation in their own life between work and personal, not so much because they’re afraid people will find out who they are — but this is all good information, so thank you, Sergiy.
Jason: Yes, excellent ways to go about it. If you are looking at a pen name for security concerns, what I really recommend is spending a few hundred dollars on a consult from a security expert who deals with that exact thing.
Erin: And possibly setting up a legal entity separate from yourself — so a security expert, and possibly an attorney as well, if you really do feel for safety reasons that you need to separate yourself.
Jason: But if it’s for any other reason, the veil is easy to pierce, and a lot of the time that’s not a bad thing — especially if you’re writing under different names.
Erin: A lot of people also use separate pen names, Sergiy, for the algorithms — if they’re writing in multiple genres, especially if they’re really focused on the Amazon marketplace, they’ll sometimes separate their genres for the purposes of the algorithm.
As you’ll know if you’ve been with us a while, we don’t necessarily recommend taking the route of having many, many pen names for that purpose, because as Jason was saying, it gets really bogged down having all these accounts you then have to think about. If you’re doing twenty minutes a day of social media for one pen name and you have five pen names, suddenly that twenty minutes a day is a few hours. So we don’t really recommend the many-pen-names approach — but there are authors who have taken it, and there are many reasons people might choose to use one.
Jason: My personal recommendation is that you don’t need them unless you’ve got audiences that would be at loggerheads with each other — where the audience for book one would be straight up offended by book two. A pen name separating those, so that they don’t accidentally wind up there, is the metric I go on.
But again, it’s a personal choice, like most security things. Take the example of hiding something from somebody who might search your house: the more secure it is, the bigger a pain it is for you to get at it when you want it. Same thing here. The more secure you keep your pen name, the bigger the hassle day to day when you interact with it. What’s best for you really depends on your situation.
Blaine: My general advice is that if you have a children’s book pen name and a romance or even erotica pen name, you probably want to keep those separate in all cases. Otherwise there’s certainly a lot more leeway.
Jason: Yeah — the first book in that series I talked about opens with a guy driving to the hospital with his best friend’s severed member in a cooler, trying to get there in time to have it reattached. That’s the adventure. So I really don’t want the parenting advice people finding that one by accident.
Erin: (Who are we getting our advice from?) Okay — any other questions for Jason in the time we have left, do send them in.

Where Reach Actually Lives Now

Jason: That’s what Instagram tells us — and most people who pay attention to the difference between what Instagram tells us and what’s actually true agree that they’re telling the truth here. Reels will also share automatically to Facebook.
I’m in an interesting situation, because I’ve got a baby Instagram account with about 2,000 followers and a Facebook account that gets 500,000 views a month. So I’ll post a reel and it’ll show that it got 10,000 views — but it turns out 9,997 of them were on Facebook. Generally speaking, though, yes: reels are a very good way to reach new humans.
Erin: Anecdotally, I’ll tell you all — I’ve downloaded five Kindle or audiobooks in the last week, and at least two of them came from reels, via Facebook, via Pinterest. I was on Pinterest, saw some authors I’m a fan of, saw their reels, which were actually on Facebook and linked from there, and I’ve got the book. So there is that ongoing engagement.
Jason: “What are reels?” Excellent — Blaine answered that one. I know we’re coming up on time. Are these one-hour things, or ninety minutes?
Erin: One hour, but we’re happy to go over a little if questions are coming in. For anybody who arrived late today — and a lot of people did — if you missed the first part of this I highly recommend you go back and watch the replay, because it was not only informative but also humorous, and Jason has given us some different examples to think about. I’m waiting for the transcript myself, because I have a whole bunch of notes I can’t read any more on my whiteboard.
One of the things we never really say often enough is to literally ask people to join your newsletter. We talk about various things you can put in a newsletter, various things you can post, but we don’t often talk about simply asking. Every other week, Jason has told us, is a good amount of time to ask people to go from following you on Facebook to becoming a newsletter subscriber. That was one piece I took away.
And the other was loving your product enough that selling it doesn’t feel like a huge burden. Not everybody’s a salesperson, but I can tell you that in my various careers over the years, every time I’ve enjoyed interacting with people about my job it’s been because I felt confident in it, and enjoyed it, and cared about it enough to want to share it. So get to the point where you love your work and love your writing, and going out and asking people to join your newsletter, or buy your book, or leave a review, won’t feel like it’s pulling from your soul any more.
Jason: Everybody here enjoys recommending books to people. Get to the point where you enjoy recommending your book to people.
One closing note. If you have any questions, I encourage you to reach out afterwards at [email protected]. I have a service where I do a half-hour social media audit and action plan. I normally charge $100 for it, but everybody here gets a friends and family discount, which is no dollars. So if you’d like to have a chat, we’ll take a look at your social media. You were here — or you can convince me you were here but actually watched it later, or somebody told you about it. I won’t know. Just reach out and we’ll set up a time.
Erin: That’s an awesome offer from Jason. If you want some more one-on-one attention on your social media, reach out to him. Blaine has put the email address right in the chat box, and I’m sure it’ll be in our extra resources for the replay as well — or maybe not, since we really only want this to be people who were here live, or who can convince Jason they were. It’s in the chat box, so take it down.
Jason: Any friend of Erin and Blaine’s is a friend of mine.
Erin: As I said, I’m waiting for that transcript, because I ran out of space to write notes and I can’t read my own writing very well. There are so many points he brought up. We’ve talked about some of them before, but in this case, Jason, you’ve presented it in a way that’s different from how we’ve heard it before, and it clicked with me — so I’m sure it clicked with some of you as well. Any last questions for Jason before we sign off?

What to Put in a Reel

Blaine: Alexander was asking, “What types of content work well with reels specifically?” But in general, if we’re trying to come up with fan content, what sorts of posts do you think work well? How do we brainstorm what we’re going to post about?
Jason: You could do a whole hour on that, but the best shortcut is to find three or four authors who are writing what you write. Look at their feeds and find which of their posts are outperforming how they usually do, and then make that post for your own stuff. So you find an author writing a very similar set of books, and they’re normally getting a thousand likes, but that one got seven thousand. Look at that post, work out what it’s about, and do a version of it that’s about your work and your passions. Generally those hit really well.
Erin: And they don’t have to be crazy or high-quality videos either. One of the ones that got me this week was simply the author standing there, not really doing anything, with a couple of bits of her latest book flashed up underneath her face with a line or two highlighted.
It was the perfect way to let me know what was in the book and what the tropes were — I read very tropey genres — and that was enough to get me to go to Amazon and see what the book was about. They don’t have to be complicated, and you don’t need any exciting special software. Just look and see what works in your genre.
Jason: It gets oddly, weirdly specific too. My Instagram is for my family safety content, and I’ve got a post that’s ten safety tips for hotels — just words on a background, with a picture of a hotel lobby and the Indiana Jones soundtrack behind it. It gets tens of thousands of hits every time I post it. If I do the same thing with different music, it performs about as well as usual. If I do the Indiana Jones soundtrack with, say, public transportation safety — nothing. But for some reason, hotels, that background, that font, Indiana Jones: it absolutely blows up every single time.
Blaine: I can see that fitting your personality for the safety training.
Erin: That’s a good point too — there has to be audio. A lot of them don’t have anyone talking, but you do need to find clips you can use for audio. I often watch with my sound off, so I don’t always know what’s playing. But it’s not really a video if there’s no audio component to it.
Jason: And if you don’t have audio for your thing, the process of posting a reel on Instagram gives you the opportunity to add some — and among those options is trending audio, which is audio doing really well right now that Instagram is intentionally pushing. Regardless of what video you have, if you put the trending audio on it, Instagram will push it. I’ll do that even when I do have audio, and just turn the music all the way down, so the post still gets the algorithm juice from Instagram because they’re trying to push that track.
Blaine: The other nice thing about doing it that way, using the tools built into whatever platform you’re on, is that you don’t have to worry about copyright strikes — because even if you have a licence, somebody’s bot can go through, find music you’ve licensed that they also have, and get your content taken down, and then you have to prove you have a licence.
Our friend Joanna Penn recently changed the theme music for her podcast: she’d been using the same licensed music for over a decade, and someone bought all the rights to it and now copyright-strikes it every time a new episode goes up. Every week she was having to prove she owned it. It was a little traumatic for her, having used it so long, but she switched to something else — I think she might have used AI to generate it, or got some kind of royalty-free licence.
It is something you have to consider. And if you’re using the built-in tools you can do a lot of cool things, like burned-in captions with one word coming up at a time, so even people who have the volume down — like Erin — can still see the words on screen. You don’t need expensive software for that.
Jason: On copyright, though, it’s gentler than we’ve been led to think. If you make an honest mistake once, it’s not going to hurt you too badly. A couple of months ago I was doing a series for my family safety channel about talking to our kids about sex, and I made a video where I pulled Salt-N-Pepa’s Let’s Talk About Sex from the eighties — absolutely copyrighted.
I got a copyright hit within three hours. But all it meant was that on Facebook I couldn’t be paid for views on that particular post. They didn’t even take it down. They just gave the money to Salt-N-Pepa, or Warner Brothers, or whoever owns it. So if you make an honest mistake, don’t sweat it too much — but do pay attention. YouTube is a place that’s really, really dangerous.
Blaine: YouTube is definitely the worst for it, because the RIAA are basically going through and listening to every video, trying to find anything with their music in the background.
Erin: On a different note — how often do you post to Instagram, Jason, and what’s your recommendation?
Jason: I was posting twice a day. I fell off the wagon for the summer and I’ll be back on there, but usually one reel and one other thing. Although I might not come back, just because my Facebook traction is so big at this point — I’m seriously considering doubling down on Facebook and seeing if I can get that five hundred thousand up to a million.
Erin: For those of you who are picture book authors, do keep in mind that Instagram is really friendly to images, and you probably have a lot of gorgeous illustrations.
Jason: My Instagram is the safest family on the block. Ironically, I got hacked on my family safety and security account, and wasn’t even able to get it back — I had to close it and start another one.
Blaine: We’ll put a link on the replay page for that. If it makes you feel any better, we were going to do a backup training a few weeks ago and my hard drive died the week I was preparing for it. So those things do happen.

Where to Find Jason

Erin: You’ve had some great questions. Any last-minute ones, let us know right away, because we’re going to let Jason go so he can get back to posting on Facebook and everything else he’s doing. I hope you all got a lot out of this — I definitely learned some things. As I was saying, Jason posed some new ideas about things I already knew and put them in a different language for me, so I appreciate that.
It looks like we’re not getting any more questions. Jason, thank you so much for doing this. I think we learned quite a bit, and hearing things we already knew in a different way really brings them home. And don’t forget Jason’s offer — reach out to him at his email address, let him know where you came across him, and he’ll set you up with that consult on where you are in your own social media journey, and help you pinpoint some of the things you should be looking for. Anything else you wanted to share with us?
Jason: Thank you all so much. I hope this was useful and, if not, at least entertaining.
Erin: I think it was both. Thanks for joining us today — we’ll see you next week. I think we’re going to have a Q&A next week.
Blaine: Yes, next week will be Q&A.
Erin: So come with your questions. We can even forward questions to Jason for you if you can’t reach out to him directly. We’ll be answering all your writing, marketing and publishing questions next week, so please submit some. If you have material you want us to look over, please submit it ahead of time. And Richard, you asked a little about newsletters today, so we’ll take a look at your newsletter situation next week as well — please make sure you can log in for that. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next week.
Blaine: Thanks a lot, everybody. See you next week.
Erin: Bye! Thank you, Jason!

AI Transcription provided by Descript.com.

(return to top)