Speaker 1: Hey, I'm Hannah. I'm a self-published author and I manage a few different pen names and platforms so I get a lot of questions about book marketing and the society. She doesn't have a job. So the questions I get vary a lot based on the author and their platform and their genre and all kinds of stuff like that. But the most common question I get across the board is what the **** do I post on social media? Great question. It completely depends on your audience and your brand and your genre. However, I've got 12 types of book promotion posts that you can use on platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. I'm not touching TikTok, maybe some other time. Most of the examples that I use are going to be ones that I've made on Canva. Canva is great because it's easy and accessible. They've got a ton of templates you can use if you're not very good at design. And the free version gets you access to most of the features like it's plenty enough to make it work for you. Canva is not sponsoring this video, but my patrons are. Hello, patrons. Thank you. Pledging to my Patreon gets you access to behind the scenes extras, bonus videos, the Discord server, and you'll see their names in a cute little scroll at the end of this video. Anyway, here are 12 ideas for book promo posts. Number one is review highlights. These are great because you can post them anytime. You can do it before your book release if you had ARC reviews, when your book has already been out for a minute, or when you just start to get really good quotes. Peruser beware, getting into the weeds of your own book reviews can be very nasty. A good tip is to just filter to the five star reviews. Don't even look at the other ones. Those don't exist. Number two is quotes from your book. This is another one that you can post before, during, or after your book release. Just grab a nice quote from your book that you feel kind of represents it as a whole. Toss it onto some thematic scenery. You can include your cover or not. If this is before your book is available, it's probably good to include a date of your release. Number three is a list of elements your book contains. This is huge on Twitter. You just list things like elements or tropes, sub genres, types of characters, things like that. Again, throw it on something thematic and include your cover if you'd like. I'll say that this method is especially good for romance and other types of genres where people are looking for really specific tropes and sub genres. Try to use things that are topical for your readership. Number four is aesthetics and collages. I will be honest, most readers do not care, but if you think they're fun to make, this could be something that you do during the writing process for inspiration. You can post them during the drafting process to kind of get people knowing about your book and to pick up on the vibes of it. From what I've seen, it's a really good way to connect with other writers because writers are the only people who care about aesthetic boards. Basically only make these if you think it's fun or it inspires you to write. And if you already have something like that made, you might as well use it to fill your social feeds. Number five is another list of things about your book, but this time with swirly arrows. This one is a big crowd pleaser. I haven't seen as many direct sales from a marketing image as I have from this bitch. So again, just list sub genres, tropes, elements that might appeal to your target demographic. And it's really good to list things that are popular in your genre right now. You've probably heard of right to market and self-publishing where authors turn books over really, really quickly. So they'll follow trends of what readers currently want and they'll write, edit, publish a book within like a month or two to join that trend. So this is kind of a good way to sort of do that without the commitment. So you would just update your marketing imagery for whatever's popular. Like if you see that a certain topic is starting to trend, think through the published books that you have, which one has that trope. Then you would just to make a marketing image to target that specific trope. So it's a book that you've already written and is out like you didn't do any extra work or crunch time on it. You're just doing something really quick to seize that opportunity. Number six is seasonal posts or as I like to call them. I slapped on a Santa hat after your books released and the novelty novel novelty of it has worn off. It's still good to continually promote it so that you can keep getting sales. Seasonal posts are great for this. If you have a romance novel, February is going to be a hopping time for you. November, December, if you want to like promote it as a gift idea, do a black Friday sale, stuff like that. But you should also look at things like your books published anniversary, make a big deal about the audio book dropping or other formats. Basically make an event of anything that you can because that makes your book promo have a purpose rather than just being like, Hey, please buy my book, which is what it's mostly going to be. Number seven is take your book on a field trip. There are lots of templates that let you drop a little 3d render of your book into some kind of environment. Book Brush has a lot of templates for that, but it does hit different if your book is actually outside somewhere. It's super fun if the pictures are sent in by your readers. So if you get tagged in a review post and they took a nice photo of it, ask for permission, give them credit when you repost it. It looks real nice. Number eight is cover reveals. You can stretch this into a few different posts. So you might make a little teaser for the cover. Book Brush has some 3d render options for that, but you can also just make your own where you just show like a little sliver of the cover or whatever. Maybe you do a countdown to your cover reveal and then the actual cover reveal post. So anything that you can do like that where it's like, maybe you're going to make an announcement post, make a teaser to the announcement post, and then you'll get twice the posts out of it. Oh my God. Brilliant. Pro tip, you can drop your cover reveals early in a newsletter or for patrons or something like that. Announce that your newsletter is getting to see it now and everyone else can see it like the next week or whatever, because that can be a good incentive opportunity to get people to subscribe to your newsletter or whatever you're trying to funnel them to. Number nine is book matter. This could be character portraits you commission. It could be like drawn maps of your world or any other like creative thing you can think of to grab interest for your story. For example, say you have, oh my God, what is this trope? It's like the bachelorette type trope. What is that series that did this? I've only read one of them, but I know that it's a huge genre. If you have a romance where the lead has an option of many romantic partners and they're doing some kind of like competition to win or whatever, right? The bachelor. You can make like dating profiles for each of the options and post those one at a time. So then people kind of like get to know your characters and it's also in a format that really complements that genre. The selection, is that what it's called? Yes. It's the selection by a Kiera Cass. I'm not recommending it. I don't remember anything about the book other than that it was the bachelorette. Number 10 is behind the scenes posts. This is good content for before your release. You can update your audience on what step in the process you're in, share your wins and losses and kind of take them along on that journey because then it makes them feel involved in the book. They're obviously going to read the book. So during your process, you're probably going to hit on stuff that you could share, but you don't want to because it's a spoiler or like if you haven't done your cover reveal yet. So keep a list of the spoiler content that you can post after your book release. For example, on one of my pen names, I designed my own covers. So after the book drops, I'll put like a before and after, like the very first cover I designed versus the final product. People really like that. So whatever you can share of the process is usually going to be pretty good content. Eleven is giveaway posts. You might do a gift box with your book and then some like related items and make a cute aesthetic photo of that. But giveaways are a good move for kind of boosting followers or getting attention for your book. And it's also an opportunity to kind of give back to the people who are supporting you. One note is that if you're doing something that's like follow my account to enter, make sure you have very interesting content to post after that one, because most people after the competition's over are going to unfollow. I've seen a lot of writers be really frustrated with that. So make sure that you are posting your best content while you're doing that to kind of hook people into becoming an actual member of your audience versus trying to just win whatever you're giving away. There's also something to the legality of giveaways like certain gambling laws. So make sure you do your research on whichever platform you're trying to host your giveaway on just to make sure that you're operating within their restrictions. And number 12 is to make compilations of related books. So if you have a novel coming out, you might lead up to that with posts like my favorite books and whatever that sub genre is. You can make that a series of posts or you can make just like one standalone. After your book comes out, you can make posts like if you like my book, you might like these books and that gives you content to post. It gives you an opportunity to connect with other authors in your genre as well as possibly giving them a little boost in sales. You can also make this collaborative like you can reach out to an author ahead of time and do collab posts where they post about your book and you post about theirs. You can also do that with newsletters because if your readers liked your book, they'll probably like this other book by another author in the same genre. Everybody wins. That's all I got. I hope this gave you a few ideas. It'll really come down to trial and error. So try a few different kinds of posts and see what works best for you and for your audience. Also, if you have any ideas, leave them in a comment. This is an open source community. No secrets. I'll see you next time. Transcribed by https://otter.ai