Book Promoting -- Part 5 -- Social Networking or If I Twitter Does that Make Me a Twit?

I've talked about Amazon in the last installment, and if you haven't read it, you need to just to understand what you're missing if you don't use Amazon. In this final installment, I try to give you an idea how to use social networking to your advantage to help create book sales.

The Jungle of Social Networking or Where Angels Fear to Tread

Social networking is a catch-all phrase for ways to connect with people, be it recommending a good article (such as Stumbleupon, Mahalo or Digg), recommending a good book (Goodreads), catching up with friends you haven't seen since college (facebook, Linked-in, Steepster), pontificating to the masses (blogs, e.g., Blogger, Livejournal), or coming out with insipid status reports (Twitter). Then, there are pages like MySpace, Ning, and others which basically do something in between. As a book author, your first thought may be to simply ignore these websites and applications as time wasters that detract from your writing.

If you're looking to promote your book, you can't afford to not at least jump on the bandwagon, even if it means you're getting dragged behind that cart (don't you love mixed metaphors?). The problem with social networking sites is that the ones that are consistently used number in the hundreds and, I suspect, if someone wanted to look at social networking sites as a whole, the whole social networking scheme runs in the thousands. Every day, I hear of more and more networking sites I never knew existed and I wonder how on earth I can keep up with them.

In short, I can't. And neither can you. But there are ways to access the important ones and keep it down to a dull roar. I'll talk about that in a moment, but first you need to know how to use social networking before you go about picking and choosing which ones to use.

How to Be a Good Social Networker

When you first get on social networks, the first thing you're likely to do is spam the heck out of people with your new book. This presents a problem because unless these people know you and are your best friends (who probably have already bought your book), everyone else is going to say "who?" and unfriend you. Sorry, but that's really how it works.

When you get on a social networking site, the first thing you should do is friend people you know and friend a few of their friends. Chances are, you'll get them to friend you back too because, by golly, everyone is there to meet people (it is social, after all). Coming up with interesting posts, commenting on other people's posts, posting interesting content, is a surefire way to keep people interested in you. People follow or friend you when you have interesting stuff to say; these people buy your books because they feel like they know you.

Creating a Persona

Oddly enough, as a writer you need to create a type of persona. Think of it as your public figure or clone who leads a slightly larger than life kind of existence. It doesn't mean lie to people about what you really do, but it does mean making your life far more interesting than you think it is. I don't consider my life to be anywhere interesting and yet, people seem to be fascinated by the fact that I train in martial arts, I'm a ninja, I train with a long sword, I snowshoe, I've podcasted, I live in the mountains where there are wolves, mountain lions and grizzlies, I race sled dogs (semi-retired), I hunt, I hike and I have some of the silliest Alaskan Malamutes and cats in the world.

"But you're interesting!" you say. "Really?" I would say. And yet my life can be dull, dull, dull. I write a lot, spending hours working on a computer. I spend most of my time taking care of the dogs and trying to decide what to make for dinner. I go to science fiction conventions. And I train. And that's about it. It's the interesting stuff - the wildlife and my encounters with it, the dogs and cats, the training, etc, and my opinions about it - that keeps people coming back and chatting with me. My point is me as a public figure is more exciting than me in real life because I've made it relate directly to people who may not have the experiences I have. You, as a writer, have a plethora of knowledge and experience to draw on that will help you establish something that resonates with other people. When you do this, people are naturally drawn to you and will probably consider buying your books.

I say "probably" because nothing is surefire. What you're doing is building a fan base, and not necessarily a readership. The readership will come in time - as people read your samples and short stories or articles, hear about your upcoming releases or conventions you're attending, or start chatting with you about a news item, they start to regard you as a friend (and vice versa). At the very worst, you've made friends and that's a good thing, isn't it?

Choosing the Right Social Networking Platform

When you decide to dive into social networking, be sure to choose the networks that are most useful. Right now Facebook and Twitter are popular, but your choices should depend on who you're trying to reach. Younger folks tend to frequent MySpace and not Linked-In. Tea drinkers read Steepster. People who are on Facebook may not use Twitter. Then, there are the article sites such as Digg, Mahalo and Stumbleupon.

The problem you will experience will be the overwhelming time it will take to update everything. But, there are applications out there for Twitter and Facebook that link statuses to various social networking sites. You can read more about them in 10 Facebook Apps You Might Actually Find Useful.

Linking your social network sites might be a pain for those who subscribe to all of them, but I've found more often than not, that not everyone uses a particular site, and even if they do, they don't bother looking at them all every time. So when you Tweet on Twitter (no, you don't "Twit"), your status updates can go to your blog, your Facebook account, your website, and other areas.

RSS - a Savior for the Time-Challenged

If your webpages, blogs and social networking sites support RSS feeds, you can save yourself a lot of hassle by setting up your blog's RSS feed to post to your various social networks when you make a blog post. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and if you or your current web guru can spend some time to set up a few links, you'll be posting your blog on your various sites and updating those sites at the same time with brand-new content even if you haven't touched that page in months.

I hope I've given you some good ideas on social networking and book promotion in general. If you've enjoyed these articles, pass them along to friends. I'd appreciate it and your friends will learn what it takes to promote their own books. Have fun and good luck.