Market Your Book Successfully: The Power of Social Media

by Bethany Ramos


By now, you probably use social media regularly for personal reasons to connect with friends or family, right? However, beyond personal use, social media provides a wonderful environment for authors looking to build a following and successfully market their books online.

The most important principle to understand before you embark on marketing your book through social media is that you must take a completely backwards approach. While many other areas of the Internet call for more aggressive marketing, like online advertising and e-mail campaigns, social media marketing is almost counterintuitive.

Social Media Marketing Starts with Relationships

The whole purpose of social media is for users to join a private community where they can connect with friends and family. Today, there is a time and a place for businesses, entrepreneurs, and even authors to use social media to reach out to their fans. BUT social media must be approached correctly if you want to build a following and increase sales for your book.

Stimulate Conversation

The first and most effective way to approach social media as an author is to begin to stimulate conversation with friends and fans. This can be done on a website like Facebook or Twitter by asking questions, engaging in conversation, and responding to comments or posts from your fans. In short, this is one of the easiest and most successful ways to reach out to fans that may be interested in your work without having to spend money on an expensive advertising campaign.

Share Content

Your readers will be attracted to you as an author if you can provide them something of value for free. If you are an author looking to promote your book, you should definitely have your own blog and website by now. You can link your blog content to your social media profiles so that interested followers can click to visit your blog and find out more about the books that you have published.

The point is to provide valuable and exceptional content to attract readers to visit your blog.

Social media is a neutral and non-threatening environment where you can reach out to interested fans and create relationships. The next step in the process is to use your well-written blog content to draw readers to your blog to potentially purchase the book that you are promoting. Do you see how it all works together?

The truth is that marketing in social media is often overlooked by many authors today.However, when you use the steps above, you can effectively reach out to fans, attract more readers, and potentially sell more copies of your new book online!


Bethany Ramos is an author and full-time freelance writer with experience in Internet marketing, social media marketing, and SEO. She is passionate about writing captivating children's books and witty chick lit. For more information, you can visit her blog at chicklit-books.com.