I understand I will take a lot of heat for saying that you can’t Instagram or Facebook your way to a publishing contract without first being a good writer. If an agent or a publisher solicits you because you have a great social media presence, beware. Not that such individuals are scammers, but they are obviously trying to cash in on a huge social media following, which means they have little else in their arsenal and that’s not a good thing. Being self-published is tough, and the tendency is to think if you just get “there” with social media, your success is in the bag. On the contrary, it guarantees nothing.
Image by Kleiton Santos
That’s why I say avoid any literary agent who’s focused 100% on social media and pressures you to spend your life on the various platforms. Such pressure is a red flag that that person is relying far too heavily on those venues to propel you to success. If it was that easy, every self-published author out there would be successful and they would all be getting book deals.
Now, I’m fully expecting to hear many people chirping up to lecture me about that one person out there who managed to make a post or photo go viral and became a best-selling author. (Don’t really know anyone like that myself.) I’m not even denying it can happen, but let’s stick to what normally happens, rather than the one-in-a-million person who managed to propel himself or herself to stardom through Facebook.
Success to Failure
In fact, here’s a success to failure story about someone who essentially achieved that “superstar status” and how it later became a nightmare. Most writers have heard of Billie Eilish, who received a $1 million book deal based on her social media following. (That’s what I was just referring to about being wary of an agent or publisher who approaches you solely because you have a lot of social media fans.) Eilish had over 30 million Facebook followers, 35 million TikTok followers, almost 7 million Twitter followers, and nearly 10 million Instagram followers. Perhaps the publisher offering the book deal banked a LOT on that social media presence, but unfortunately, her publisher lost a fortune on her book.
The book sold approximately 65,000 copies, which is certainly more than many authors sell, but it didn’t pay the bills and it sure didn’t cover that cool million. Another little interesting tidbit… She has fewer book sales than self-published author Chris Fox, whose social media presence is blasé.
No. I am not suggesting you have a blasé social media presence.
Of course, the hardest thing in the world to get over to anyone is that you cannot propel yourself to stardom on these platforms. That’s because it seems like it should be easy. We all remember Justin Beiber right? It seems like it’s the new golden land of opportunity, but it just doesn’t work that way. Do you need a strong social media presence? Absolutely. Will that in and of itself make you a successful author? The answer is an emphatic no.
The bottom line is, you can’t do it all with social media. I did well when I was self-published (And I mean well for self-published, not well for traditionally published.) But I advertised constantly. I paid for ads and I paid for them to run to a specific market. A very specific market. Although I’m getting redundant, I will say “specific target market” again, because even advertising is a great way to hemorrhage money if you don’t target the right demographic with what you’re selling. More on that later.
Reality Check
Social media was once Facebook and Twitter. Now it’s a whole lot more. And because it splintered into so many different venues, they can be difficult to sort out. Not overcomplicating it is the best way to get a handle on it. For example, Instagram celebrates the selfie. The easiest way to get followers is to look beautiful. More than all the other venues combined, Instagram essentially celebrates physical beauty to the point that according to the platform’s own internal research, many of its members end up feeling a bit “stressed” when they don’t live up to the standard of beauty shown on the Instagram model.
The uncomfortable reality I’m alluding to here is that the majority of individuals who are popular on Instagram are beautiful. The other way to become an Instagram celebrity is to be a fantastic photographer. But unless you have a lot of time and energy to devote to taking pictures on a daily basis and making sure they out-pretty everyone else’s, it’s not all that practical for the everyday author. Should you post there? Absolutely. Just be realistic about what you’ll get in return.
Facebook is one of the best known social media platforms, but unfortunately you are no longer allowed to communicate reliably with your fan base there unless you pony up the money. If you pay, you're guaranteed that your fans, as well as everyone else’s fans, will see you, but keep in mind that as you are building a following, this works both ways: your effort toward gaining a fan base for yourself eventually morphs into a platform for other writers to advertise their books. In other words, you will be advertising to other authors' fans and they’ll be advertising to yours. Sure, you can benefit from that arrangement, but once again, you have to be realistic about how big a piece of the pie you will actually get for your money–or your hours of time and effort if you're trying to do it without money.
Twitter has been around longer than any of them, and after all this time, it is still modeled toward that snarky one-liner that will create a buzz. I use Twitter a lot, not to make snarky statements, but because of demographics and the fact that–believe it or not–when I was paying for my own advertising, my best return among Facebook, Twitter and Instagram was Twitter. Facebook was a close second, Instagram was a big fat zero. Then again, the type of historical fiction I write is targeted to women over 35, and be it politically correct or not, they are primarily on Facebook and Twitter, not Instagram. Less than 13% of all Instagram members are women over 35, and we won’t even go to statistics on that where TikTok is concerned. The problem we run into with Twitter is similar to that of Facebook. You pretty much have to pay to play.
I suppose this is a long post to say there’s no way around spending money. If you’re self-published, you have to pour money into ads. My next post will be on the importance of figuring out who your target market is before you spend a penny. Trust me, you’ll want to tune in.
****As always, the opinions on my personal blog are mine, and should not be construed as the opinions of any other person or entity with whom I'm associated.****