Many people think that social media is a fantastic way to market their book, but this is not necessarily true. Social media is a fantastic way to build relationships and network with people, but not the best place to sell your book. People will soon grow tired of your repeated messages, posts or tweets of ‘buy my book now’ as they have heard it all before. You really don’t want to spam people.

People also assume that social media is the perfect place to talk constantly about their book, but again this is not true. You need to be more subtle. A good way is to interact with others who share your interests, other authors who write in a similar genre to your own, and readers. Share their tweets, share stories of interest, and converse with your followers. In doing so, people will begin to gain an interest in you and will start to look for your books, and will then begin to share about them with others.

Another myth is that social media is a quick way of selling your book. This is wrong. You need to put in an awful amount of manpower if you want to start selling books. Before you can do so you need to build up a following and gain interest, and this takes time. Reading a post or a tweet is a far cry from reading a whole book so you need to be prepared for the hard slog.

People tell you to market your book on social media as it is cheap to do so; although this may be true you need to look at the bigger picture. As already mentioned, to gain any significant success in selling your book online via social media you need to put an awful lot of effort in to it and, as they say, time is money. This time may well be better spent writing and perfecting your craft, designing your book cover, anything to do with your writing really. One option may well be to pay someone to do the social media side of things for you; they can manage the promotions and marketing while you are free to concentrate on your writing.

Do you need to be on most social media platforms and all the new ones that pop up as well? Again this is not good marketing; what you should be doing is concentrating on your author website and blog and maybe a few social media sites at most. Do what you feel most comfortable and what you are happiest with.

Lastly, people always believe that Facebook is the holy grail of social media and that you have to be on it. No, you do not. It is a good place to share your book details with family and friends and they will do a lot of promotional work for you, but there is no guarantee that just because you have a Facebook Author fan page that you will sell lots of books. Again, time and effort is needed to do so just as with any other social media site.