I’ve blogged a couple of times about the positive impact of social media for authors, in terms of book marketing, but in today’s post, I’m going to look at the impact on writing time, not marketing time.
In case you’re confused, writing and marketing are completely separate aspects of the book publishing journey. Both are equally important, if you wish to be a published author. As a person, I’m quite an introvert. I have a limited amount of social energy and after expending it, I need to recharge in solitude for a long time. If given a choice about whether to go out to a party or stay home, I would rather choose home. As an author, it’s hard to market your books if, like me, you are an introvert. I don’t tend to seek out live events such as book fairs or signing events very much, preferring to put more resources into selling books online instead. This is for a few reasons, not just my introverted nature: doing book fairs and signing events as an indie author means that I need to keep a ready supply of copies to sell, and I just don’t have the space; I’ve also found that I make more in royalties from online sales than I do in profit from buying my books at an author discounted rate and selling them at full retail price. Plus, in between having a full time day job and managing childcare, that leaves only weekends free to do book fairs, and I’d rather spend my free time with my family instead.
If you take live book events out of the equation, this means relying on paid advertising and social media to handle book marketing. Over the past five years I have steadily reduced the amount of money I’ve spent on sponsored advertising by increasing my organic sales. I’ve done this by reaching readers through social media, specifically posting videos on Instagram, Tiktok and YouTube.
Now, that takes time and effort, as well as taking as much creativity as writing a book in the first place. It takes time to record a video (I find that videos featuring me and my books, rather than just my books, sell more copies) overlay text, add other fun graphics, etc. All of this takes a lot of time. I discovered recently that I’m rarely switched off from being in ‘video opportunity’ mode, always seeing a scenario that could potentially be used for a promotion. Being on my phone so much to record videos, edit them and post them on social media is time consuming. It was starting to impact my writing time as well as my family time feeling the need to create and post new content every three or four days.
Aside from posting content on social media, I don’t tend to scroll much; I check in to see what friends have posted, but apart from that I tend to make sure I haven’t missed any comments about my own posts. In the run up to Valentine’s Day, I spent a lot of time promoting Love you to Death, and after the 14th February, I took a short digital detox for a week. I fully expected this to negatively impact book sales, but to the contrary, I noticed no significant difference without posting on my usual 3-4 day schedule. On the other hand, I felt more mentally free to focus on writing without stressing about chasing an algorithm that I don’t really understand, in a blind attempt to reach new readers.
As with anything in life, it’s about finding balance. The need to create new content to promote my back catalogue on social media was having a negative impact on the amount of time I was dedicating to finishing my current novel wip. Social media is not only useful, it’s necessary for me to sell books, but in order to manage all my eggs, in all my various baskets, I’ve decided for now to relax my social media schedule to posting a new video every week or so, and see how that goes.
Leilanie Stewart 