Social media, for authors who would rather be writing
Start with the honest position, because most advice on this subject skips it.
Social media sells fewer books than authors are told it does. The mechanism is real but weak and slow: a post reaches a fraction of the people who follow you, a fraction of those stop, a fraction of those click, and a fraction of those buy. Nothing about that chain is efficient. A large following and a small mailing list can easily produce more sales from the list, and when that happens the reason is structural rather than a failure of effort.
It also compounds only over years, which means the six weeks before a launch is the worst possible time to start.
So the decision is not how much social media to do. It is whether there is one platform you can stand, and whether you will still be on it in two years. An author with one account they enjoy beats an author with five they resent, every time, because the resented four get abandoned halfway through and leave dead profiles pointing at nothing.
If the answer is none of them, that is a legitimate answer. Put the hours into the newsletter instead. See The newsletter, and what to give people for joining.
What actually works there
The thing that performs is the work and the making of it, not the advertisement for the finished product. Feeds are built on curiosity and people, and a post that says buy my book offers neither.
Show the process. The cover reveal. The proof copy arriving in the mail. The row of your own books on a shelf. A page you are proud of, photographed. The thing on your desk you had to research. These are the posts that get saved and shared, and they are also the ones that cost you nothing to make, because they are things that were happening anyway.
Talk about the subject, not the book. If you wrote a novel about Arctic whaling, post about Arctic whaling. The people who find that interesting are the exact people who buy the book, and they arrive without having been sold anything. A nonfiction author has it easier still: the book is a subject, so be useful about it in public.
Be a reader out loud. Recommending other people's books is the single most underrated thing an author can do on a platform. It puts you in front of their readers, who are your readers; it gives you something to post on the weeks when nothing is happening with your own work; and authors notice, which is how you end up in a position to ask for a blurb or a swap. It costs nothing and it is not a trick — you were going to read anyway.
Post the honest middle. The draft that is not working, the chapter you cut, the map you drew badly. Readers like watching something get made far more than they like being told it is finished.
Three format facts worth knowing
These change, but the direction has been stable for a while.
A still image of your cover performs worse than motion. A flat cover reads as an advertisement and gets scrolled past. The same book turning — front, spine, back — holds a viewer long enough to register.
Vertical video is what feeds currently favor. Short, vertical, ten to fifteen seconds. This is not an aesthetic judgment; it is what the recommendation systems are tuned to show to people who do not already follow you, which is the only traffic that grows anything.
A link in a post is usually suppressed. Platforms do not want to send people away, so posts carrying an outbound link typically reach fewer people than the same post without one. The practical answer is to keep the link out of the post and put it in your profile, then refer to it. One destination, always in the same place.
In the tools. Mockups render your real print wrap as a physical book, and the Social Pack makes a 15-second vertical video and matching stills from the same cover — so producing something to post is a by-product of finishing the book rather than a separate project. Start a book → · about the tools
The discipline, which is most of it
Pick one platform. The one whose format suits what you can actually make. If you take photographs, the visual one. If you write sharp short paragraphs, the text one. If you can talk to a camera without flinching, the video one. Do not pick the one you were told has the biggest audience for books, because you will be posting to it for years.
Pick a rhythm you can keep. Twice a week that continues beats daily that stops in February. The account that posts steadily for three years outperforms the one that posted forty times in a launch month and went quiet, because the slow one is still there when someone goes looking.
Batch it. Photograph the proof copy, the shelf and the desk in one afternoon and you have a month of posts sitting in a folder. Making a post from scratch on a Tuesday is how people come to hate this.
Send everyone to the one thing you own. Your newsletter. A follower is borrowed — the platform can change what it shows, change its terms, or disappear, and the list you built there disappears with it. An email address is yours and moves with you. Every profile link, every bio, every occasional post should end at the sign-up.
That is the whole strategy: one platform, a pace you can hold, show the work rather than sell it, and convert the people who like you into subscribers you can reach directly.
Everything else — the paid side, the launch-week push, the site — is covered where it belongs. See Advertising a book, honestly and The author website, reduced to what it needs.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Back to: Box sets and omnibus editions · More: Mockups: showing a book that does not exist yet · The newsletter, and what to give people for joining · Launch week, without the panic