There’s been a lot of buzz about the new social media site
TSU and how “everyone” is jumping over there from Facebook. I’m not convinced
that a new social media site is the best use of my time. Facebook is already a
big time-suck. Why would I sign up for another?
The indie author community is up in arms that Facebook is
going to start charging for you to make sales posts. Hmmm… Yes, it’s a bummer
but can you blame them? It should be no surprise, over the last couple of years
organic post reach has dwindled for pages to almost nothing. We were all used
to running around on Facebook posting “Buy My Book” but how much did that
really help our sales? Facebook is a SOCIAL media site, not a free advertising
site. We all shout that Facebook is greedy but what other type of business lets
you use their product for free to sell your product? It’s time we indies pulled
up our big girl panties and faced the fact that the age of promoting our books
for free is drawing to a close. Yes, it’s expensive to promote our books and
finding new ways to promote without spending a fortune will be hard. We are
creative, we can do it!
Let’s put it this way. Up until I ran a free/$.99 promotion
this month I was lucky if my royalty payments were $10. That’s right, even with
all the posts on Facebook my book sales stunk. It boils down to the fact that
you get what you pay for – free posting gets you a lot of nothing. For my
promotion I spent about $40 for my free book to be listed on some websites and
included in some emails by sites that specialize in free/cheap ebooks. Over 5
days my free book was downloaded over 17K times and I sold over 100 copies of
my $.99 ebook. For an author that was lucky to sell 50 books per year that is
HUGE!
So, I will continue to connect with readers on Facebook but
I am not convinced that social media is the best use of my time and/or
advertising dollars.
Until next time,
Happy reading!
L.A. Remenicky
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