Instead of just passively reading what comes across my computer screen, I recently decided to dive in and look at the research and the numbers and figure out what is really going on under the surface.

I took at look at the common beliefs many of us have about social media marketing and lined those up with what the numbers tell us.

What I found staggered me.

In this article I’m going to walk through 3 of the most common beliefs we have about social media marketing and show how each one is a myth. Then I’m going to share with you 3 ways to use social media marketing that have a real impact on growing your authors platform and successfully launching a book.

Let’s get started.

Myth #1: A Big Social Media Audience = Big Book Sales

Awhile back, in an interview specifically for authors, Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Jab Jab Jab, Right Hook and Crushing It made the claim that if a fiction writer started up Twitter and/or Instagram accounts for their book’s characters it would be the difference between selling 200 copies of their book and selling 25,000 copies of their book.

The problem is, there is no evidence to back up a claim like this.

In my work over the last year with dozens of top bestselling authors, many of which of large social media followings, I’ve never heard or seen anything close to this happening. I’d be extremely surprised if there is a single author who could show you even 1000 extra sales by creating Twitter accounts for their book’s characters.

So many social media marketing experts love to talk about the effectiveness of social media marketing for authors yet never back it up with real numbers, experiments, and case studies.

I have personally tested the effectiveness of social media marketing with my clients. These aren’t tests on the scale of my Twitter following of sub–6000. These are tests with people who are connected to hundreds of thousands and even millions of people.

Here are few examples:

• I worked with a client that had over 160,000 Twitter followers. We tracked the sales in promoting his book on the platform and it resulted in less than 400 sales.
• An author friend had someone with well over 1 million Twitter followers promote his book and it resulted in no noticeable bump in book sales.
• In multiple tests across many social media accounts, it’s a normal thing to get well under 1% – more like 0.25% – of your followers or fans to take action on a given update. This is just clicking on a link, much less converting to a sale. (Try it yourself with the service bit.ly to see how many people click on your links.)

Also, not to continue picking on Gary Vaynerchuk, but when his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook came out, I did a bit of simple arithmetic.

At the time, here were his social media numbers:

• Twitter – 1,016,311
• Facebook – 147,604
• Instagram – 34,563
• LinkedIn – 152,735
• Pinterest – 15,778

Through those five platforms, that was 1,366,991 connections.

(Stop and think about the daunting task of building that kind of following on social media.)

Now consider this: in the first week of sales for Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary sold about 25,000 copies (according to Nielson BookScan). If you take out all the other promotion he did – the dozens of interviews, the appearances on NPR, CNN, Huffington Post, etc – and assume all of the book sales came through social media, that’s still only a 1.82% conversion rate.

That means for every one book sale, he needed 55 connections on social media (again, assuming every single sale came through social media).

Now consider your own social media. Think through how much time you’re spending on it in hopes that it turns into book sales and do the math to see how many book sales are going to result.

It gets worse.

I did some digging around to find out what kind of engagement rate you can expect on the various platforms.

Here’s what I found.

Twitter

• An engagement rate between 0.02% and 0.09% is considered good. That’s 0.2 to 0.9 reactions (I’ll define that shortly) for every 1000 followers. Anything from 0.09% to 0.33% is considered “high”. Anything over 0.33% is considered “very high” and is rare. That would be 3.3 reactions per 1000 followers. [1]
• The engagement rate is calculated by finding the average number of likes, comments, and retweets on a Twitter post and dividing it by the numbers of followers.

Facebook

• An engagement rate between 1% and 2% is considered good for a marketing campaign. That’s when you’re paying to promote your updates. [2]
• The engagement includes clicks, shares, likes, comments, and follows.

Instagram

Instagram is currently the most engaged social media platform.

• Engagement between 1% and 3.5% is considered average/good. Between 3.5% and 6% is high and anything above 6% is a very high engagement rate. [3]
• Engagement includes likes and comments (remember that you can’t directly link to anything in an Instagram post).

What do these numbers mean?

Think about that for a minute. Let it sink in.

The amount of people that may like, comment, follow, retweet, share, etc is much lower than the number of people that will actually click through and buy a book. So if “good” numbers of engagement are around 1% to 3%, what do you think the numbers are for an update on any of your platforms to translate to even a single book sale?

A bit more bad news…

The bigger your following gets, the more your engagement goes down.

If you have less than 1000 followers on Twitter, you may get an interaction rate of 0.18%. But by the time you build that up to 100,000 followers, it will drop to 0.04% and once you break 1,000,000 followers, it will fall to 0.01%. [4]

A similar drop in engagement numbers extends over every social media platform as your audience grows. [4]

A Big Social Media Audience ≠ Book Sales

Consider your own social media. Think through how much time you’re spending on it in hopes that it turns into book sales and do the math to see how many book sales are going to result.

Myth #2: Social Media Will Make You Famous

Take a look at the top 100 people on Twitter by follower count. Now, how many of them are not independently famous outside of Twitter?

Social media marketing is not a way to grow your “fame”, it’s a reflection of your fame. There are, of course, outliers of people that became famous as a result of social media, but these are outliers.

If you think through how you find new followers on social media, it’s rarely because you just happened upon them on social media. You find about them out in the world, and then find them on social media to follow them.

This is the norm, not the exception.

If you’re focusing on growing your social media following, you’re focusing on the wrong thing. It will always grow slowly when you’re running around trying to build your follower and like count.

You should be focusing on your obscurity problem – the fact that not enough people know you exist – and the way to solve that is not social media.

MYTH #3: Social Media Marketing Actually Works, You Just Haven’t Figured Out the Formula Yet

Honestly, this is how I often feel.

I look around at all the advice and “success stories” and think maybe I’m missing something or just doing it wrong. This may be how you’re feeling too.

It’s not true though.

I’ve gotten the chance to pull the curtain back several times, and the truth is always much more mundane than you think. Here’s the common things I’ve seen in “successful” social media campaigns:

• It wasn’t actually successful. This is the most common. We see something bouncing around the social mediaverse and assume it must be selling like hotcakes. Once you get a look behind the scenes though, it’s not usually the case.
• There was something else going on. For the successful campaigns, there was usually something else going on that wasn’t as public. In the book launch examples I give in this article, I was questioned after the fact by several people who assumed our social media campaign was a big hit. The truth is, most of the book sales came from everything but social media. Social media was just the most public thing so people made assumptions about it’s effectiveness. It’s the tip of the iceberg that you can see, but what really drives sales is hidden behind-the-scenes.
• The scale was enormous. I addressed this in Myth #1, but the successes I’ve seen selling things via social media is because the scale was enormous. Your 5k, 10k or 50k followers/fans aren’t going to generate many sales for you.

At this point, I’ve spent a good bit of time pointing out the myths of social media when it comes to marketing. My hope is that it will save you a lot of time and frustration and help you see through a lot of the misinformation that is swirling around out there.

But I don’t want to just leave you with the myths. I want to share with you how you can effectively use social media.

Social media is just another tool in your toolbox. When people try to use it like the above, it’s the equivalent of grabbing a hammer to get a screw into a board. It’ll work a bit, but will mostly waste time and frustrate you.

What I want to show you now is the right way to use social media to build your platform.

Here are 3 truths about social media marketing for authors.

Truth #1: It Is A Great 1-on-1 Connection Tool

When I talk about Outreach and connecting with influencers, it’s often hard to make that first connection. Either the person doesn’t respond to your email, or you’re not even sure what to email them.

This is where social media marketing can be very effective. Even influencers who have teams of people who maintain their email inbox are often maintaining their Twitter or Instagram account themselves. It can be a great way to get past the gatekeepers and introduce yourself for the first time.

This has worked for me several times. I’ve wanted to connect with someone. I emailed them and never heard back, so I reached out with social media and got a response. Then I was able to follow-up with email and got a response.

Social media is not a mass strategy. It’s a 1-to–1 strategy.

Experiment with thinking of social media more as a 1-to–1 tool instead of a way to communicate with a mass of people. You’ll start to see the effectiveness go up, your time wasted go down and your frustration be set free.

As you build your platform, the number of people you are connected to will continue to grow. When you first get started, it’ll seem pretty easy to keep track of everyone. But as the numbers grow and you meet more people, it’s going to be harder to stay connected to everyone.

This is where social media can be extremely helpful.

I’ve been able to stay connected to people who I’ve met at conferences, have emailed me about my book or met in some other way. This is fun on a personal level, but also extremely helpful for building my platform.

Truth #2: It's Easier to Leverage Other People's Followings Than to Build Your Own

Since my book came out, I’ve had a lot of people share the book on Instagram. I went back through everyone who shared the book and added up their followers.

It was over 600,000 people.

By inviting people to share your content on social media, you’ll be able to reach many, many more people than you could with much less time and effort than building your own following.

Here’s the other thing to consider…

Most people don’t have email lists. Most people don’t have a blog. Most people don’t guest contribute to other blogs. The typical person that waits tables or does data input only has one way to share content online… social media. By inviting people to share your content on social media, it allows them to be involved with what you’re doing and help spread the word in the only way they can.

While Myth #3 above still holds true, making your content easy to share and inviting people to do so is a great way to spread your message.

Truth #3: Email Marketing Is Still Far Better Than Social Media Marketing For Authors

According to a recent study, people value email 26x more than they do social media.

Let’s compare engagement rates.

In the case of email marketing, we’ll look at open rates.

MailChimp recently put out a report that shows industry wide open rates for email marketing, and the lowest average number is 15.66%. [5]

Compare that to the engagement rates of social media from above.

You shouldn’t be trying to build your social media following, you should be building an email list.

That is where you will get the most long term engagement in a way that actually drives book sales.

(If you don’t have an email list yet, I wrote a step-by-step guide for you.)

Why are you on social media?

When you’re engaging with social media, it’s important to remember your goals. Are you using it for fun and to stay connected with friends, family and colleagues? Then it’s great. If you are hoping to build a huge following that will turn into big book sales down the road, you are going to find yourself frustrated with a lot of wasted time behind you.

Also, more importantly, be suspect of advice you read online – even this article. Judge it against what you’ve experienced and make sure people are backing their advice up with real world experience instead of anecdotal conjecture.

With all the ideas, tools and tips I share, my goal is to help you get the most impact out of everything you do. You can dig a hole with a spoon, but it’s a lot easier with a shovel. The same goes for social media. Yes, it can have impact on your platform. Yes, it can help you sell books. But if you try to use it for something it’s not built for, you’ll find yourself digging a hole with a spoon.

Footnotes:

1. Mee, Georgia. “What Is a Good Engagement Rate on Twitter?” Blog. Accessed August 24, 2018. .

2.”What’s a Good Facebook Engagement Rate?” Aamplify | Marketing Expertise Outsource Capability. Accessed August 24, 2018.

3. Mee, Georgia. “What Is a Good Engagement Rate on Instagram?” Blog. Accessed August 24, 2018.

4. “Which Social Media Sites Get The Most Engagement?” How Much Should You Budget For Marketing In 2018? Accessed August 24, 2018.

5. “Average Open Rate for Email & Other Email Benchmarks.” MailChimp. June 13, 2018. Accessed August 24, 2018.

There is no better way to build long-lasting connections with readers, which is the definition of marketing.

It easily trumps social media, for building a long-term author platform and for sheer book-selling power.

It’s how first-time authors are launching New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers.

It’s the foundation of your author platform.

In fact, other than writing well and consistently, building your email list should be your Number One goal as an author.

That’s all well and good, you're thinking — but how do I go about actually setting everything up?

We're going to tackle that in this article, with these five steps:

1. Choose an email provider
2. Decide on your “Why?”
3. Write your first email
4. Create the two most important email signup forms
5. Get your first 100 subscribers (this week)

1. Choose an Email Provider

There are dozens of email marketing providers out there. In fact, way too many to wrap your head around and test adequately.

So let me save you some time:

Sign up with ConvertKit.

(BTW – that link will get you 30 days free with them.)

Last year I switched to ConvertKit from MailChimp for email marketing for authors and have never looked back. Their platform is easy to use, especially for non-techies. They have great features. And their customer support is amazing.

Seriously, signup for ConvertKit then move on to step #2.

2. Decide on Your “Why?”

People already get too much email. Their inbox is crowded, and they’re not actively looking to add more to the pile.

So why will they sign up for your email list?

Because you’re going to give them a really good reason to!

Let’s start with what NOT to do: Do not have a bland, unappealing request such as “Sign up for my newsletter” or “Get my updates.”

Remember: WIIFM

You have to answer their first and biggest question, which is: “What’s in it for me?”

What is a compelling reason for people to sign up for your email list?

The simplest and best method is to create a giveaway.

Create a compelling offer — free content that can only be accessed by subscribing to your email list.

Here are a few ideas:

• One of Your Books – “Sign up now and I’ll immediately send you my bestselling book, The Truth About Why You Don't Like Your Day Job — and What to Do About It”
• A PDF with Tips, Secrets or Insider Information – “Enter your email address below to download my free PDF 8 Secrets to a Healthier, Sexier You”
• A Course or Walkthrough – “Where can I send your free 30-day book marketing course?”
• Interviews – “I’ve interviewed three of your favorite novelists. Where should I send the recordings?”

This part of the process can be a real sticking point for many people.

It’s easy to get caught up in trying to come up with the perfect giveaway, or to assume that the one you have isn’t good enough.

Based on my experience in building, assessing, and consulting on hundreds of author websites, here’s my advice:

• Something is better than nothing. ANY free giveaway is going to work better than “Sign up for my newsletter!” (which is all about you, not them).
• Let your friends decide. Come up with three ideas, then ask ten to twenty people which one they’d rather have. Go with the popular opinion.
• Don’t give away the first chapter of your book. Well, you can — just don’t call it that. It’s not compelling enough. Name it something more compelling.
• Try different things. You don’t have to stick with your first idea. You can always change it later.

Whatever you offer people, make sure it answers the WIIFM question.

The goal is to give people a compelling reason to sign up for your email list.

3. Write Your First Email

Once you've gotten set up with a solid email provider and decided on your giveaway, it’s time to write your first three emails.

Here’s how:

http://commoninsights.wistia.com/medias/bt7dgb39ca?embedType=iframe&videoWidth=1200

This email is the first step towards creating that long-term relationship with your readers.

4. Create the Two Most Important Signup Forms

Now that you have your list set up with an email provider, have your giveaway ready, and have your first emails written … it’s time to let people sign up!

There are two main online forms you want to create:

1. Website form(s) – As mentioned above, your Number One goal is to get people to sign up for your email list. This means that your website’s Number One goal is to get people to sign up for your email list.
2. Link form – When you share your signup link on social media or invite someone via email to sign up for your list, you’ll want to have a stand-alone form ready that they can link to directly.

Both of these forms are very easy to create with ConvertKit.

Here’s how:

http://commoninsights.wistia.com/medias/4xgp742z2g?embedType=iframe&videoWidth=1200

Then you can create your Link Form directly in ConvertKit:

http://commoninsights.wistia.com/medias/mst9gifk58?embedType=iframe&videoWidth=1200

At this point, you’ve come a long way.

You’ve set up your email list, created your compelling giveaway, written your first three emails, and created some forms so people can sign up easily. Great job!

Now we can begin the real work of email marketing for authors…

5. Get Your First 100 Subscribers (This Week)

How do you go from one subscriber (you) to 100?

And how can you pull this off in the next seven days?

The first thing to remember is this: you’re not inviting people to join your email list.

You’re inviting them to download your free giveaway.

Instead of saying “Sign up for my newsletter,” you’re saying “Download my latest book for free” or “Let me send you my free PDF.”

Starting from that crucial point, here’s five steps you can take to get your first 100 subscribers:

1. Invite your social media following. Post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., and let people know about the giveaway you have available.
2. Add it to your email signature. Automatically invite everyone you email to join your list. This is what mine looks like:
   
3. Make it the Number One thing on your website. In Step 4, I showed you how to install SumoMe and add a pop-up or slide-in signup form to your website. If you haven't yet, stop right now and do that!
4. Put it in your book. Change the last page of your book to include an invitation to join the email list.
5. Ask new subscribers to share. Individually email each of your first 100 subscribers, to thank them for signing up, ask for their feedback, and ask them to share your free giveaway invitation with their friends.

–

Email Marketing for Authors

Your email list is the foundation of the author platform that is going to support your entire writing career.

Take the time to set it up right, and start getting your first group of subscribers now.

If you’ve read my previous article on social media, you’ll know that my advice goes against conventional wisdom.

In this article, I want to dig into Facebook—what it’s good for, and what it’s not good for—and how you can avoid the common time sinks and pitfalls most authors run into.

Let’s start here …

Strategy vs Tools

Never, ever assume that you have to use any one platform or tool to be a successful author. Even when it's my advice you're reading.

Every single activity that gets your non-writing time should be required to make its case for why you’re using it.

Just like Twitter, email lists, blogs, GoodReads, and Amazon, Facebook is just one more tool in your marketing toolbox.

You should use it only when it makes sense for you, and not when it doesn’t.

Let’s start with an example I’ve used before …

Imagine me having this conversation with my wife:

Her: I need you to build something new for the house. I need—

Me: Should I use a hammer?

That's putting the cart before the horse, right?

Because I first need to know what she needs me to build. Then I need to find the right instructions on how to build it, and figure out what materials I’ll need.

Only then can I decide what tools are needed for the job.

Using Facebook or any other marketing tool works the same way. Before you make that decision, you have to understand how it fits into your overall author platform.

And what it does well, and what it doesn't do well.

Because if you try to use Facebook for something it’s not designed to do, you’re just going to get frustrated over the lack of results.

I could try to get a nail into a board by using a screwdriver. But it’s the wrong tool for that job.

I could maybe get it started, but I’m mainly going to be frustrated about how it just can’t get the job done.

The realization that “Facebook is just a tool” is the missing ingredient in so many authors’ blogging efforts [1].

What is Facebook Good (and Bad) For?

Here are things Facebook is Good for:

• Connecting one-on-one with individual people. Because of the way people immediately and openly interact on social media, it’s often easier to connect with them on Facebook than by phone or email. You can also get past a lot of gatekeepers by directly reaching out to someone on Facebook.
• Staying connected to small, focused groups. One of the main reasons I stay on Facebook is because of the handful of groups I'm involved in. They allow me to interact and learn from other people, in one space. This is not a marketing strategy, where I spam a group with marketing content about my new book launch. Rather, it’s another form of the above—it allows me to connect directly with new people.

Here is what Facebook is Bad for:

• One-to-many communication. Only 12%–16% of your fans see your page updates [2] [3]. Let that sink in for a minute. A big part of this is because Facebook actively culls posts out of people's newsfeeds that it thinks they won't be interested in. You cannot assume that posting anything on Facebook will actually be seen by your friends and fans.

If you are able to build up 10,000 people who have liked your page on Facebook, at the absolute most, only 16% of them will even have your update appear on their feed.

AYP: Addressing Your Protests

At this point, when I’m talking about Facebook, I usually start getting a lot of pushback.

So let me address several common questions/arguments:

“But I heard a story about Author X doing _____________ on Facebook, and they sold a ton of books!”

We’ve all heard these rumors urban legends lies stories about an author doing something on Facebook and selling a bajillion copies of their book.

I’ve been behind the scenes on enough of these launches, and talked to the people running them often enough, to know that one of two things happened:

1. It was a complete fluke. They may have done something on Facebook that sold a bunch of books, but they don’t really understand how or why it worked, and it’s completely unrepeatable. Lightning strikes from time to time, but I don’t count on that happening for me.
2. More than likely, the author was doing a lot of other stuff behind the scenes. This is something else I point out in my other article about social media. In most cases, the social media presence is the visible tip of the iceberg in a book launch. It’s what everyone can see, but it's not what is really selling books.

Posting on Facebook is not the way to sell a lot of books.

Sure, a handful of your connections will buy your book when you announce it. But it is not a one-to-many strategy that will reliably sell thousands of copies of your books.

“But I like Facebook! Why are you telling me to not use it for marketing?”

This is where I encourage you to separate pleasure from work.

I binge-watched the show Braindead last weekend on Amazon Prime. I did that for fun. I didn’t call it “story research” or tell myself that I was getting valuable work done.

If you’re on Facebook for fun, then go for it. I’m not telling you what to do with your free time.

What I am telling you, is that all those hours you’re spending scrolling, Liking, Wow-ing, and commenting on Facebook is not book marketing.

It’s not helping your long-term game of building a platform that will support a book launch.

“But it seems to work for me!”

My answer to that is, Test it.

Use a service like Bitly to see how many people are actually clicking links that you post on Facebook. Then track your book sales, to see if people on Facebook are actually buying your book.

It's important that you test your assumptions and get data to make decisions on.

Facebook feels like it works, but when I've tested it, the sales numbers I get for the amount of time it takes to build up a big following are abysmal.

What to do with all those friends and fans?

I hear this question a lot. What if you’ve already built up a solid presence on Facebook? How can you use that in some constructive way?

First, change your strategy. Focus on using Facebook to connect with interesting people, not to build up a huge following.

Second, invite people to join your email list. As I’ve said before, building up your email list should be your #1 strategy. That does work for one-to-many communication.

Come up with a compelling offer—a blog post that links to your website, which you know a particular group would be interested in, or a giveaway related to your book launch, for example—and post that on Facebook, inviting your friends and fans to join your email list.

Facebook is a useful tool

It can be a great place to connect one-on-one with people, and learn together.

But it’s not where you should be spending a large majority of your time building your author platform.

Keep Facebook in perspective.

Understand what that tool is good for, and use it accordingly.

I talk constantly about the importance of setting up an email list. It’s the single most important thing you can do to build your author platform.

I make this very clear in my book Your First 1000 Copies:

“Your #1 goal as an author should be to grow your email list as much as possible. Write that on a post-it. Recite it to yourself every morning. Tattoo it on your forehead. Do whatever it takes to make sure that developing your email list is the #1 goal of your platform strategy.”

So let's say you've got that working for you.

You've set up an email list with a solid email service provider, and you've started getting subscribers.

Now what?

Most writers let those subscriber names just sit there, gathering dust. They never actually email them.

Or they only email them right before their new book comes out.

Which begs the question …

How often should you email your subscribers?

The conventional wisdom is, “Don’t email them too often, because you don’t want to annoy them—they might unsubscribe!”

However: Take an even halfway logical look at that statement, and you’ll see it’s false reasoning.

I’m subscribed to the email newsletter NextDraft, which sends me an email every day. And every day, I read it.

I also get emails every day or two from an online clothing store I like.

I’ve kept my subscriptions to both of them. I'm not at all annoyed by the frequency of their emails.

Because here’s what I’ve learned:

People have a high tolerance for receiving useful, entertaining content.

It’s not about frequency. Your goal is to focus on sending content that is compelling.

My definition of marketing is:

1. Creating long-lasting connections with people (getting people onto your email list)
2. Being relentlessly helpful (sending them useful, entertaining content)

So what does that mean for your email list?

How often should you send? What should you send?

If you’re not sure where to start, here’s what I suggest:

1. Set a schedule

Remember, the schedule isn’t for your readers. It’s for you.

Most people are not going to be checking their in-box every day, waiting for another email from you.

You need to stay in touch, and setting a schedule ensures that you don’t go six months between emails.

If you don’t have a schedule you’re sticking to, it’ll be too easy to just stop sending emails.

Then suddenly, when your next book is about to come out, you'll start spamming them with messages to buy your book, even though they haven’t heard from you in a year.

You don't appreciate that sort of non-involvement from the people you subscribe to, and neither do your subscribers.

So pick a schedule, and stick to it.

2. Decide on the Content

It’s important that you decide early on what type of content you're going to send your list.

Every week, Shawn Coyne publishes a new blog post at StoryGrid.com. And every Tuesday afternoon, he sends out a link to that new blog post to everyone on his email list.

He doesn’t have to decide every week what he's going to send. He decided what content to send a long time ago.

He just has to send it.

That’s only twelve pieces of original content a year, and twelve author updates a year.

That is a very doable schedule, even if you've got a full-time day job.

It ensures that you invest in your relationship with your readers, and stay connected to them.

3. Stick with it for 6 months

Do not change your schedule for six months. You need to give it time to see how it’s working.

I’ve seen two types of mistakes that can occur when writers don't adhere to this kind of set schedule.

First, you start scaling back on how many emails you send.

Maybe you got a bunch of unsubscribes, or got a mean reply from a reader. Or you just got lazy.

Either way, you start slipping and missing your deadlines. The problem with this, of course, is that it too quickly turns into you not emailing your email list for six months.

Second, you send a bunch of emails early on.

A lot of people get excited about the prospect of sending great content to their list. So they quickly write a lot of content, and decide to send three emails in a single week.

Sounds great. But at that pace, you’re going to get burnt out very easily.

You’ll send three this week. Then three next week. Then nothing for three months.

The excitement is good, but breaking the schedule is not.

If you’re inspired to write three pieces of content, go ahead and create them.

Now you’re ahead of schedule, and don’t have to worry about email content for three months. You can work on your next manuscript instead!

If you change your schedule too soon, you’ll not have given it enough time to see how well it’s working.

Wait six months, then step back and evaluate your schedule.

How does it feel? Are people enjoying the emails? Are you enjoying the content you’re sending? What could be tweaked and changed?

If you are easily creating enough content to start sending out once a week, make the change and stick to that schedule for three months.

If you’ve been struggling to get the emails out on time, maybe scale back to once a month, or once every three weeks.

Building your email list is important, but so is staying engaged with your new audience.

So pick a schedule, choose the content, and then stick to it. This will ensure that you’re investing in your audience.

You want them to be excited to buy your next book, and you help them do that when you use your blogs and updates, shared at a steady pace, to keep them engaged with your work.

Because people unsubscribing from your list is not the worst thing.

The real tragedy is not staying steadily involved with your readers in positive ways.

I pretend I don't have any.

I play a game where I assume future Tim will be lazy and unfocused, and will distract himself from doing any meaningful work.

So if that’s true … what can I do to make my future self do the work needed to reach his goals, even when he wants nothing but slothfulness?

The best method is to create an environment where it's extremely hard to not work.

Cut out enough distractions, and I’ll work because there’s nothing else to do. (Pssst–this is one of the reasons I get up at 4:15 am. Those quiet early hours are a great time for pure focus.)

One of the biggest distractions I've had to cut out of my life is social media. Because 99.9% of the time I was spending on it wasn't getting me anywhere near my goals in life.

So here’s the eight things I did to stop letting social media kill my productivity, so I could get more writing done:

1. Install RescueTime

“Know your enemy and know yourself.” – Sun Tzu

I guarantee that the amount of time you think you spend on social media, and the amount of time you actually spend on social media, are two very different things.

Time management software RescueTime has a forever-free version that will track exactly what you spend your time doing when you're on your computer.

Try it. What it reveals will surprise you.

2. Be Honest With Yourself

“But it’s fun!” – Joanna Penn, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, in an argument with me about spending time on social media

Many people have gotten the wrong impression from my articles about social media. They think I hate it.

Not true! I love funny cat pictures and the I Fucking Love Science Facebook page as much as anyone else.

But I am careful to distinguish between things I do for fun and actual productive work.

As we’ve seen, social media is terrible at actually selling books. Yet far too many authors are wasting far too much time on social media, telling themselves they’re “networking” or “marketing” or “building a community.”

When I watch TV, I don’t try to convince myself that I’m “learning about story structure” or “researching new advertising methods.”

I’m watching TV because it’s fun. That’s it. And that’s OK.

Sure, you may be interacting with readers when you're on social media. And yes, some of them will buy your book.

But it is still the slowest, hardest road to successfully marketing your books.

It’s like digging a ditch with your hands when a perfectly good back hoe is available. Will you make some progress? Sure. Is it the best, most effective way to do it? No way.

3. Kill the News Feed

“By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his [or her] chosen goal or destination.” – Christopher Columbus

There are several groups on Facebook that I’m a part of, and that I really enjoy. But at one point I realized that whenever I tried to visit these groups, I got constantly distracted by my news feed.

Solution: Get rid of the news feed!

If you’re using Chrome, it’s really easy with the News Feed Extractor.

On Firefox and Safari, use this handy Quiet Facebook hack.

Now I can visit Facebook, message people, and check in on my groups–without getting distracted!

4. Silence All Social Media Notifications

“Silence is a true friend who never betrays.” – Confucius

And I mean all of them.

No text chirps, no mobile notifiers, no email bleeps.

This will keep you distraction-free, and I promise–you won’t miss anything important.

5. Uninstall Mobile Apps

“Delete the negative; accentuate the positive!” – Donna Karan

It’s far too easy to pick up your phone and lose yourself in social media.

Delete those apps. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest … make them all gone.

Instead, catch up on reading with the Pocket reader app, or listen to an audiobook with Audible.

6. Block Access

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self.” – Igor Stravinsky

If you just can’t stay away from social media, block all access to it from your computer.

If you’re on a Mac, try the free SelfControl app. If you’re on a PC, you can get Stop Procrastinating for $5.

If you’re using Chrome, there’s StayFocusd. And in Firefox, you can use LeechBlock.

7. Automate Your Updates

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

But what about your updates?

It’s not just about consuming social media feeds. You go on those sites to post updates as well.

This is where I recommend you automate your social media.

With a tool like Buffer, you can load a number of updates all at once, to be posted over time.

Even better is a tool I’ve been using called MeetEdgar.

It allows you to create a library of helpful and interesting updates that automatically get posted on a schedule that you pre-set.

It’s greatly increased my social media engagement, while running entirely on autopilot.

8. Plan Your Social Media Time

“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” – Alan Lakein

Every night while I’m letting the dog out before bed, I check my social media. It gives me a few minutes to catch up on things, and then I’m done.

If you need more time, do it during your lunch break, or in the last twenty minutes of the day.

Instead of social media being your default action when you’re bored (or avoiding writing), plan out a set amount of your time, so it’s a conscious decision.

–

What do you get when you combine all of these?

Less distraction and more time to do meaningful, impactful work as a writer. 

Balance the amount of time you spend consuming other people’s creativity vs. doing your own creating.

Put these eight ideas into practice, and you'll be able to keep social media in the proper place in your life.

He, and many like him, like to make lofty promises that if authors would just spend enough time on social media then they’ll sell tens of thousands of books.

Unfortunately, this is a lie. Social media doesn’t sell books.

Your blog won’t either because people aren’t reading it. Even your fans. RSS is dead – the nerds use it but not the general population. So you have to rely on people remembering to show up twice a month when you post something new, which isn’t going to happen.

Here’s a few more things that don’t sell books:

• Commenting on blogs
• Podcasting
• Making YouTube videos
• Posting in forums
• Starting a Facebook page

So what works? What can you use to reliably and predictably sell books?

An email list.

That’s right, that old marketing tool from the 90s is still alive and kicking. It will also outperform your social media, podcast and blog combined by at least a factor of five.

This isn’t another anecdotal post with no real numbers to back it up. I’ve worked with over 100 authors and launched multiple #1 New York Times best selling books. Most of the books I work with get basically no traditional media coverage so all of the promotion has to come from the author’s own fan base.

In fact, last year I launched a book for an author who had two interesting marketing assets:

• A twitter following of over 200,000
• An email list of over 50,000

I wanted to see which would sell more books, so I ran a test. I promoted the book on the Twitter feed and then promoted the book to the email list and then tracked the sales separately. Here’s what I found: For every one book I could sell via Twitter, I could sell six via the email list. That means someone that signs up for the author’s email list is 24 times more likely to purchase a book than someone that follows the author on Twitter.

This isn’t an outlier. I’ve repeatedly tested the effectiveness of blogs, social media, podcasts, forums, webinars, speaking and pretty much any other way of promoting a book, and nothing works as well or as consistently as an email list.

If you are an author, your #1 marketing goal should be to build your email list.

Everything you do should funnel people to your email list. Everything.

• When you speak, put a slide in your presentation inviting people to sign up for your email list.
• When you write something on a blog, link to a page inviting people to join your email list.
• When you post stuff on your Facebook page, invite people to join your email list.
• When you publish your book, make sure there are links in the content to your website where people can sign up for your email list.
• When you launch your website, make sure you’re inviting visitors to signup for your email list (more on this shortly). Not buy a book. Not read your blog post. Not, for god sakes, following you on Twitter.

My hope for you is that you won’t just be a someone that wrote a book once. Instead, you’ll be an author that successfully writes and publishes multiple books because you know, before you pen the first word, you have thousands of fans on an email list ready to buy.

If you want to get your author platform moving and start building your email list, here’s the steps to take.

1. Sign up for an email marketing service. I once met an author that was literally copy and pasting email addresses into Outlook every time he wanted to send an email to his fans. Don’t do this. Besides breaking the law, it’s extremely inefficient. The service I recommend is MailChimp. It’s free for up to 2000 subscribers and has great features and support.

2. Learn how to use it. MailChimp has a ton of great resources to learn the best ways to take advantage their platform. Yes, it will take time to learn but remember, this is your #1 marketing tool. Take the time to learn how to do it right.

3. Use a normal email template. Don’t get fancy with the emails you send out. Keep them simple. Graphics don’t work well. They scream “marketing” when people open it. Use a simple text template that is optimized for mobile. You want it to look like an email from a friend, not a marketing department. Click here to download the one we use and click here to learn how to upload it to your MailChimp account.

4. Send out a lot of emails. I send at least one a week. I know authors that send several emails every week. The bare minimum is once a month. You want to stay connected and top-of-mind so make sure your fans regularly hear from you.

5. Make your email sign up hard to resist. The #1 goal of your website should be to get people on your email list. Make your sign up front-and-center. Use contrasting colors to make it stand out. Put it at the top of the page, don’t bury it in the sidebar. Use a popup. Make it really hard for people that come to your site to not sign up for your email list.

6. Send out autoresponders when people sign up. With a tool like MailChimp, you can set emails to automatically get sent to anyone that signs up for your email list. Make sure promote your books and everything else you do as soon as people sign up. You can see how they work by signing up for my email list too.

Once you have all of this in place, you’re ready to get started. You’ve got a great service for email marketing. You’ve got your website setup to turn visitors into email subscribers. You’ve got a great template for sending out email. And you’ve made sure that everyone that signs up for your email list gets a couple emails promoting your book.

Do you see how all of this works together? You now know:

1. Anything you do to promote your work – interviews, guest posts, speaking, blogging, podcasting, etc – should lead people back to your website.
2. Since your websites #1 goal is to get people on your email list, those people coming in from your promotion are going to sign up.
3. Once they’re subscribed to your list, they will automatically get a series of emails promoting your books and other products/services.
4. Now you have direct access to their inbox for everything you want to promote in the future.

If you create this kind of system and make building your email list your #1 marketing goal, you will be building a platform that will not only sell your current book, but support your writing for your entire career.

Read more at http://betabeat.com/2014/02/attention-authors-the-tech-tool-that-really-makes-books-into-bestsellers/#ixzz2twsukV6K
Follow us: @betabeat on Twitter | betabeatNYO on Facebook

Have you ever stopped long enough to consider what, if any, impact this going to have on book sales?  What are you doing to measure what you're doing?

From my experience with the many authors I've worked with, there's two important things I've noticed:

• People spend way more time on social media than they think.  You may think you check it here and there, but if you actually keep track, you'll notice it's sucking up hours of your day, not counting the context switching problem.
• It has way less impact than they think.  Have you ever measured how many people are taking action with a given update in social media?  Have you weighed that against the impact of other things your could be doing with that time?

Let's take for instance the Twitter following of someone like Daniel Pink.  At almost 200,000 followers, he's got numbers that most authors would kill for.  However, if you look at the publicly available stats for the links he posts, they range from a top end of 1100 clicks to a low end of under 200 clicks.  The average click-through count for a given link is around 650.

That's a 0.325% click-through rate.

With apologies to Dan… by any marketing standard that's a complete failure.  And you're not even trying to get people to buy something.  What do you think the sales rate is going to be when you want them to pay attention enough to buy your book?

And, of course, this is not just Daniel Pink's Twitter following.  These rates are the same for the vast majority of authors using Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to “market” their work.

So what can you do?

• Track how much time you are spending on social media.  Use a service such as RescueTime to see how much time is being sucked up by these platforms.  You may be surprised at how much time you're spending surfing Pinterest instead of writing your book.
• Track the actual impact your time is making.  Is it converting to book sales?  If you aren't marketing your book, is it converting to people joining your email list?  If your follower count is going up, are other measurements going up as well such as click-throughs, email list signups, etc.  A few free tools to use for this are:
  • Bitly – track click-throughs
  • Google Analytics – track visitors from Social Media to email signups or other marketing goals
  • Amazon Affiliates – track how many people are purchasing your book through different marketing efforts

Finally…

I am not advocating that you immediately drop social media if it's not creating marketing value for you.  A lot of people merely enjoy using the platform to interact with friends and fans.  However, what I'm advocating here is to stop calling something “marketing” that is having little or no impact on building your platform and selling books.

What gets measured gets done.  Look hard at the time you're spending on social media and the impact it's having on your marketing platform before continuing to poor huge amounts of time and effort into building your following there.