Twitter Won’t Sell Your Books — I Tried!
But don’t abandon it if you’re a writer — just get smarter with social media
An article by City Stone Publishing’s author, Miles Etherton
The writer’s nirvana
What is the Holy Grail for an author? If you ask, chances are you might get one or several of the following responses:
- I want to be a better writer
- I have insights to share which will benefit and add value to readers
- I hope to grow a community of interest
- My author brand needs developing
- I need subscribers!
And every respondent will almost certainly also want to: Sell more books.
Creating vs. Marketing
In my experience, the writer’s biggest challenge is balancing our innate need to “create” and get our words onto a page and the realities of marketing and bringing our work to the reader. I have a career in communications and marketing, but this can still be a daunting task, not least as there are so many potential routes open to us. If ever the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none” had relevance — it’s here.
My journey has taken me in many marketing directions, attempting diverse approaches to see what works, what doesn’t and, not forgetting, what I enjoy doing. It’s a brutal truth, not everyone feels comfortable with “self-promotion” so you need to find something that is comfortable and effective.
Twitter is a platform I’ve been using for years and I now have a healthy following approaching 8,000. This was going to a fertile ground for demonstrating my marketing skills and selling more books. Or at least so I thought.
My two month Twitter experiment
My plan was to spend two months trying different approaches to advertising my first novel through Twitter with a variety of techniques. [PS — I won’t post a link to my book here or expect you to buy it, just in case you were wondering!]
If you’re not a regular user of Twitter, here a few stats to boggle your mind. According to industry estimates, the platform has 192 million active daily users and is pumping out half a billion tweets a day. Twitter also accounts for 10% of the world’s overall social media base.
By the numbers alone, this is a platform writers need to be engaging with, right?
Well, yes, but who will hear me amongst the noise I hear you say? This is an ongoing challenge with Twitter. Industry estimates vary on the lifespan of a Tweet with anywhere been 15–20 minutes considered the time before your content vanishes into the cyber ether. The same experts believe this adds legitimacy to sharing your message several times a day to mitigate this and to capture greater interest from your post.
The first month
Armed with this knowledge, and keen to make my content (well, let’s be honest they were adverts) stand out, I used the following approaches:
- Strong and impactful imagery capturing the essence of my novel
- A clear “Call to Action” to buy my book and where it’s available from
- Featuring my Amazon rating and number of reviews to add credibility
- Tweeting several times during the day, with different images and messaging, to keep things fresh and get my message seen
- Strategic use of hashtags to make it more visible, including: #Kindle #bestseller #thriller #ebook #Applebooks #barnesandnoble #Googlebooks #kobo #Smashwords #lulu #awriting #amreading #Writers #WritingCommunity
Here’s one of the content assets I created.
This was March’s approach. So how was Twitter’s analytics stacking up in terms of the impact of my posts? I stayed off the platform in February so I could get a genuine sense of how well my “advert” posts were performing. At a glance, things looked great. Just 27 impressions in February rose to over 31,000 impressions in March. My content strategy was four posts a day, spread from early morning to the start of the evening. Each post targeted a different format of my book (Kindle, Print or Audio) as well as its availability from other retailers, and with different straplines.
As my comparator, I was also sprinkling in other posts on general issues around writing and my activism work.
How many books did I sell? Not a single one. Back to the drawing board but with the view that this was an exercise to learn from.
Month two — correcting my mistakes, refining my approach
For April, I threw video posts and Followerwonk into my arsenal of marketing approaches to crack my Twitter selling duck. Evidence shows videos or animations are up to six times more likely to be retweeted. What do retweets make? Wider visibility to potential buyers of my book.
Followerwonk is a valuable tool — with a free and paid feature set — and I delved into the free version to look at the times my followers were most often online and at their most active. With the new insights that between 2–4 pm GMT was the sweet spot, I reduced my posts down to two a day within this time window. My secret weapon — a video trailer of my book — was now featuring as one of these two daily posts. I was good to go in April.
Let’s look at the numbers.
It was clear that focusing on the time window Followerwonk identified more than made up for reducing from four posts a day to two, overall impressions increased a little and the use of video was paying off too.
But — did I sell any books? This month I sold one Kindle book.
The aftermath
Overall, my tweets total was 226 in March and 222 in April, although this also covers the non-promotional posts. When I look at Twitter’s analytics my best performing post in March was announcing the pre-publication draft of my second novel with 4,363 impressions, although this did better as I pinned this to the top of my profile. The most effective “advert” post came in 7th with 448 impressions.
In April, my leading post was about the launch of my new website with 2,852 impressions. The highest “advert” post only ranked 43rd with 162 impressions.
The upside was my Twitter follower base grew, and my engagement (comments, retweets and likes) was much greater for posts that weren’t trying to sell my book.
What can we learn from this?
In simple terms, Twitter was not effective to help me sell my first novel. If I’d tried Twitter’s advertising options, it might have been different. Perhaps I’ll explore that in the future, but selling through organic posts did not justify the effort. This appears to be a common experience and view among social media experts and authors.
So should you stop using Twitter if you’re a writer? Absolutely not. One of the most important lessons for me is getting clarity on why I use different social media. Twitter is by definition, brief and fleeting. It is a means to grow and engage a community, share views and debate a point. Users of Twitter, at least those sharing my interests, did not want my repeated adverts — no matter their quality. But, if you can interest them in an issue or a community, they are far more likely to engage with you now and in the long run which builds your credibility and author brand — and who knows, maybe even buy your book one day!
Sources:
If you enjoyed my article, here are a few more from me that hopefully catch your interest!
