Internship Post: Facebook

Marketing is difficult. My publisher has a list of promo pages and paid for promotional companies that we can refer to; however, there’s not a step-by-step list on how to market. It isn’t their fault. Even large publishing companies don’t necessarily do that. In fact, that’s why I even have an internship! Because the literary agents are expanding into an area publishers seem to have left behind (more on this some other time).

This is really going to be about what I thought I knew about marketing. I thought I was doing a great job. I increased my social media presence by 600%. New profiles, more consistent feeds / posts – I thought I had the hang of things.

Then I became a PR intern.

I wasn’t even using Facebook to its full potential!

5-10 posts a week per book. That’s the minimum. Sure, some weeks I had done that before, but I didn’t realize the difference of consistency and variety in where I was posting. I only posted to groups specific to my genre. That’s not enough.

1. Post to Kindle groups
2. Post to separate Nook and other Ereader specific groups
3. Post to general book groups (they’re often bigger anyways)
   1. Follow all rules of course and don’t spam
4. Post to activity groups that share some aspect of your book
   1. Parkour interests, city-specific interests, demonology interests, etc

Perhaps I was too shy. Maybe I didn’t realize how important reaching beyond my sphere was, but either way, until my PR internship, I hesitated, and who knows how many sales that could have cost me.

Avoid my mistake. Try everything. Ask questions – reach out.

Good luck.