Row, Row, Row, Your Social Media Campaign Boat

Contrary to popular belief, self-publishing is not as easy as 1-2-3! There’s a lot of social media based marketing to be done to build up a following to your book. Not a simple task, especially for nerds who would rather just write than communicate. But, this marketing thing is a critical success factor as they say in the corporate world. A necessary evil for the introverted, a barrier that must be overcome, tamed and trained to do your bidding. But there are plenty of tools out there to make the job easier. Too many actually, which can make things rather confusing.

So, how should you tie together Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn, FaceBook, Instagram, MailChimp, Hootsuite, Tilton, Tumbler, (I could go on and on and on…) into a lean mean social marketing machine that will add ten thousand followers to your blog site so that you can launch your 90,000 word science fiction mastery into an instant hit and draw Hollywood mogals to your electronic front door with multimillion dollar offers to turn your NY Times best seller into a 10 episode TV series to compete against the likes of “The Expanse” and “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier?” Huff, puff, GASP!

OK, I’ve gotten a bit ahead of myself here. But you get the idea.

Those of us newbies lost in the social media woods, may find some help from Evan Gow who built something called StoryOrigin. Now, I’m not ready to endorse this platform. But it seems to wrap up the key elements of a successful social media marketing campaign into one integrated package and I find that interesting. I’m an engineer by education. And a good engineer is a lazy engineer who is always on the lookout for a simple set of tools that will do all the work (or most of it anyway).

Like any complex process, there’s a lot to learn for a successful do-it-yourself book campaign tool like StoryOrigin. But what I like about StoryOrigin is that you are not alone.
You work with other authors who, like me, are all in their own little life boat rowing against the river current for some point on shore. The key word here is row, meaning YOU row, not someone else. We don’t have access to motors (aka literary agents) to propel us upstream. But StoryOrigin provides a map, tools and potential friends to get the job done.

So, I’ve developed a StoryOrigin “Reader Magnet,” (see below) which is a gift give away to generate potential book fans. In my case the reader magnet is the first full chapter of “God Games” given for free to readers who subscribe to my blog and become part of my mailing list. Mind you, I don’t abuse the privilege of having your name and email address. Instead, I use it to update subscribing readers on my progress and tell them some interesting aspects of “God Games” that didn’t make it into the book.

Beside Reader Magnets, I’m experimenting with StoryOrigin’s “Newsletter Swaps” and “Group Promotions” with other authors where we inform our fan base of other Science Fiction books that may interest them. It’s sort of a “buyers of this product have also bought these products” type of thing. It’s a nice way to provide and get exposure to new social media platforms for me and my fellow Science Fiction authors. Bottom line here is that I now have a way to provide even more value to my Science Fiction subscribers, which when you think about it is what authors should be doing for their readers.

How is StoryOrigin working for me? Too early to tell right now. But stay tune for an update on my progress!  You can read more about my self-publishing journey by clicking here for more posts in this category.   

Meanwhile…