Does Social Media Sell Books?

Social media is an essential part of your book marketing plan and your branding. ?

However, social media is a major time suck and most sites are next to worthless when it comes to marketing and selling your book.?Nevertheless, you must persist in using social media in your marketing efforts.?

Now let's address an important question: Does social media sell books??But first, let’s define what we mean by social media because it is a broad theme.?The social media addressed in this article means sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and all the other such sites.?I also include ads and promotion sites.?Publishing sites like Medium and Angie’s Diary are not included here. Neither are information sites like Wikipedia and others.?

Back to the question. If you write a post or launch an ad or a book promotion on social media, the answer is No, it will not sell books! ?

Why not??Because the job of social media posts, ads and promotions?is to deliver visitors to the book’s landing page.?The landing page is where the visitor will decide to buy the book.?Or not. ?

To restate that last sentence, your book’s landing page is where the sales magic takes place, not the social media mentions.?In fact, the landing page can be the most important marketing content you own.?

To be successful, your marketing efforts must address two vital concerns.?First, how do you get your social media content to deliver visitors to the landing page.?Second, how to do you create a landing page that convinces a visitor to buy your book.

Delivering visitors:

This discussion has to start with the Click Thru Rate or CRT.?The CRT is the percentage of impressions (or views) that result in a click on your ad or post.?So, if your ad receives a thousand impressions, a 1% CRT means ten people clicked on the ad.?Does that mean you sold ten books? Nope, it means ten people went to the landing page.?Whether they buy the book or not is a separate issue.

Once you understand the CRT concept, you will also understand the need to create ads and posts that will maximize the CRTs the ad gets. There are a number of strategies you can use to achieve this and there are many articles, books and even course that concentrate on this topic. ?One of the best articles I’ve seen is this one: https://neilpatel.com/blog/improve-organic-click-rate/

Some of the tips in this article will make your post or ad more interesting and/or attractive to viewers.?Other tips will improve the SEO status leading to more impressions. ?

The cumulative effect of implementing all the tips will increase your CTR rate. Once you’ve accomplished that, it’s up to the landing page to cinch the deal.

Clinching the sale:

Your book’s landing page is where the marketing magic takes place.?A visitor shows up, looks at the copy and immediately clicks on the “Buy Now!” button.?Well, that’s the?theory anyway,?

The landing page has three related elements that strive to make the magic work.?These are the cover image, the book blurb and the description.

Cover:

When a visitor looks at a book page on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, the first thing that grabs her attention is the cover icon in the upper left.?If this image is dull, drab or cliched, it won’t impress the visitor.

That is why you have to try to get a unique cover: to impress the visitor.?

Book blurb:

?Many new authors consider a book blurb to be a short synopsis.?This is a fatal mistake.?Book blurbs and a short synopsis are two different animals, and they have very different purposes.?

Here are descriptions for each of the three elements involved in a book blurb.?Keep the blurb to fewer than a hundred words if possible and no longer than a hundred-fifty words.

The pitch line (or hook) is the first statement and it is the hook to grab the reader’s attention.?It should be simple, one or two sentences at most, and it must make a clear statement about your book.?On your landing page, the descriptive text will only be a few lines.?Those few lines have to convince the visitor to click on the “read more: button.?That’s why the pitch line is so important.

Once the visitor clicks on that button, she see more of the blurb in the form of answers to two questions.?

The first question is: What's in it for the buyer??

This is a statement that explains what the visitor will get in exchange for money.?This must be explicit.?Tell the reader what benefit she'll get from buying the book.?Think of this statement in this way: if your book is surrounded by hundreds of similar-sized books on a shelf in a bookstore or on a web page, what would persuade the buyer to choose your book instead of one of the others?

The second question is: What's different about this book??

With all the books published every month, what makes your book stand out from the others?

The secret to creating an effective blurb is to keep rewriting and condensing it until it expresses the ideas with a minimum of words, less than a hundred words is ideal.?

Description

After the blurb, things get tricky.?Writing a book description for a fiction book is quite different from a non-fiction book.?

For fiction, the description should attempt to get the visitor interested in the main character and that character’s problem.?You want the visitor to say to herself, “Oh!?I wonder how the character will get out of the mess she’s in.”?Once you get the visitor thinking like that, you’re close to getting a sale.

With a non-fiction book, the goal is to convince the visitor that your book will solve a problem the visitor has.?After all, if a visitor landed on your book page, she must have at least a passing interest in the problem.?So now the visitor reads your introduction (i.e. your blurb) and then the description convinces her that your book will indeed solve her problem. That ain’t easy! ?

You can use this six-step formula to create your non-fiction book description:

1: Book blurb (include a promise)?

2: Book benefits (at least two)

3: Build your authority (why are you an expert on the book’s subject)

4: Describe the contents

5:?Repeat the promise a second time

6?Forceful call to action

This formula was stolen from an excellent article written by Kevin Kruse.?Alas, Kruse’s web site has disappeared.

To summarize:?

A social media post or ad does not sell books.?It’s job is to deliver potential readers to your book’s landing page.?This landing page is where the deal is completed.?Consequently, the landing page is the most valuable marketing content you own.?Make sure you spend the time to make it as great as you can.

----?

If you looking for help with fiction writing, self-publishing or book marketing, check out the resources on https://writersarc.com

I also publish articles on Medium, several a week.?Sign up to read them at hanque99.medium.com

This link will display all my courses on Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/user/hank-quense-2/

.?