Not everyone is. And to get the most out of it you have to be comfortable.
Comfortable with putting yourself out there. Revealing your opinions. Asking people to help you by sharing tweets and posts about you. You have to be comfortable with technology, willing to make and post videos, organize blog tours, and keep your website fresh and updated.
Most of all you have to willing to promote your book and yourself. Surprisingly, this is where a lot of authors go shy.
Michael A. Stelzner, founder of the Social Media Examiner blog and new author of the book LAUNCH: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition, is not shy. On top of being curious, innovative, and a prolific writer, Michael has the social media gene for sharing. Now, in the case of his new book, he’s trying to find the balance between sharing and promoting.
One way he’s sharing is with this great post: “9 Ways to Use Social Media to Launch a Book.” Make note of all the highly creative, low-cost ways he found to use grass-roots marketing to get out the word about his book. (A book, which is admittedly aimed right at self-marketers, a very receptive audience for his experiments. Also, on the “promotion” front, note how many times his book is mentioned in his post!)
You’ll see that Michael offered 50 book review bloggers a chance to review his book and give it away to their followers. His main piece of advice for his reviewers: Be authentic. Check out Rhonda Hurwitz’s review of LAUNCH on her blog She Means Business to see how she kept it authentic. (I haven’t read the book myself yet, so can’t chime in either way right now.)
If you’re skimping on using social media because you don’t have the time or the desire to share, share, share, at the very least make a goal to become more comfortable with it. Sign up for email blog posts from media gurus like Stelzner and Hurwitz to find out what works and doesn’t work. Read the business stories about where publishing is heading these days (ie, authors doing their own marketing). Visit your Facebook and Twitter feeds once in a while and read what people are posting (and look for people to follow via Tweet Top or WeFollow or by looking at other people’s Facebook likes).
Try to integrate social media a bit more into your life, one toe in the water at a time. Before you know it, you’ll be happily swimming around, like the pooch in the photo above.
