In this digital age, social media marketing and presence is everything for authors establishing their brands. The hard part is that you need to start way before you actually publish, because it takes time to build a following and if you launch your book without an audience, that is a recipe for disaster.
10 Reasons your Social Media Platform Will Make you a Better Writer
1. Gets you to read more books. What you are reading will give you a lot of great content. You can find quotes to turn into photos for postings, take pictures of the books with fabulous backdrops, and contact authors and tell them what you think of their work.
2. Chronicle your inspiration. Take photos of the world around you and capture those little nuggets that lead to story ideas. You are not just hunting for things to post about, but ideas for creativity that happen to work well as posts too. As a reader, I would love to see what inspires my favorite authors.
3. Keeps your writing desk tidy. You need to have that space set-up because one of the hottest things for writers to post is what their work space looks like. To take all of those various photos of your keyboard and your notes. If your space looks better, you are going to want to use it more, thus more writing.
4. Write in cafes more. Bring your computer and notebook out to a cafe and document the work you are doing. A change of scenery is a great way to feel inspired and needing to post about it is a good motivator to get outside.
5. Read more literary journals. Sharing stories, flash fiction and poetry from literary journals will give you a lot of content. You should be reading them regularly anyway, having a reason to post will keep you on your toes.
6. Follow more authors and publishers. This will help you to keep on top of the news and give you things to share with your own followers. Also, see what the masters are doing to help you with your own online marketing efforts.
7. Interact with writing and reading community more. This forces you to keep your finger on the pulse of what is happening in the publishing world and there is a huge amount of great information about the writing process and craft elements. What are the trends? What do your readers want?
8. Crisp language for your posts. They have made changes so you can write a lot more now on most platforms, but your followers don’t want to read all that. Get to the point, fast.
9. Brainstorm settings, characters and quotes. This one is more pinterest specific. It is a great tool for helping you come up with ideas and also do deep dives into craft elements if you are a visual learner and keep all of your articles in one spot on your board.
10. To show your writing life, you need to be living one! Join some activities to share about like writing retreats, conferences, read alouds, writing groups and book clubs. If you have the push of needing to post once a day on each platform, that gets you moving.
The #1 way to be a better writer, is to write. Your social media platform will motivate you... so, let it!