Hi everyone. This weekend. I got to sit in on a session—a Zoom session—with bookstagrammers, and I just thought I would put it in a few words for bookstagram. Bookstagram seems like a pretty cool way to get the word out about your books and about your writing, in general.
Here are just a few words of advice I would give. I wouldn’t want to rely on it alone, of course. I mean, I don’t rely on any one thing alone. But you do have to feel a level of comfort in doing it, I guess is the way I should say it.
When reaching out to bookstagrammers, do so the way you would with any reviewer, any book reviewer, because basically these are book reviewers who are on Instagram, so you would approach them in the same manner you would approach any reviewer that you don’t know personally. That makes sense. Right?
When reaching out to bookstagrammers, do so the way you would with any reviewer … these are book reviewers who are on Instagram, so you would approach them in the same manner you would approach any reviewer that you don’t know personally.
And then also find out what social media your readers are using because you can use surveys for this easily. I mean, you can use surveys to get all sorts of information about readers, and that is one of the most important questions. Where are your readers? And if they’re not on Instagram, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use bookstagrammers because perhaps you’ll reach a new segment of readers this way. So that’s one way of looking at it.
Find out what types of books they prefer and what they’re not into, the way you would with other book reviewers. Try checking out what they put up on Instagram, to see how their tastes in books run.
And then, to the bookstagrammers themselves, I just want to say good job doing the presentation. Can you guys start using like a genre hashtag or something? Cause I did a search on #bookstagram (the hashtag) and came up with so many different images and so many different types of books, it’s like, okay, what do I do with this? This is not helping.
Survey your readers to see where they hang out online. If they’re not on Instagram, you could use Bookstagram to meet new readers there.
So finding you guys and making that connection is what’s really going to be hard for the writers. I think. So. Is there like a directory? Do you guys need a directory? Do you want me to put together a directory for you? Is that possible? I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m saying at this point. Other than sometimes it’s a little hard to find the people you need to find on Instagram who will connect with your work and maybe the best way is to simply start posting pictures of your books and just say, here’s my mystery. Here’s my young adult novel. Here’s my science fiction short story. I don’t know. Just a thought.
Try posting interesting photos of your books on Instagram. Here’s a tip: make the book the sole focus of your photo. Minimalism is your friend here.
And just one final note to authors and anyone else who’s on any social media. Don’t let all those “likes” go to your head because … Just don’t. It’s not a good idea. Just keep your feet on the ground and keep doing your work and keep doing it well, that’s it!
Oh, there was just one other thing I was going to mention. And that was that going on bookstagram and getting interviewed or having a review on bookstagram is not the same as selling. It’s not selling when you do an interview with somebody. It’s not selling when you’re online, doing things like telling people about your work. It’s marketing. Marketing and sales are two different things, really. So that was the only other point I wanted to make. And in the meantime, I have a new splint for my dystonia hand, which sort of, kind of helps a little bit. Maybe.
And how do you like my new splint? Courtesy of NIH. The fine people at NIH. Thanks, guys. Hopefully this will help with my dystonia. That’s it. And I’ll talk to you later.
PS: Here’s an article about bookstagram that the bookstagrammers shared with us during the presentation.
And here’s another one! 🙂