Book marketing is by far the hardest part of the book process. I’ve struggled with it since the moment my first book was done. A lot of my issue is finding an audience. If I want to be more successful, I need to find a way of getting my books out in front of more people. I need to find my readers, I need to interact with them. Enter social media – and all the woes that come with it.

When I was a young teenager, it was easy to navigate social media. First of all, there was only one that mattered, the almighty MySpace. Eventually Facebook showed up and, though everyone signed up to it in 2008, no one actually used it until a couple years later – then it wiped MySpace out. In MySpace’s golden years, it was no problem getting thousands of “friends”, reaching out to people across the globe, finding someone who had the same interests as you and speaking together in ease immediately, though you had never met in person before. To this day I think I still have a few friends from MySpace on my personal Facebook page.

Nowadays, it’s different. Nowadays, there are too many social media websites to keep on top of. Which one do I sign up to? All of them? Twitter seems to be the leader right now, but I just can’t crack it. Honestly, I don’t really like it (most probably because I can’t figure it out). When I was a teen, I’d write any old rubbish and post it. Now it takes me FOREVER to think of something to write – witty or not. Where I used to be able to reach out to strangers across the globe, I’m brave enough to whack the heart button and that’s it.

If I want to be a successful author, if I want more readers, I need to crack social media. That’s the going advice all over the internet that all the “successful” advisors are advocating for, and I can see the truth in it, of course. On the other side of the coin, rather than fretting about social media and writing posts for each of them, I could be pouring that energy into my books.

With bare minimum marketing (if any), sales are trickling in, pages are being read. Is there any need to have a Twitter? Is there any need to fret over social media presence? I’ve only published two books so far, the Danethrall Trilogy isn’t complete (and probably won’t be until 2022 at this rate). Part of me feels like, until I’ve at least completed the final installment of the Trilogy, I shouldn’t worry about establishing an audience – not yet.

If you’re an author, traditionally published or independent/self-published, at what point did you try to establish an audience? Did you let it grow organically or did you do a hardcore social media campaign? Did you pour your savings into advertisement websites or just let your book do its thing on Amazon? If you use social media, which do you prefer? Which do you get the most interaction from?