Authors Need to Social Network; Try a Few Apps

Your Book Writing Coach
Your Book Writing Coach

As an author or aspiring author, you need to use social networks to help create your platform and, eventually, promote and sell your books.

Yet, social networks can eat hours or days of your time with little impact. This is because social networks aren’t generally built in a day. If your social network is going to work for you, you want it to be filled with people who know and love you.

Should you friend or follow just anyone who asks? I say no. Be picky. That way, when you send messages or invitations to people on your list, you know they actually care and that they won’t report your communications as spam, for one thing.

Facebook can be part of your social media strategy.
Facebook can be part of your social media strategy.

If you’re a busy and successful professional, I suggest just taking a couple of hours a week to build your networks and friend/follow people on Facebook, Linked in, twitter, etc. whom you know well from different walks of life.

If you are just joining these networks, create a profile. Ask colleagues for recommendations on Linked In.

Then try a few apps (applications). Here’s the latest application I tried on linked in. It’s a one question poll on whether you want to write a book in the near future. I’m wondering how it’ll work. Here, you can take the poll right here.

I’d love to hear from you. What social networks do you belong to? What strategies do you use? What are your favorite apps?

Lisa Tener

Lisa Tener is an award-winning book writing coach who assists writers in all aspects of the writing process—from writing a book proposal and getting published to finding one’s creative voice. Her clients have appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, CBS Early Show, The Montel Williams Show, CNN, Fox News, New Morning and much more. They blog on sites like The Huffington Post, Psychology Today and WebMD.

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  1. I’ve been playing with Facebook for a while. I’m not sure how effective I am at using it to promote myself. If nothing else, I have connected with a couple of old friends through it. For me, the jury is still out on the usefulness of social networking.

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