Building A Social Hive

Caleb Mason
Founder and Publisher, Publerati
22. Promote Your Story…
Publerati uses social media as an important part of our marketing strategy, especially since our novels are digital only. We are creating a brand with a social purpose, namely to help spread literacy using ebooks and to promote excellent fiction as an enduring form of unique human expression. At the corporate brand level we buy advertising on Facebook to reach socially-minded people around the world, selecting interests that include fiction, literacy, ebooks, novels and social responsibility.

23. …And Look Good While Doing It
We use creative that offers appealing images with type on them (same as what works for effective print advertising: strong unexpected image with brief supporting message), designed to generate hundreds of shares to build our global network. Then we intersperse these with occasional informational content for people interested in literacy and fiction plus our own soft sells, and typically see immediate jumps in ebook sales. We also use LinkedIn and Twitter at the corporate brand level to reach technology media and publishing enthusiasts to help spread the unique Publerati story.

24. Test Out Different Platforms
At the product marketing level, we use Goodreads, NetGalley, Pinterest, Readwave and Wattpad. Among the things we are testing is to see if we can sample one free story, usually the title story, from short story e-collections that we sell for $4.99 and as a result increase those e-collection sales. We also use NetGalley to seed the early adopters with advance e-copies to build buzz at launch.

Kate Rados
Director of Community Development,
Crown Publishing Group (Random House)
25. Create A Roadmap
Prepare an audit of your social profiles and consider the value you’re providing the reader in every post, tweet and comment. The content created in the social space should resonate with the reader and compel them to share. We provide training decks for each social platform, so the publicity and marketing teams have full access and understanding of how to maximize social for their titles. These guides are then available to all authors, creating almost a self-serve scalability.