What traditional publishing gets wrong about social media book marketing, and what it means for authors
🪁 Kites vs 🍄 mushrooms - read on, I promise it will make sense
I will die on the hill that authors don’t need thousands of social media followers to effectively use it to sell your book, AND I think I might have figured out why traditional publishers are so hooked on the idea that you do.
🪁🍄 It has something to do with kites and mushrooms… 🧸
PS. I’m actually a bit nervous about what I’ve written here because I’m a publishing outsider and I may have made assumptions in this essay that you know not to be true. I also don’t want to fall into lazy accusations aimed at the marketing departments of publishers who I know are working hard under difficult conditions - I hope that comes through in this piece. I’m always open to learning so please let me know - as politely as you can so I don’t panic lol - if you think I’ve misrepresented anything ✌🏼
Over the last few years, many in the publishing industry have learned the hard way that large follower counts are no guarantee of high volumes of book sales.
It is also becoming more common to hear representatives of the publishing industry acknowledging that audience relevance and engagement rates - not raw follower counts -are more reliable indicators of how well a social media audience might respond to a book, but still there appears to be a thirst for authors who combine writing with massive existing social media audiences, especially in the non-fiction and memoir spaces.
What this emphasis on follower counts (especially in the absence of other kinds of ‘platform’) means for many writers and authors with small or non-existent social media audiences is that traditional publishing becomes almost entirely inaccessible - but why?
Why are publishers so convinced that an author needs a large social media following in order to make their book commercially-viable?
Well, it’s my view that the main answer to this question lies in the priorities of traditional book marketing, and how they lead to a misunderstanding and under-utilisation of the actual strengths of social media.
Traditional book marketing is like flying kites 🪁
Imagine that, when a book is published, a kite is also launched. The hope is that the kite will make people stop and pay attention to the book it is attached to.
🪁 Some kites are launched from the tops of mountains, fashioned from slips of silk, bigger and better designed to catch the word-of-mouth-wind.
Think billboards; print and digital advertising; slots on national radio or tv; interviews on podcasts with large audiences; bookshop window displays; paid-for influencer campaigns with swag-filled gift boxes; appearances at prestigious literary events; being featured in the ever-diminishing review column inches of print media; and yes, large social media audiences.
The audience is broad, the activity is relatively un-targeted, and the focus is on surface-level ‘content consumption’, prioritising volume of eyeballs reached, or, very simply, how much attention is attracted.
🪁 Some kites are smaller or less well-designed but catch a lucky gust and soar upwards unexpectedly.
Think of the books you’d never heard of until they were nominated for a prize, or were picked up on a whim by a book influencer with a highly engaged community, or the ‘breakout’ books that for some mystical reason grew wings and started flying for themselves.
🪁 Of course this could be you, but spare a thought for the many, many, many other authors left holding the strings of poorly constructed kites consisting of a cover reveal graphic and three Tweets (true story), that sink lower and lower in the sky, back down to Earth, until they land, broken and muddied, in a puddle.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing implicitly wrong with kite-flying. It is a completely legitimate form of marketing for all products (I know we don’t like to think of books as products but it’s important to accept that publishing does). BUT, in the publishing industry, part of the problem is that the kite builders - the hard-working and dedicated people who work in marketing departments - are tasked with too many kites to build and not enough resources to do their best work on all of them.
AND, any decent social media marketer will also point out that kite-flying completely bypasses the strengths of social media.
Slick impersonal graphics, and branded photography combined with generic blurbs, are the kites of the social media content world and scream, I want you to do something for me.
What these tactics fail to account for is that saturated, over-stimulated social media audiences have their own agenda when they open the apps. They want what they want, be it information, education, insights, entertainment, outrage, awe, beauty, conversation, connection or escapism, and have little patience for anything that looks like an ad.
Even those carefully curated gift boxes, artfully captured and posted by book influencers, that some authors might have coveted are likely to receive little more than cursory engagement. Social media audiences are savvy and suspicious about anything that even hints at a transaction.
And yet, this is often the extent - if you’re lucky - of social media marketing that most books receive from their publishers.
🪁 Why kites don’t work on social media
Effective marketing - of anything - requires more than making people aware that ‘it’ exists: it’s about more than flying kites.
It’s about understanding the feelings, motivations, and challenges that your ‘target market’ are experiencing, and then using that understanding to shape the messaging that will help your ‘target market’ understand how [insert product] can help.
When it comes to books, it’s often the case that the ‘problem’ is something nebulous and more difficult to define than many, more practical, products but books do offer solutions to problems like:
knowledge gaps
boredom
wanting an escape from the daily grind
curiosity
wanting to be entertained on a long journey or a holiday
the desire to feel less alone
the desire to feel ___
the desire to understand ourselves better
the desire to understand others better
the desire to imagine a different reality
Books ‘solve’ (however fleetingly) a multitude of problems but little of the marketing by the publishing industry ever focuses on this.
To be fair, this may well be inevitable because, compared to other industries, publishers are in a fairly unique position where every ‘product’ they create is aimed at a different audience.
To be tasked with creating a comprehensive marketing strategy for every single book would be the end of the industry BUT the consequent dominance of kite-flying is precisely why traditional publishers put so much emphasis on the size of social media audiences.
Because traditional book marketing only ever invests and engages in kite-flying, they only understand social media marketing in terms of it’s kite-flying potential.
i.e. they overplay the importance of having a really high mountain to launch a kite from.
To understand the true opportunity of social media marketing for books they/we/ you need to think more along the lines of fungi 🍄
This feels like a good time to tell you about my monthly membership, TOO MUCH INSTAGRAM which is hosted here on Substack.
Members benefit from:
a weekly online chat where you can access feedback, advice and encouragement in a safe, judgement-free space
a monthly Ask Me Anything session where you can get more detailed advice with any sticky problems
fortnightly co-working sessions where we create posts in company
a wealth of other resources, ideas, and tutorials to support you with using Instagram to get more readers
and you also get to be part of a brilliantly warm and welcoming community of writers and authors all facing in the same direction.
You can browse the archive here. Upgrade your subscription to become a member ❤️
❌🪁 Stop flying kites, and start growing mushrooms 🍄
The power of social media can be far better understood and harnessed if it’s treated less as a hitching post for kites that fly up in the sky, counting on gusts of a capricious wind to keep them afloat, and more as fertile soil in which a mycorrhizal network of fungi can thrive, connecting plants and trees unseen, under the forest floor.
‘Mycorrhizal refers to a symbiotic relationship between a plant's roots and beneficial fungi, forming a network sometimes called the "wood wide web"[!!]. These fungi help plants absorb water and nutrients from the soil, and in return, the plants provide the fungi with sugars produced through photosynthesis. This network is crucial for plant health, especially in natural ecosystems.
The interconnected network of mycorrhizal fungi allows for the transfer of resources (like water and nutrients) and potentially even information between plants.’ -credit to Google for the helpful summary.
Where many authors fall down in their use of social media is they approach it in the same way that publishers do. They fly kites, which inevitably crash, and they are left demoralised and demotivated with the distinct impression that social media marketing is a waste of time.
What I would love authors to understand is that you’re actually much better placed to behave like a plant nourishing its underground, unseen, fungal networks in order to connect with other plants, so you can all thrive.
Think about it. Even an Instagram account with a relatively small audience of a few hundred people can have an outsized effect if - thanks to the relationship-building an author has done - those people are 1. highly relevant to, and interested in, the kind of book you’ve written and, 2. super-invested in supporting you, the author.
As I’ve already said, kite-flying relies mostly on content consumption to get people to buy books but by using social media to connect with people more meaningfully, authors can tap into something much more powerful that is out of the reach of most publishers, something that is closer to an expression of your reader’s identity: I buy this kind of book, because I’m this kind of person, interested in this kind of thing.
Being left holding the strings of a poorly designed and executed kite can be a death knell for many books, but authors can take control of the future of your book by using your social media activity to nurture a network of potential readers, fellow writers, book influencers, journalists, podcasters, broadcasters, and other relevant people.
When your book is published these are the people who will:
buy your book
read your book
leave reviews for your book online
go into libraries and bookshops to ask for your book to be ordered in
post on social media about your book
interact with your posts so the algorithms show them to more people
share your posts about your book with their own audiences
recommend your book to their book clubs
buy it as a gift for friends and family, and so on…
The network effects of this activity increase the chances of someone who has never heard of you or your book abandoning their social media scroll to immediately order a copy, or picking it up and taking it to the till next time they see it in a book shop.
Trust - and the subsequent motivation to act - is also enhanced when the person making the recommendation isn’t connected to the creation of the book, making this kind of organic buzz more effective than a post created by a publisher could ever be.
FINALLY, it’s worth not overlooking that these kinds of audience members, who you have connected with over shared interests, emotional resonance, or thought-leadership, will also follow you from book-to-book. There is no such thing as publisher loyalty from readers, but there are many, many examples of author loyalty.
Word of mouth is broadly understood to sell books, but what if social media, especially over time, can be word of mouth with a megaphone*?
*Mushrooms, but with megaphones, isn’t an image I was expecting to conjure when I started writing this…
What does this mean for authors?
Well, in brief, it means that the ‘platform-panic’ that originates with the priorities of the publishing industry is founded on a fundamental misunderstanding of how social media actually works - which, I realise, is scant comfort if you’re currently on the wrong side of a firmly shut door.
I suppose the best I can hope for is that if authors better understand how you can leverage social media beyond raw follow counts, then you may be better placed to argue the case for your book at the proposal stage (for non-fiction writers and memoirists, who are most often on the receiving end of publishing’s fixation on follower counts).
I also hope some of you with book deals already, perhaps worried about the absence of significant marketing support from your publishers, may feel less hopeless about the prospects of your book sales, and more hopeful that there are ways you can effectively use social media even without a large following.
Perhaps you will feel more positive about the opportunity to approach social media in a meaningful and effective way that focuses on relationships, rather than the grubbier pursuit of account growth at all costs.
If the platforms can be understood as working better when we act more like mushrooms than kites, then climbing the mountain of ‘growing a following’ no longer becomes the goal, and even a relatively small investment of time could kickstart something that pays dividends in years to come.
And maybe some of you might even feel able to raise social media support as a going concern at the contract negotiation stage. For example, I do know of one (ONE!) author who managed to get their publisher to pay for a one-off workshop to show them the basics of how to use Instagram (it wasn’t with me btw). After all, publishers are the biggest beneficiaries of the unpaid efforts by authors to market their books - how amazing would it be if they were prepared to offer authors some support to develop their own use of social media in order to elevate their book sales?
Isn’t that the definition of win-win?
Further reading:
This is one of the best articles I’ve read on the subject of social media and publishing by
, co-founder of Open Road Integrated Media and former editor-in-chief of HarperCollins. I especially liked the bit where she asks: ‘Is it [social media] really unreliable? Or is it publishers falling asleep at the wheel?’ 🤭
🍄 Come and grow some mushrooms - join the TOO MUCH INSTAGRAM membership! 🍄
Members benefit from:
a weekly online chat where you can access feedback, advice and encouragement in a safe, judgement-free space
a monthly Ask Me Anything session where you can get more detailed advice with any sticky problems
fortnightly co-working sessions where we create posts in company
a wealth of other resources, ideas, and tutorials to support you with using Instagram to get more readers
and you also get to be part of a brilliantly warm and welcoming community of writers and authors all facing in the same direction.
You can browse the archive here. Upgrade your subscription to become a member ❤️
Love this. I'm an editor as well as a writer and the thing I say often is you have to give people a reason to care about your story. It's a leap, as a creative person, from "I want to say this" to "I want to beguile and hook my reader". So I guess that's a similar thing. Not "BUY MY BOOK" but "here's something to delight you!" I'm only really just getting back into social media after a hiatus and am so interested in how to do this with peace and integrity and joy and fun! (For me and for my followers) I have signed up for your Friday Masterclass. ☺️
What a lovely image. I can picture lots of little red and white ones, because they're very cute, but I guess we're better off with button mushrooms for health reasons!