Facebook falloff?
Kathleen Bolton on Feb 11 2008 | Filed under: Business
Last week I posted about the effectiveness of online publicity and how professional book publicists were turning to online resources to market their clients books rather than using ‘traditional’ outlets.
Coincidentally, Victoria Strauss over at Writer Beware blogs about the decline of social networks as marketing tools and makes a good point:
Unfortunately, even as older strategies prove not to be magic bullets after all, newer strategies don’t supplant them–they merely expand the field of self-promotional activity, adding to the burden of non-writing tasks that writers must fit into their schedules. If you don’t know what works, you’ve got to do it all, right?
Strauss links to a provacative article in the Register that documents the recent drop in popularity of these social networks.
Maybe that’s good news for authors who are bewildered by the array of online promotional opportunities that they feel they must do in order to get the word out on their book.
So I’ll confess: I don’t visit MySpace or Facebook pages. Maybe I’m showing my age, but (rightly or wrongly) I think of them as places for teenagers to congregate and talk smack about each other. Maybe our readers can enlighten me.
I’ll pose a few questions: would you/do you use a social network to promote your book/writing/self?
Does it work to get the word out for you? Or is it more work than you thought?
A dying medium? Or is it ready to explode in popularity?
I’m interested in your thoughts.
Kathleen Bolton
Therese Walsh
Ann Aguirre
Porter Anderson
Brunonia Barry
Carleen Brice
Keith Cronin
Anna Elliott
Jane Friedman
Donald Maass
Juliet Marillier
Sophie Masson
Jael McHenry
Jan O'Hara
Debbie Ohi
Barbara O'Neal
Crystal Patriarche
Ray Rhamey
M.J. Rose
Chuck Sambuchino
John Vorhaus
Yuvi Zalkow
Sharon Bially
Anne Greenwood Brown
Tracy Hahn-Burkett
Suzannah Windsor Freeman
Kristan Hoffman
Jeanne Kisacky
Erika Robuck
Lydia Sharp
Catherine McKenzie on 
I do have a Facebook page. Would I use it to let everyone know I have a book coming out? Absolutely. Would it be an effective marketing tool? Probably not. My friends list only includes about 90 people, which is quite small compared to most members. I’m funny in the sense that I only let people I might actually speak to on the list.
Interestingly, when I first signed up, you had to be affiliated with a college or highschool to join. Today, you can be anybody. My mother has a Facebook page. Does she likely use it less frequently than my younger friends? Yes. But despite the small size of the network, the opportunities to get the word out to people who are not 13 are there. As I say, though, in my case it just probably wouldn’t mean that much.
On the other hand, I often think that even if I managed to sell a book tomorrow, by the time the thing is actually published in our glacier-speed system, the trend will likely be dead or on its last legs anyway.
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I only use my blog. I can’t stand the layout of MySpace and I haven’t even looked at Facebook. I really have enough to keep me busy with my blog and my blogging buddies; the other two options would only suck more of my time away.
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I know few kids who bother with social networking – other than IM.
Of the pages I’ve read people either recreate the networks they have already or find places to gripe about some issue.
One book on my space was ‘reviewed’ by kids who had never read the book. It seemed like it was just another opportunity to swear on-line.
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It seems as though the recent spate of bad publicity (online stalkers) coupled with more regulations make social networks more hassle than they are worth. But maybe I’m missing something.
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I began my blog before I sold my novel so it was never a marketing device to me…but ironically, the blog readers pre-ordered the book even before my family did, and have done a lot to promote it.
Myspace was just the opposite. I joined at my publisher’s suggestion for the specific purpose of marketing my novel, but all I ever got out of it was a lot of spam! I agree with you: more hassle than it’s worth.
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Thanks for your take, Patry. I wondered about the logistics of setting up and maintaining a Myspace page.
It’s interesting, though, that the publisher wanted you to do it. Maybe the ‘no stone unturned’ school of marketing?
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I don’t use Friendster anymore, but I do use MySpace and Facebook to spread the word about my books and especially my reading series and often crosspost blog posts from my main blog onto MySpace and Livejournal, where I also maintain an old account just for this purpose. There are different people reading each one and I want to do whatever I can to reach as many people as possible. It’s a little more time consuming but, I think, worth it, and possible less intrusive than constant emails.
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I think that if you are already established on these social networks (whether it’s MySpace, blogger, FaceBook, what have you), then they’re useful marketing tools because you ALREADY have a network there. But if the sole purpose of creating a page on one of these networks is for selling your book, it can’t be as successful – you don’t have any audience there.
That said, MySpace has proved a really useful tool for musicians – primarily because I think the audience fits the medium, and vice versa. The age groups networking on MySpace et al are into tunes…not so much books.
But if there WERE a networking site that already had built a solid foundation of our target market – people who READ – then yeah, I would see that as a worthwhile endeavor. More and more, however, readers are baby boomers, and they don’t bother with the “kid stuff” of MySpace.
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