Book Review: Social Media Just for Writers: How to Build Your Online Platform and Find and Engage With Your Readers

As a newly minted author, I have been looking for information to better promote my book. I realize that social media can be a powerful tool for doing this. It is with these thoughts in mind that I picked up Frances Caballo’s book, Social Media Just for Writers: How to Build Your Online Platform and Find and Engage with Your Readers. While I am familiar with how to use each of the tools and concepts that she shared, it was the specific ideas for their use that I found interesting.

Social Media Just for Writers is 217 pages long organized into seventeen chapters. Caballo also shared a couple of useful cheat sheets in her resource section. In her book, Caballo covered the following topics:

• How to approach social media
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Hashtags
• LinkedIn
• Visual marketing
• Pinterest
• Instagram
• Tumblr
• Goodreads
• Blogging

As I noted, I have actively participated in all these different areas. What I was interested in was how to specifically use them to support my book. I am pleased to report that I picked up a number of great ideas from Caballo. I have started to put a couple of them into action, but I need to do a better job with others.

In her section on how to approach readers with social media, she shared the acronym CARE.

Communicate with your readers
Answer your reader’s questions
Relate to your readers
Educate with stellar content

As I mentioned, I had many takeaways. The first one dealt with karma. If you want book reviews, you have to write book reviews. I currently write book reviews and share them on my blog. I also post them on Goodreads and send them out to the different social media sites. I need to do a better job of writing reviews on Amazon.

The key point of social media for any business activity is the social part. It should not be just a conduit for pushing information.

Because of this book, I finally decided to create a Facebook author page. I am using it to talk about the book as well as share information about an upcoming podcast. At the end of the Facebook chapter, she listed other ways to attract readers to the Facebook Author page. There is certainly more I can do. I have to weave them into my processes as with all the other ideas.

Caballo shared a wonderful list of Twitter hashtags. There were some new hashtags that I was not aware of.

After reading Social Media Just for Writers, it is obvious that I need to do more on LinkedIn. I need to weave my book into my profile better.

One of the messages that Caballo emphasized over and over was the importance of not synchronizing one platform with another. For example, do not automatically post your tweet on LinkedIn and Facebook. Content needs to be personally curated and shared on each platform. Each platform has a different audience and different needs.

Social Media Just for Writers is packed with really useful tips. I will now need to take time to go back through my notes to identify the things that I will do to improve my book promotion. If you are a writer or another creator, I believe you will pick up a lot of great ideas that you can put into practice.

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Additional Reading

• Book Review: The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users
• Book Review: Social Media Mastery (A Daily Actions Guide)
• Book Review: Social Media for Trainers: Techniques for Enhancing and Extending Learning

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