engage in social media where you can sell your books

Today’s guest is author and social media strategist Chris Syme. (You’ll find a full interview transcript below.)

How would you like to spend less time using social media for your author business and still find more readers and selling more books?

Chris Syme Web ImageToday’s guest is Chris Syme. She’s an expert on the use of social media for authors and has shared her expertise on MSNBC as well as numerous magazines and digital news organizations.  She’s also an author, with a new book that is being released on November first, and I love this Title, SELL MORE BOOKS WITH LESS SOCIAL MEDIA.

On this 43 minute episode, you’ll learn Chris’s favorite social media platforms for promoting and selling books, the critical importance of your Facebook author page and her four-step strategy for getting more engagement and book sales from the time you invest on social media.

Links

51jvyqitxglBuy Chris’s Book, SELL MORE BOOKS WITH LESS SOCIAL MEDIA at Amazon or KOBO and Barnes and Noble

Chris’s Website www.cksyme.com

Mastering Book Marketing for Author Assistants course link to early bird notification.

Maria Connor’s book: Do Less, Write More

Best places to find Chris: Twitter @cksyme Podcast: cksyme.com/podcast

Full Interview Transcript

Stephen Campbell: I’m happy to be with Chris Syme again today. I don’t like to use the term “guru,” but Chris is my favorite marketing “guru,” because I totally connect with the way she teaches author marketing – a very “common sense” approach to marketing that’s based more on strategy than tactics, and a common sense, “do the work,” kind of an approach. Chris, it’s a pleasure to have you back on the show again.

Chris Syme: Oh, I’m excited to be here. It’s always good to talk to a like-minded guy.

Stephen: We have a fascinating topic today that ties right in with a new book you’ve written that will be coming out November 1st. Our topic today is “How to get more engagement and book sales with less social media,” which is pretty close to the title of your book!

Chris: That’s right. The book is called Sell More Books With Less Social Media, and I’m excited about the concept because I think it’s something that authors have been asking for.

Stephen: It’s really the Holy Grail (Laughs), I think. I shouldn’t speak for everyone, but we think we spend more time on social media than we should; I definitely spend more time on social media than I want to. I’m excited about this, I’m excited to get into this. Before we get into some actual strategies and tips, I want to first talk about something that you go into early-on in the book that’s a problem for a lot of authors that I talk to, and that’s the concept of the Facebook profile page versus the Facebook Author page. There was a school of thought a few years ago that the best thing to do is to just have as many friends as you can on your Facebook profile page, and use that to market your books, but things have changed over the course of the last few years.

Chris: Oh, and they’ve changed significantly. As a matter of fact, I spent a good deal of time on a post this morning on Brian Cohen’s Facebook group. There was an author that posted on there that he’d gotten an email from Amazon saying he had to stop having reviews from friends, or they were going to take his book down, basically. One of the things that some of us kept saying to him in there, is Facebook has a policy of not allowing people to promote on their personal profile. I mean, we all cheat on it, I get that, but I think we’re starting to see the beginnings of a place where we may have a problem here, if authors promote too much on their Facebook profile. Of course, the answer to that is you really need to have that Author page, as opposed to your profile. You can have that open to the public, “follow” option on, so that people can just follow you, but the problem is then they can’t post, if you’ve got that – they’re just following. To me, that’s only one half of the equation. So you really need to have a good strategy, and I really coach authors to start weaning people away, and use that Facebook profile as a redirect to your Author page.

light-bulb-1173249_640Stephen: When I read that in your book, that was something that really resonated with me. I was talking with an internet personality last night, who’s got hundreds of thousands of followers, and she was saying, “The only thing I use my personal page for is to redirect people to my business pages, and that is it.” It’s like a little bit of a light bulb went off, and then later last night I was reading that section of your book, and it was like, “Oh!!” (Laughing) “I get it now!” How do you suggest we actually do that? How do we wean readers off interacting with us on the profile page, and try to move them on to the Author page?

Chris: It’s a little bit like pulling teeth, because it’s a difficult situation. As you mentioned earlier, a lot of authors got started on their personal profile, and rather than do a Facebook page, they just open their profile up to the public. I think it’s going to be difficult, no matter how you do it. There is a number of different ways you can do this. I think the best way you is to start weaning people off by redirecting them over there, and explaining to them why you want them over there. You can do a number of strategies to do this. One of the popular ones that I’ve found works really well is to put together a short-term campaign to actually migrate people over there. You can do things like send them invites – you can invite anyone that’s a friend of yours to your business page; have a promotional contest that’s specifically running only on your Author page, and get people over to that page, to start that culture of engaging. One of the biggest mistakes Steve and I see people making on their Facebook Author page is they have this dual strategy: “I’m going to sell on my Facebook Author page and I’m going to engage on my personal profile.” You’ve got to quit that, first of all. You need to go over and do the engaging on your Author page as well.

screen-shot-2016-10-31-at-3-41-05-amChris: The best formula for content and for figuring this out is to always remember you need to engage where you sell. It’s simple. It’s really a mantra. Put a sign up in front of your computer that says, “I need to engage where I sell.” Don’t ever break that rule. You’re never going to sell at optimum level without engaging at the optimum level in that same location. We’ll talk about that more later, with primary channels. The best way to get people over there is to 1) start engaging over there, 2) use a migration strategy, and 3) when you feel like you’re ready to pull the plug, you need to disable that “follow” option on your personal profile, so that all those people who follow you will no longer have access to your personal profile. Then, keep posting on that personal profile a couple of weeks, or even a month, leading up to that point, telling followers, “I’m going to pull the plug, I want everyone to go over here”. It’s really tough because a lot of authors have author friends. Remember when you’re marketing on Facebook, you’re not marketing to author friends, you’re marketing to readers (Joint laughter). It’s okay to have author friends on your Facebook profile – you don’t need to worry about them missing out on promoting your books. Get the people to the other page, there’s going to come the place where you’re going to have to pull the plug, and it’s going to be painful, and a lot of people aren’t going to do it.

Stephen: When you were talking about putting a sign up on your computer, I was thinking about the duality of the author life, where you’ve got your creative hat when you’re writing, and then you’ve got your marketing and business hat when you’re doing marketing and business tasks. You said put the sign up, and I actually have a card on the left side of my computer that’s all about writing, and it’s very specific to grounding the reader in your scene. I was thinking, “On the right side, now, I need to put a sign that says ‘Engage where you sell’,” so I can look to the left if I’m writing, look to the right if I’m selling. (Laughing)

Chris: There you go! You’ll have all your bases covered.

Stephen: Let’s get into getting more engagement and more book sales with less social media, because that’s what we all want. Among many other things in this wonderful book that you’ve written, you outline a four-step process. Unlike what a lot of people might outline as a four-step process, “use this trick, and that trick, and this other trick, and in three and a half hours, your problems are solved,” you teach a strategy that takes some work and takes some time to actually deliver results, which is of course, the only way to make it work.

Chris: Yes, I agree. I’m a very process-oriented person. I’m an old-school marketer, so I believe in doing things in a formulaic way. I’m not a big tactics person, as a standalone. I think those four steps are key because if you don’t do all four, and you don’t do the work, it’s not going to work. There’s a huge problem in every sector, it isn’t just authors – it’s everywhere, in people wanting to accumulate information, but not being able to actually put the information to work. I think what readers are going to find in this book is I don’t give you a pass on actually putting this stuff to work. This book is written with the idea that you’re serious about what you’re doing, you want to find the best way to sell your books without having to spend your whole lifetime everyday on social media. It’s very much a process-oriented book with a lot of action steps, and a course that goes along with it.

Stephen: This course that is available at no cost for people that buy the book has several different sessions, and you’ve got worksheets in there. It’s not just read the information in the book, absorb it, and act on it – it’s actually read the information in the book; if you need more information, take this particular session, go through this worksheet, and then get to work.

Chris: Right. I stole this idea from Pat Flynn, he did this with Will it Fly? It’s a great book. I realized when I went through his the course while I was reading his book, what the course does is it takes you into depth like a book cannot. For instance, in my online course, there’s something to do in every chapter to dig in a little bit deeper, and there are a lot of videos in there. A lot of what we need to do is visual – you need to walk people through screenshots, and you can’t really do that very well in a book. I think the easiest way for people to learn the material is to do what you just said – read a chapter, do the work in the course, read a chapter, do the work in the course. I think I’m going to use this model for every book I write from now on, as long as online courses are available, because it’s a great way for people to learn the material faster.

Stephen: I read a lot of non-fictional, educational-type books, and there’s always these little charts and diagrams in there; I prefer to read on a Kindle, and you just can’t read the darn things! Being able to go to a course and actually see what you’re supposed to be seeing, and then get the worksheet that’s in a readable form, and be able to work on it is a blessing. Thank you for doing this, and I thank Pat Flynn for giving you this idea. Stealing ideas from Pat Flynn is always a good plan/ (Joint laughter)

Chris: I agree! The link to the course is in the book, and it’s free, it’s not an extra add-on you have to buy or anything, it’s just there.

Stephen: It is a great value-add for the book. Let’s start walking through the steps. This first step, Finding and Building your audience – that doesn’t sound easy.

Chris: No, and this is the one thing that people skip. (Joint laughter)

Stephen: That’s like skipping building the foundation on your house! “I’m gonna start with the walls.

Chris: Right, build your house on the sand, why don’t you? It’s first because it is the first step in the process, but also it’s the most important step. I’m amazed at the number of authors that don’t know anything about their followers – they know what genre they write in, but that’s it. This chapter on finding and building your audience is two-pronged; it’s find them, first, and it goes into detail about how to do audience research and that kind of thing, and then it goes into actually the building of the audience. There are three strategies for building your audience that people really need to understand: there’s discovery strategies, there’s content strategies, and then there’s growth strategies. Those are the three things you do with your audience – you need to be discoverable, you need to have content strategies that then grow your audience, and build that loyalty. This is a key principle in this whole system.

Stephen: Let’s dig into some of the market research aspects of this. For example, if you write romance, there are specific places you can go to find information about, not necessarily your reader, but the average romance reader.

surveyChris: Right. You bring up a really good point; you really need two sets of data. You need to understand the global data. If you’re a romance writer and you happen to be a member of Romance Writers of America, they provide that data to you. For global data, my biggest go-to is www.pewinternet.org because they have all the online data you need about demographics. They help you hone in on places where your readers might be. The other thing that I think becomes most important is your own research. For instance, Facebook Insights – huge amount of data there. If you’re a Twitter user, if you’re a Pinterest user, all of those platforms have data. If you have a website, Google Analytics is another good source of data. To really dig in deep, if you’ve got a decent email list – that might be 100 people – send out a little survey to your readers. In the book, I talk about what you should ask for, and in the class there’s actually a sample survey that you can send out to your own readers to gather your own audience information. Once you really hone in on that, you can start that process of finding the intersection in content between what your audience wants and what you want to be.

Stephen: You threw out an interesting number when you mentioned email lists. I’m going to take a step back, because I’m assuming that everyone listening to this how has an understanding of what an author platform is – we know it involves a website, we know it involves an email list, and we know it involves some social media platforms. For some people, it involves many, for your clients, it involves fewer. We’re assuming that everyone understands all this. You threw out a number of 100 for an email list; there are a lot of people out there that might have an email  list between 100 and 200 and they think “I couldn’t get any useful information from my readers. I’m not going to do it, because I don’t have 1,000 or 10,000, or 20,000 like the people in my Facebook group have.

Chris: It’s actually tougher to get useful information from 20,000 people than it is to get it from 100. I know that doesn’t sound right, but if you’ve got 100 people then, you’re on what I call in the book the Level 1 Platform. I put together a focus group of Indie authors a couple years ago, and we came up with this structure for platform levels. I’ve heard Chris Fox discuss this same concept, and he talks about book ranks, in defining your levels. We need to understand that no matter what level we’re at, we always have this group of core fans. If you’re a Level 1 author with 100 email addresses, they are probably your core fans, and that’s all you need. One hundred responses to a survey is a pretty good sample. I think it goes with his idea that sometimes we misunderstand – we want to sell as many books as we possibly can, so we think that our audience is this big wide group, maybe it’s the whole world, maybe you think your book is for everybody! (Laughing) But it’s not. In this chapter, we really talk about focus. If you’ve got a platform, and you have only 100 or 200 email lists, you’ve got to start there. That’s a good start. There’s a lot of ways to grow your email list, and there’s a whole chapter on email marketing, and in the course there’s a lot more than that. This idea of having to start somewhere? Having an email list is critical, it is. It’s not critical to have an email list of 20,000 people unless you’re a best-selling writer. Those are the ones who are going to have that size of a list. I’ve got a mid-list client that has an email list of 15,000 people, and we’re constantly struggling with getting engagement. She’s a mid-list author, so she’s not at the place yet where those 15,000 people are going to be responsive, so we’re using warm-up sequences and all this stuff. She got all these email addresses through these mega-author platform parties you’ve been hearing about, where you get 20 authors together, and they each give away a book, and you get this email list of 5,000 people at the end of the ordeal.

Stephen: You can build an email list very, very quickly that way.

Chris: Oh, you bet you can!

Stephen: I am really curious what the value of those lists are. What’s been your experience?

Chris: We found out right away, with one particular party, that we waited too long to get back to the people. When we sent out our first email, we had a really high complaint rate, and we got an email from AWeber. (Joint laughter)  This is where, if you’re going to do these kinds of party things and get these big, huge email lists, the one thing you have to have in place is a welcome sequence; follow-up sequence, autoresponder, whatever you want to call it, you’ve got to get these people warmed up as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you’re going to lose them. The people that are grabbing these free books off these author-networking parties are attending several parties a month, and you’re going to be only one author in a sea of maybe 10, 20, 30 authors a month that they’re getting free books from. You need to make sure that you warm them up in such a way that creates engagement, and the course, especially with the book, goes into detail about how you can do that.

Stephen: Excellent. Let’s move onto the second step, which is choosing your primary channel. Let’s define what a channel is.

Chris: A channel would be a social media platform: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, anything like that. For the purposes of everything in the book, a channel is a social media platform. Here we’re going to go back to that mantra we talked about: primary channels engage where you sell. (Joint laughter)

Stephen: Not Snapchat, I bet.

Chris: No, sorry. The earmark of a primary channel is where you engage. It’s not where you are, it’s where you have conversations with people that lead to loyalty that creates book sales. When we’re looking at primary channels, we need to have a list of criteria that you look for; they’re listed in the book, there’s five of them. I call them measures. When it comes to choosing that one-  or maybe two, Stephen, there’s some exceptions to that rule, if you’re writing in a certain genre, like YA, or children’s books – but, for the most part, everybody only needs to be in one place. You have to choose that primary channel to engage based on: 1) whether it’s the best fit for your reader demographics, 2) Which channels has the best overall numbers in those demographics? 3) Who has the best commerce tools, or what I call “buying culture”.  I think it’s easiest to use the example of Instagram; I don’t like Instagram because you can’t have live links in the comments, and this is just a deal-breaker for me. It’s problematic for people who don’t have visual retail to sell, like clothing or shoes, or something like that, so I’m not a big fan of Instagram as a primary channel. The only way you can sell anything on Instagram is if you run ads there. 4) They need to be a good match for your genre, and you really need to think about that, and 5) The channel has to be strong in discoverability and conversion. “Discoverability” is how good are they at bringing in new readers? How easy can they search you, how easy can they find you? “Conversion” is a sale – how easy is it for people to buy directly from that channel?

Stephen: Is there a favorite platform for your clients?

Chris: Yes, Facebook! It’s hard not to just tell people, “You need to be on Facebook,” but I think by laying out the criteria for how you measure for a primary channel, Facebook is always going to come out on top. There’s nobody that has the numbers they have. Even active members – over 70% of users are there! There’s no channel that comes anywhere near that; I think the next closest one is in the 30s. They’ve just got the best overall demographics; they have, by far, the best discoverability, because their search function is akin to Google. On Snapchat, for instance, you have to know somebody’s username in order to find them – it’s a difficult channel for discoverability. Facebook also has a number of apps, and they’re getting more all the time, that are allowing people to sell and gather emails directly from Facebook without people ever having to leave, so they’re strong there, too. I recommend that everybody have a Facebook page as a primary channel. If you’ve got an exception, then you might want to look at something else, to engage, if you’ve got the time. But you have to have the time. Engaging is time-consuming; setting up an outpost takes time as well, but it’s not nearly as time-consuming as being present to engage.

Stephen: Before we get to outposts, let’s talk about that person out there that’s listening and saying, “Wait a minute, but my author friend just told me that she went onto this new social media platform and she got 1,000 followers in three days, and it’s awesome, and I have to be there.”

Chris: I don’t have any problem with that. I just think that people need to understand the time commitment that’s involved in everything. I have one client that is so social media savvy, she can engage on three channels. There is one overriding thing that you and I have been dancing around, and I know we both agree on, but that is the purpose of a writer is to write. If you’re at that place where you’re just tired of having to deal with marketing, then you need to understand that being on a whole bunch of media channels besides Facebook, is not going to increase your long-term sales that much, that you couldn’t just give them up. Does that make sense?

Stephen: It makes total sense. Based on the numbers we’ve both seen that people are generating from places like Twitter, and Snapchat, most of that type of engagement is happening on Facebook. There are some genres where it might make sense to be engaging at a high level on some other platform, but for a lot of us, the simple answer is Facebook.

Chris: Here’s a great number: internet users, on average, spend 28% of their time on social media. That doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but when you consider everything else you do online, it’s plenty. (Laughing) Of that 28%, 22% is spent on Facebook. The other 6% is scattered out on all the other platforms. Facebook’s main goal is to increase the amount of time that people spend there. Their main interest is to put together more tools and more opportunities so that you never have to leave, basically. (Joint laughter)

Stephen: And it’s working!

Chris: That’s good news for people that are trying to sell stuff there, because over time, Facebook is just going to keep adding more and more commerce options so that people don’t have to go anywhere to do anything, they can just stay right there.

Stephen: Okay. In step two, we’ve chosen our primary channel; step three, we’re going to choose outposts. Let’s define what an outpost is, and then how do we do that in such a way that it doesn’t suck up too much time?

Chris: An outpost channel is a place where you have a presence, but you’re not engaging. There are two basic strategies for an outpost channel: 1) discovery (“I’m on Twitter, someone said something about this author, I’m going to see if they’re here”); you want to have a presence there, so you can do the second strategy, which is 2) redirect people back to where you’re engaging. For a lot of authors, their priorities might be different at different times. For instance, my redirect strategy on Twitter might be to send them to sign up for my email list, because I’m running a short-term campaign to increase my email list before I release a new book. Your outpost is a place you maintain a presence, but it also reflects your current needs, or your current campaigns, or whatever is going on that’s the most important. I’m going to use that cover photo on Twitter, or set up a board on Pinterest, or post on Google+ (or wherever you are) of whatever is going on. You launch a new book, you change your cover photo. When you are building an email list, on all your other channels, you change that cover photo and you do a pinned post, or a pinned tweet. It’s not a place where you’re necessarily going to talk back to people; although,

Chris Fox

Chris Fox

Chris: Chris Fox, if he gets @tagged on Twitter, he has a notification set up, and he’ll answer questions there. But he’s not posting there. Whenever you post on social media, the ultimate goal is to engage, right? To get them to talk back or take an action? Well, we’re not going to do that on our outpost channel, because that’s where the time commitment comes. It’s more effective to redirect people to places where you’re already engaging that way you can build a relationship with them; you can engage while you sell. I hate to keep bashing Twitter, but I’ve been bashing Twitter since February of this year when they put out an algorithm. I’ve talked to people whose engagement rates are plummeting on Twitter, and they just want to give up; I say, don’t give up completely – set up an outpost there. Pin a tweet every time you change your cover photo, let people know where they can find you. This is the one thing I hear from people: “Aren’t people going to resent that, because you’re not there, and think that you’re lazy or don’t care because you’re not engaging everywhere?” I don’t think so. I think that people that want to find you are going to find you wherever you are. I don’t that someone is going to go to your Twitter profile and say, “Oh, they don’t tweet. Well, I’m not going to go find them on Facebook.” (Joint laughter) I think we need to understand that if someone is looking for you, they’re going to look for you until they find you, or until it becomes too difficult. So, make it as user-friendly as you can to redirect people from your outpost to your email list, to your Facebook page, to your Facebook group – wherever you’re engaging, send them there. That’s basically what an outpost is.

Stephen: How many outposts should we have?

Chris: I think that depends on how much time you want to spend on maintaining them, because you do have to maintain them. When you’re doing that research where you’re asking those questions (What’s the best fit for my demographic? Best overall numbers? Best commerce tools? Maybe that author friend of yours that got 1,000 people on that other channel), make a list of half a dozen of the top ones. For a lot of authors, that will be places you already are, but you want to pull back that presence into an outpost strategy, rather than go out on any new ones. Make sure that includes Author Central, the Amazon Author page, and Goodreads. The important thing for people to remember about outposts is that it’s not “set it and forget it”. You still have to check in, and you still have to change out your cover photos and your pinned tweets from time to time.

Stephen: Okay. That’s terrific advice. Let’s move on to the fourth step. Step one is a hard step, and step four is a hard step, as well. “Creating the right content for your audience,” and even figuring out what that right content is.

Smart Social Media for AuthorsChris: I agree with you, those steps are like a sandwich. (Joint laughter) You’ve got the two really difficult ones at One and Four, and then in the middle it’s like “Eh, okay.” Step Four is key because you can’t do One, Two, and Three, and then not remodel your content strategy. Unless you already have a really good content strategy and you’re already doing the right things. Then you don’t have to worry about it. This is a reiteration of my first book, SMART Social Media for Authors; you need to have content that is more like copywriting. There needs to be a number of things that you want to look at. The first one we probably want to talk about is the 80/20 rule. That is the idea that content cannot be overly promotive. Data tells us that you can’t just sell; it turns people off. If there’s nothing of value that you’re giving them, they’re not going to reciprocate and give you anything else. I like to use the 80/20 formula; that means that 80% of your content is going to give value to your fans, and 20% of your content is going to be about selling. When you find that intersection between what you like to talk about, and what your fans want to hear, that 20% that you sell – they’re going to give you a pass on selling. As a matter of fact, they’re going to want you to sell. They’re going to wonder why you’re not selling, if you never sell at all, because you’re giving so much value away, in terms of content, stuff that makes them happy, entertains them, fills them with compassion, whatever. Those are the kinds of posts that build up the loyalty, that, when it comes time to sell, you shouldn’t feel salesy or sleazy, or any of that, if you honor that rule.

Stephen: When we talk about content, I can imagine listeners thinking to themselves, “Content = writing blog posts, and just creating this stuff that’s just difficult and time-consuming to do.” That might be a little bit of what you’re talking about, but a lot of it is easy things – it’s selecting the right way to be useful.

Chris: That’s a great point, “selecting the right way to be useful.” I think one thing authors don’t realize – because a lot of us don’t like to talk about ourselves – is that the most interesting thing to our fans is in that intersection between what I like and what they like, and there’s a lot of the same things in there. I talk a little bit about the content bucket system, which is something that I introduced in my last book. This idea of defining those buckets where you can easily find content that you can pull out at any time. All of us spend a lot of time online – 28% of our internet time is spent on social media (Joint laughter). You can be collecting this stuff that you find all the time; places like Buzzfeed have great links to articles that everybody likes, and I think that once you find that intersection, you’re going to find that content is a lot easier to write. You just have to get over yourself. You want to sell people books, but if you want to sell people books, you have to let them in a little bit. You have to be like the Wizard of Oz – pull back that curtain and you don’t want to be saying, ”don’t pay any attention to that man in the booth back there.” (Joint laughter) You gotta let people in a little bit, and this is really hard for a lot of people to do, but you can do it to the extent that it makes you feel comfortable.

Stephen: Can you give us an example from one of your clients – I’m not asking you to identify them, or give any information away that’s going to identify who your client might be? Just some ways to find that intersection and then to really make use of it.

Chris: In the content bucket system, first of all, you need to find out what your fans like; and I go through that process a little bit in the book, about really understanding content that they like. You can do this by research on other like authors that are like you, and take a look at their Facebook pages, see what works; see what works on your Facebook page, by going into Insights and looking at your top posts, things that you like. For instance, right now I’m looking at one of my author’s content bucket systems, and her buckets are: she lives in Montana, so that’s one of her buckets, she’s a foodie, she loves to read, so she talks about other books, she likes pets, she likes holidays, and she also likes quirky news – weird things you see in the news sometimes that kind of amaze people. Those are her buckets, and she’s always looking for stuff when she’s out that she can post online. Last year at Halloween, I ran across a post on Buzzfeed or something – it was a poll on “What’s the favorite Halloween candy in your state?” and it listed every state and every candy. I looked at that, and I looked at some of the states, and I said, “Are you kidding me?!” (Joint laughter) I couldn’t believe they were so weird!

Stephen: That’s awesome, though, that’s a great post!

Chris: She posted that, and then told what her state’s candy was, and whether she liked it or not, and then asked people, “What do you think?” That was the most popular post she had all year.

Stephen: That’s amazing. Great examples! Thanks for sharing those.

Chris: Well, everybody wants to speak their mind about their state.

Stephen: And their favorite candy, and their favorite cookies! I’m all about cookies, myself.

Chris: Yeah, there you go.

Stephen: Okay. Those are the four steps. We’ve come up with ways, once you build up this process, where you can get a lot more engagement by spending a lot less time on social media, and using that engagement to sell more books. What we would like you to do now, is jump out and buy Chris’ book, which is called Sell More Books With Less Social Media. If you’re listening on the day the show comes out, which is October 31st, the book is being offered at a very special price. Again, it includes the free course. I think you’ve got two or three days to get the special price, and even when the price goes up to the normal price, it’s still going to be a great value. This is just the kind of book that, as an author, you should have in your author library.

Chris: Well, thanks!

Stephen: Chris, where can we buy the book?

Chris: The book’s available on Amazon, Kobo, and Nook…and the link for the course is in the book.

Stephen: We were talking before we came on the air, about a fascinating new project that you’re involved in; something that I think our author listeners are going to be interested in, maybe for themselves, maybe for some of the people that are helping them with some things. Can you talk for a minute about that?

Chris: Oh, I’d be glad to. This is a course I’ve been working on for a year. The course is for author assistants, it’s called “Mastering Book Marketing for Author Assistants”. It’s also good for authors. It’s a bit of a collaboration project with a gal that owns an author assistant company. We’re putting together a comprehensive course that specifically speaks to marketing, because all the authors that I talk to say, “I want an assistant, but I want them to do more than just manage a newsletter; I need them to understand marketing.” We put this course together in response to what authors were asking me to do. It’s comprehensive – it covers everything that’s in the book, really, and how author assistants can do everything from evaluate the platform level of your author, to how to do Facebook ads, to how to put together email marketing strategies. I think for some authors it would be good, too, because then you can understand what, exactly, it is you need your author assistants to be doing. That will be coming out here pretty soon. We have an early bird special on that, that I can let your listeners in on, and I’ll send that you the link for that.

Stephen: Okay, so we will link that up in the show notes. Chris, it is always a pleasure to chat with you. Again, I love the common sense approach that you bring to author marketing. Keep up the great work.

Chris: Thank you so much. Also, I never overlook an opportunity to send my people your way, I think your podcast is great. Thanks for having me.

Stephen: Thank you, and thanks everybody for listening. Remember, you can find show notes and links to everything we talked about today, including Chris’ book (which if you get it on the first couple days, you’ll get a really great price on) at www.theauthorbiz.com Thanks for listening!

Thanks for Listening!

Thanks so much for joining me again this week.

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