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I have been wondering with the introduction of social media to the literary world, is social media as effective in literature without a brand or audience? I am beginning to think without a strong or reasonable audience, a base, there is no social media portal that is better than another? None will ensure sales? Would love to hear other opinions and experience.

-- 11 Mar 2014, 19:19 --

Wouldn't be great to have a social media portal just for authors and publishers? where readers could go to interact with their favorite author or publisher?

That would be pretty awesome, actually. I have "liked" a bunch of authors on facebook, and have noticed that many of their posts are endless self-promotions of their books. No matter which social media portal you use, to market your 'brand', you apparently have to spend hours a day trying to provide some little tidbits of valuable information to the online community, while reminding them, over and over again that you have written a book, and will only stop these reminders until all 7 billion people on earth read it.

In some ways, I suppose it's good. There are many books I only had the pleasure of reading because I came across an interesting blog, and there was a link to "I have written this book!"; or there were some nice quotes from someone shared on facebook, and when clicking on their link I saw their book's promotion.

So I suppose my 'answer' to your question would be: Whatever medium you choose, just keep at it ceaselessly, until you reach as many people as you can, but still providing some other value to people who have already read whatever you happen to be promoting.

And yes, I think having a one-stop-shop for author/reader communication would be really convenient!

The whole marketing thing has been something I've looked into quite a bit. There are so many mixed reviews on all of them too. Some people are like "This worked great for me!" and others are like "This didn't do anything at all. Total waste of money!" There are some sites that I've heard of like "Bookgorilla" that if it doesn't up your sales you can get your money back, which is nice.

As for social media, I kind of think it's almost a must in this day and age. Well, at least if you're self-publishing, and probably even if you're going the mainstream way. People like the internet, and they especially like social media, so I think it's best to get your name on that google generator as many times as you can when someone types it in. I've noticed facebook, twitter, and myspace (still hanging in there) have a tendency to be at the top of the google listings. Goodreads is kind of a social media kind of thing for authors as well. I've noticed a lot of self-published authors friending anybody who reads their books on there, which I think does encourage you to read more by them.

Coming from someone who is not all about technology (in fact, while I am still in my early 20's there are many of my friends who call me a grandma, because of my distaste for all things electronic...seriously, I had my last boulder flip phone for 5 years and only got a new one because it was dropped in the toilet...) I do feel that in this day and age we are very lucky as authors. As long as you are willing to do the marketing and social media stuff you WILL sell books. Will you end up on the top seller list? Haven't really tested that theory just yet

I agree. I also believe it is a challenge to keep up with marketing and promoting. Additionally figuring which social media portal is most effective with increasing your 'brand' or audience base can be a challenge. Balancing all of this and for how long? When do you make the decision to not just change media portals but change your marketing and promotion approach? How many sales; audience base figures large or small or no change do you adjust?