When promoting yourself as an author, there are a number of methods that can boost you on the internet. As a publishing company, we are very aware that the author’s own self-promotion can play a part in both their success as an author and our success in publishing them well. Whilst these pointers and suggestions are valid and useful if you’ve self-published, we feel that they can work especially well in combination with being supported by a publishing company.
Let’s have a look at some of the ways an author can use Facebook especially to promote themselves and their book(s). 

The most obvious and simple thing that an author can do on Facebook is create a page for themselves. Technically, Facebook classes authors under “Artist, Band or Public Figure”. This is especially a good option if you want to create a separation between your personal account and your professional author page (the alternative is to allow people to follow you personally and controlling what they see with the different privacy settings on your posts, but we’ll explore the page option here).
Your author page can be devoted to everything about your book(s), to your writing and your thoughts about it, to writing as a general concept… Anything that you feel connects to you as an author.
You can share pictures, quotes, anything that you find elsewhere on the web and that you relate to as an author…
You can put quotes from your work, you can discuss the progress of your book, you can talk about your writing process and the evolution of your work…
You can use the page as your platform to tell the world about you as an author and about your writing, whether it’s a novel, short story, poems, or a mix of all of these…

Another useful thing about having a page as an author is that pages can like pages… This means that you can connect your page to publisher’s pages, to other author’s pages, to pages about writing… And this also means that the publisher you get published by should actually turn around and like your author page, thereby showing you support.
Mutual sharing of posts will also show your publisher’s support for you as well as your support for them. Liking posts is equally useful and creates a connection between your page, your publisher’s page, other writing related pages and so on…
Likes and shares create interaction between pages and boost the amount of people who are aware of their existence. Comments also encourage others to react to the posts commented upon.

A very important tool is to invite people to like your page and your publisher’s page. The more people interact with a page by commenting, liking, sharing and liking the page itself, the more the page will gain attention, and the more attention to the page, the more likely people are to buy your book (which is the author’s ultimate goal). There are apps that can be added to your page to make it easier to invite friends and if your publisher’s page uses one of those, make sure to invite all your friends to their page as well as to your own. On your own page, you’ve got a ‘Build An Audience’ button that gives you the option to invite your friends and email contacts. Don’t forget to use it! You have to make sure that your page is visible as much as possible and that means interaction – yours with everyone else and theirs with you.

The crucial point of any Facebook use for an author is interaction – you have to be involved with people as much as possible and make sure that your book and your page as well as you are memorable to those who come across it! It’s a vital balance between drawing interest in your page, showing interest in any writing pages/communities that you are involved in and drawing interest to your publisher’s page.
Don’t forget that you can contact other pages about your page, your book and so on via their message system and find out how they might be able to promote you.

There is plenty more that can be done on Facebook, including advertising your page through their ad system, boosting individual posts and so on. Those options require you to pay for them and may not be a first choice, but if you want to use them, go for it (make sure to read through their help pages on them first – there’s a difference in the level of effect between ads and boosted posts for instance!), but don’t feel pressed to. You can build up quite a following just by being on online, interacting and being part of the reading and writing communities and pages on Facebook.

These pointers are some of the things that we’ve found useful and feel help authors promote themselves… They are by no means exhaustive, but they are a good start.
Let us know what tricks you’ve found in promoting yourself in the comments section! 🙂