Spoiler alert! This post states the obvious. It unashamedly presents stuff you already know with brass knobs ON. It is written to fit maybe any author (sapphic or otherwise) trying to market a book on social media. Read on if you dare….

Let’s start with some small business B A S I C S
There are TWO steps to achieving business success:
Step 1: Make a product
Step 2: Sell the product to make a profit

This applies to anything a consumer might want and yes, dear Author, that includes books. Why else do we spend our lives in a drafty garret, hunched over a cold keyboard, tapping out deathless prose until we produce something of publishable quality? Why else do we suffer the cycle of submission-rejection-submission-repeat, until (yay!) we find someone to publish the thing; a trad or hybrid publisher or, more likely these days, ourselves. But after we’re done riding the creative’s rollercoaster of inspiration-desperation and our newborn babe book finally appears, what if no one wants to read it?

Back in the pre-internet era, publishers looked after the marketing. As precious authors, we could retreat to our garrets, do what we are good at and let the marketing experts promote our books for their and (ahem) our profit. Those golden days are gone. Now, it seems, just the Big Five Publishers do any marketing and then only for bestsellers. Most publishers don’t invest in it and leave the chore up to us.

Obviously we—and I use the term royally to denote all authors, no matter the genre— we want our work to be read. So, how do we find readers? Putting aside family who are likely to be biased, which is nice, but we already know they love us, we usually start looking among our friends.

Well, there’s bad news on that front, folks. A study released in July 2023 from the Pew Research Center crunched the numbers on friendship among Americans.

Only 38% percent of the Americans surveyed said they had five or more close friends (= potential readers). Staying in America, that feeble 38% translates into the scholastic grade F, for FAIL. Clearly, our books would never get widely read if we depended on real friends.

So what about virtual friends on social media, Facebook in particular? My quick & dirty search struck gold in a study by Oxford psychologist Robin Dunbar published in The Royal Society Open Science in 2016. Dunbar analyzed a survey of 3,375 Facebook users in the United Kingdom aged 18 to 65. His study revealed that these users had an average of 150 Facebook friends.

Two years later a poll commissioned by the app Pingit found that 2,000 adults in the UK typically have 554 friends in their social media networks. Let’s pretend that number hasn’t changed since then. Just imagine what an ideal start our book would get if every single person in our network of 554 friends reads (ahem, buys) our book, and here’s the point, shares their good review with their 554 friends, each of whom would share the news with their own 554 friends, each of whom in turn would have another 554 friends ready and willing to read (ahem, buy) our book.

Look, I can’t do sums (yes, dear Author, I failed my Arithmetic exam) but according to my calculator (554 x 554 x 554)  that ideal situation would equal one hundred and seventy million, thirty-one thousand, four hundred and sixty-four readers (or do I mean 4 x 554 = 94,194,743,105? I can’t even say that number * ). Even if only 38% of that total buy our book, we’d be global bestsellers in no time!

Wake up, little Susie (or whatever your name is, dear Author). It don’t work like that, do it? Nowadays we cannot rely on either real or virtual friends, no matter how much we badger them to help us sell our book. As untrained marketers, we must somehow build a following out of millions of strangers, like ourselves, mucking about on social media. If we’re lucky, we might find like-minded readers who might like our book (after they buy it first).

But how?  How do we reach our target audience, that desirable bunch of book addicts in our genre whose TBR pile towers over their bedside stand but—as any bibliophile knows—there is always room for one more (or more than one; let them buy another copy for a friend). It’s a minefield out there on social media!

Well, dear Author, I warned you this post would state the obvious. So here it is: I don’t know! Me, myself and I don’t have the technical savvy to successfully reach my target audience on my ownsome. Yes, I’m doing the obvious. I have this website, and this blog, AND I’ve set up author pages on Goodreads, Facebook and Instagram, where I post stuff I believe potential readers find amusing, and most importantly (I think), where I share the wonderful reviews that readers of Becoming Janice send me. I try not to bash my thankfully rising number of followers on the head (too often) with plaintive entreaties to buy Becoming Janice. Because a wise person once told me that the key to inviting online engagement is being ‘social’  not ‘sell-cial’ (duh). So I try to stay friendly.

But I digress. Social media has advanced so far you need proper training to master all the uppers and downers of online marketing. There are so many pitfalls, and so many ‘experts’ out there willing to take on the task (for an extortionate price!) and tell us how we can ‘maximize our advertising budget’. So, where can a bewitched, bothered and bewildered (**) author find genuine (free) support?

On social media, of course. Facebook and Instagram are famous for groups that offer solace. But sometimes a shoulder to cry on is not enough. Please, dear Author, if you’re in the same muckety media marketing quandary as me, share your advice in the comments. Teach me something I don’t know, and I might even stop bullying you into buying Becoming Janice. 

Writers groups on Facebook
These are some of the great support groups, some more commercial than others, that I’ve come across on Facebook.
Women Writers, Editors, Agents, and Publishers
Female Writers – Women Only
Fiction Writers
Writers and Authors Promotions
Indie Authors’ Book Promotion Group
Authors Promoting Authors
The Writing Wives Ads & Marketing Group
Lesbian Books, writers, readers
Book writers, publishers & agents
Lesbian Reader’s Group
Lesbian Readers and Writers Book Club.
Julies Book Review- Reviewers for Authors
The Lesbian Review Chat
I Heart SapphFic Author Forum

Featured image
Shared with thanks to The Tall Poppies, the “only cross-genre, cross-publisher women’s author collective in the world. [Their] goal is to connect with women, help women, and yeah, talk about books (and sometimes flowers. And chocolate.)”

(*) I told you, I can’t do sums, let alone count.

(**) Jo Ann Greer singing for Rita Hayworth in ‘Pal Joey’. Greer was one of the great unsung heroes of Hollywood, dubbing vocals not only for stars like Rita Hayworth, but Kim Novak, June Allyson and Esther Williams as well. Thought you might like to know that.