If you have author pages, do you feel obligated to beg for "Likes"?
I started out with a regular FB page as an author, just to get free exposure for my books, but then later I added a professional page. Since I never liked the idea of spamming the hell out of my friends, I don't have a whole lot of "likes". My regular page is reaching that 5,000 "friends" limit, and when I attempted to switch all my "friends" over to "likes", it didn't work.
Frankly, I'm getting a bit fed up with FB in general...it's shifted and changed so many times and I am no longer "in control" of the contest on my pages, being inundated with outside advertisements and content that I end up having to go in and delete every day or two. FB sneaks posts in that don't come from "friends" and certainly don't come from readers. By the time I just get comfortable with some of the changes they make, they change again.
Anyone have any ideas? Of course I have my author pages on ARe, and on Amazon, etc. and my author page at Ellora's Cave, but those only reach a finite number of readers.
Some of you send me monthly newsletters, and I go buy your books if they sound good to me, but because I do not have a huge mailing list, I stopped sending out newsletters long ago. I'm pretty sure the 10 of you who got my newsletters got tired of deleting them each month. LOL! I have paid for memberships to Coffee Time Romances, TRS Blue, and posted to their author blog for about a year. But I noticed that I seemed to be the only person to leave comments on other authors' posts, so I began to doubt that anyone ever read the blog posts there.
I post to several joint blogs, and get perhaps three or four comments from other authors on those posts (thank you to those who are kind enough to leave comments!). I used to join large author chats on various Yahoo Groups, but there were so many authors all leaving excerpts and chatting, my posts never seemed to show up until the "chat" had ended.
I guess I am just not gung ho enough in my promo attempts. I have two closed Yahoo Groups that I have used in past years to communicate with my author pals, but when members post excerpts and promo, the only ones who see it are the 30-odd members (who are all authors, too.)
My back list sales had been good from Ellora's Cave, so I just stopped doing a lot of promo. I just did book reviews and interviews for others on my Examiner . com columns, or on my blogs. But I am finding that having only one book out in a year isn't bringing folks to my back list over at Ellora's Cave...and my royalties have slumped alarmingly.
So I warn you now that I will be more aggressive with promo, and will become a royal pain in the butt. In the meantime, if any of you want to toss me a bone and give me some free advertising on your blogs, I would appreciate it. In return, I will use my blogs to help you promo yours.
Hugs...
Fran Lee
