Social Media by Janelle Evans

Social media is one of the ways we as writers can spread the word about our past and upcoming books. Ranging from free to a fairly inexpensive way to promote your work, every author should strive to be savvier in this area of promotion. 

One way to strengthen your social media presence is create memes with images of your work. Here are a couple of examples I have made to promote my own.

I use canva.com to create all my advertising artwork—from posters to memes. It’s user friendly with tons of layouts and text settings. Not everything is free at this site, but since they allow me to download my own images and create my own layouts, everything I do from this site is free for me. How is that possible?

• Tip #1: Use a google or Bing.comsearch to find pictures for your background. If they don’t have a watermark covering them, you don’t have to pay royalties to copy and download them to Canva. The rose picture you see I found by typing (winter, rose). The other picture I found by typing (rippling water). Yes, it’s time consuming to go through pictures. I set aside a few hours every Saturday just typing in random words and seeing what pictures pop up. Anything that jumps out at me I save to Canva, even if I don’t know what I’ll use it for at the moment.
• Tip #2: You want to look for wallpaper sized pictures. They don’t tend to pixelate, or get burry, when you try to enlarge them as often as other pictures do. I usually use the word wallpaper in my search also just to help weed out some of the thousands of free pictures out there.
• Tip #3: There is an option on canva.com to make the picture you create as a link to other webpages. Don’t use it. Social Media sites don’t support it. When you upload these memes, write those links in the subject bars instead. Then your customers will have a working link they can click on to buy your book after being amazed by your eye-catching artwork.

The last thing I would like to mention about promotion is that it is time consuming. So, I also use a web platform that helps me look like I spend more time on social media than I actually do. Hootsuite.com enables me to schedule posts and comments across all of my social media accounts. From this website I can view comments and drip in posts, up to 30 per month. If you want unlimited accesses for scheduling it will cost you a yearly fee, but so far I have found 30 schedule posts per month to be more than enough.