J.M. Lane, author of Why the Curlew Cries, on why, when it comes to marketing your book, you don’t need to be everywhere . . .
One of the first things you find out when you start trying to market a book is that, apparently, you need to be everywhere.
Facebook. Instagram. TikTok. YouTube. Threads. A newsletter. A website. Probably three other things I’ve forgotten about already, and two more that were invented since I started writing this.
And I tried. God knows I tried.
I opened accounts, posted things, and watched videos about how often I should post, what time I should post, how long a video should be, what hashtags I should use, and whether the algorithm had decided that week that hashtags were dead again.
It gets ridiculous fairly quickly. At some point you have to stop and remember that you started all this because you wanted to write books.
I had days where I spent more time telling people I was a writer than actually writing anything. That’s a strange place to end up.
Useful, but not everything
Social media is useful, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise. It has sold books for me, introduced me to readers, thrown up opportunities and put my work in front of people who’d never have come across it otherwise.
But I don’t think you need to be everywhere. In fact, I think trying to be everywhere is a good way to be fairly bad at all of it.
This goes back to what I said in the last article. You need some idea of who your reader is. Once you know that, or at least have a decent guess, you can start thinking about where they actually are.
That sounds obvious. I didn’t always do it.
Chasing whatever’s working this month
Like most people, I sometimes joined platforms because other writers were there. Somebody would say TikTok was the place to sell books, and suddenly I felt I should be on TikTok. Then Instagram would change something, and the word went round that Reels were the answer. Then somebody else would tell me Facebook was still where books actually sold.
You can lose a fierce amount of time chasing whatever everyone else has decided is working this month.
The thing is, what works for one writer can be no use at all to another.
- A children’s writer might get far more from schools, libraries and parents than from hours spent trying to make clever videos.
- Someone writing local history might do far better with local radio, the paper and the community groups.
- A romance writer might find a huge, hungry readership on TikTok.
None of them are doing it wrong. They’re just talking to different people.
You have to actually like the place
There’s another part of this that I think gets overlooked: you have to actually like the place, at least a bit.
If you hate making videos, building your whole marketing plan around video will make you miserable. You might drag yourself through it for a few weeks, but sooner or later you’ll stop. Same goes for any platform.
I’ve always found that I do best in the places I actually use, rather than the places I’m only marketing on. I talk to people. I comment on things. I answer messages. I post about books, but I also post about whatever else is going on in my life or my writing.
That feels natural to me. Dropping in every few days to roar that I have a book for sale doesn’t.
Nobody wants to follow an ad.
Here it is beside a coffee cup
I learned that one fairly quickly too. When you first publish something, there’s a temptation to talk about it non-stop.
Here’s my book.
Here’s the cover again.
Here’s a review.
Here it is beside a coffee cup.
Here it is beside a slightly different coffee cup.
I’m taking the piss a bit, but we’ve all done some version of it. I certainly have. The trouble is, after a while people stop seeing it.
The posts that have worked best for me often didn’t feel like advertising at all. They might be about where an idea came from, a bit of Irish folklore, something that went wrong in the writing, a place that ended up in a scene, or just something that happened that day. The book is somewhere in the background, rather than being shoved in someone’s face.
That’s probably the part of social media I find most interesting now. People aren’t just following books. They’re following people.
The numbers game
I know that sounds painfully obvious, but writers forget it the minute we start staring at numbers. Followers, likes, views, reach. It gets into your head.
You post something and check it ten minutes later. Then again twenty minutes after that. One post gets a few hundred views, another gets thousands, and suddenly you’re trying to work out what magic thing you did differently.
Sometimes there is no magic thing. Sometimes the internet just interneted.
A big number doesn’t necessarily mean much either. I’ve had things seen by thousands that sold next to nothing, and much smaller posts that clearly reached the right people and actually shifted books.
That changed how I look at all of it. I’m far more interested now in who is paying attention than in how many.
A few hundred people who genuinely like what you write are worth more than thousands who watched one video, tapped like and forgot your name five seconds later.
Pick somewhere, not everywhere
So if you’re starting out, I wouldn’t open accounts on everything and spend the next month feeding them all like a field of hungry calves.
Pick somewhere. Maybe two places. Use them properly for a while, and see what happens:
- See who talks back.
- See whether the people there seem interested in the kind of books you write.
- Ask yourself whether you can picture still using that platform six months from now.
If the answer is no, there’s no great shame in walking away from it.
You’re not failing at book marketing because you don’t enjoy TikTok. You’re not failing because you barely touch Facebook. You’re not failing because somebody else has fifty thousand followers and you have five hundred.
The only question that really matters is whether what you’re doing helps the right people find your work. That’s all social media is supposed to do.
It isn’t the work. The book is still the work.
And if keeping five platforms alive means you’ve no time or energy left to write the next one, then somewhere along the way the marketing has started eating the thing it was meant to help.
(c) J.M. Lane
About Why the Curlew Cries by J.M. Lane:
Former Garda Jack McLane has come to the Ox Mountains looking for a quieter life, or at least the remains of one. He has left the job behind, but not the things the job left in him. Grief. Guilt. The memory of an old friend who spent years thinking about the women who vanished from the west of Ireland and were never found.
When Jack is given access to that friend’s private notes, he expects obsession, loose ends, maybe the sad remains of a case that defeated better men than him. Instead, he finds a pattern. The trail leads him through lonely roads, abandoned farms, half-forgotten families and a landscape where people know more than they are willing to say.
In the shadow of the Ox Mountains, the past has not passed at all. It has only settled into the walls, the fields and the silence between neighbours. And somewhere in that silence, a killer has been waiting.
Where the Curlew Sings is a dark Irish crime thriller about grief, loyalty and the secrets rural Ireland keeps when no one is asking the right questions. For readers of atmospheric crime fiction, cold case mysteries and slow-burning rural noir.
Where the Curlew Sings is out now. Order your copy of the book online here.
And read more from J.M. Lane on Writing.ie here.
