A professional Facebook Author page is a must-have for all writers. Though Facebook doesn’t offer the same organic results as they did in the past, they’ve created one of the greatest advertising platforms that is excellent for selling books.
You’ll want to make sure your page is complete before running any ad campaigns. Set up or optimize your Facebook Author Page with this tutorial.
1. Facebook Cover
Your Facebook cover is a billboard where you can create a cover that promotes you and your books.
Design your own cover image according to the Facebook page cover dimensions. You can use a mobile app or web-based graphic designer like PicMonkey or Canva. Make it even easier by hiring someone on Fiverr to do it for you.
Otherwise, browse freelance sites for a video production specialist.
2. Use the Shopping Template
Facebook’s Shopping template will allow you to host a store on your author page. It’s the perfect place to showcase your books.
If you’re setting up your author fan page for the first time, you will be prompted to select a template.
If you already have an author Facebook page, you can change to the shopping template in Settings under Templates and Tabs.
3. Fill out Your Page Info and Story Sections
I can’t tell you how many authors pages fail to include vital information, like bio and website. Fans are going to want to visit your blog, website, or Amazon page so be sure to add as much information as you can.
Page info settings
More free promotional real estate is offered in the Story section located in the right sidebar of your Facebook author page. This area features another image and a text area where you can include a live link.
Edit your Story Section
4. Activate Call to Action Button
This call to action button can be used to encourage fans to contact you, watch a video, shop for your books, and more. Click edit button and a box will pop-up with button options and settings.
5. Add Your Books to the Shop
The Facebook shopping template is perfect for authors because you can feature a little bookshop right on your page.
What your shop area will look like.
Click Shop in the left sidebar menu. You will see a box where you can Add Product. Click that area to add your book cover, buy link, and toggle the Share this product to your page if you’d like your book to be posted to your timeline.
Adding books to shopping template.
6. Embed a Mailchimp form
If you’re a Mailchimp user, you can grow your email list straight from your Facebook page. However, this must be done through your Mailchimp account.
Log in to Mailchimp, click your username in the top menu bar to activate the dropdown menu. Click account and then click integrations. This is where you will find the option to add a tab with a Mailchimp form to your Facebook Author page.
Locate the Facebook signup for option in your Mailchimp dashboard.Offer a free download with a Mailchimp form in a Facebook page tab.
You can reorder your tabs by returning to the Templates and Tabs section under Settings. Click and drag them to the desired spot.
7. Invite Your Friends
Use the handy Invite Friends button to get the first likes for you page. Click this button ever few months as you add new friends to your personal profile.
Invite friends!
8. Claim Your Facebook Username
Once you get 25 likes on your Facebook author page, you can choose a username.
Try to find a username that is closest to your writing name or the same as your social media handles.
Choosing a username will also set the URL for your page, making a nice, neat address instead of the default jumble of words with numbers.
Check your username in the About tab.
9. Connect to Your Instagram
Connecting your Instagram account allows you to share Instagram posts to your Facebook Author Page. It also makes it possible to configure Instagram ads via Facebook in your browser, which is easier than doing it from a mobile phone.
Make sure your Instagram is connected by visiting the Instagram tab in Settings.
10. Use Offers
Whenever you want to promote your book, you can use Facebook Offers to stir up interest and urgency. Click offers in the left sidebar menu or in the posting options on your timeline.
You can then add a photo, choose what kind of offer you want to post (coupon, discount, promocode, or other), and set the expiration date.
Offers tabCreating your offer
11. Create a Group That’s Connected to Your Page or Link Your Existing Group
Groups are an extremely effective way to stay engaged with your readers. Each time you post to a group, your members will get a notification, so unlike page fans, group members are more likely to see your posts.
A private group can also be a way to give members exclusive access to you. Just make sure you are prepared to invest time and thought into your group to make it a worthwhile endeavor.
If you already have a group, link it to your page so your brand is connected.
Link groups in the Groups tab.
Now You’re Ready to Go!
Your page is ready for using, sharing, and advertising.
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When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people—our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families—will choose for us, and before long we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important. We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.
Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
When it comes to becoming a successful author, planning is 200% more valuable than writing. I’m not talking about outlining your stories and novels before writing them. That is important too, but I’m talking about planning on both macro and micro levels to reach your big picture vision of your life as a writer. Without planning ahead, we get distracted, sidetracked, and stray off task.
Aspiring writers are especially susceptible to writer’s drift, a state when we feel like life always gets in the way of our writing. There are several reasons we allow this to happen on a conscious or subconscious level.
1. Because we don’t earn a steady paycheck from writing yet, so we can’t justify spending time and energy on it.
2. We usually don’t have writing deadlines, except those we impose on ourselves. When we fail to meet them, who cares? No one knows but us. We have no one to hold us accountable.
3. We don’t know exactly what to do next, leaving gaps to be filled with interruptions, distractions, or someone else’s priorities.
We’ll get up for a job we’re not crazy about. We rearrange our schedule for our kids or significant other. We even drag ourselves out to walk the dog no matter how tired we are.
But how often do we take a stand for our writing?
The first chunk of time to be sacrificed when some unforeseen issue comes up is our writing time. Writing time is vague and unconvincing. People don’t respect it. Even we’re not sure what it is we’re not getting done when we’re not able to write. So it’s easy to dismiss it as no big deal.
The one person we fail is ourselves. And we don’t realize the impact it makes on our wellbeing when we’re constantly letting ourselves down by pushing aside our heart’s dream.
What would happen if you treated your writing with the same priority as other aspects of your life?
And how do we put ourselves into position to do that?
How do we do it without feeling guilty or self-indulgent?
Planning out your writer’s path to the smallest details will keep you committed to your writing. This means breaking things up in 5-year, 1-year, quarterly, weekly, and daily goals.
It’s not about finding time to write. It’s about making time to write.
Making sure you always have something scheduled to do next will ensure that you avoid wasting time, overwhelm, and paralysis. This will help you keep moving forward no matter what.
You’ll be able to ignore your fears and push past rejection. You’ll always be able to put one foot in front of the other by executing the next step in your plan.
Start Here
I’ve created a planning guide to avoid writer’s drift. You can download it for free using the link or form below.
How to find beta readers? It’s crucial for every writer to get honest and useful feedback, but it’s difficult to find beta readers outside of family and friends.
Today, we talk to Matt Brindley from fresh.ink, an exciting new platform that will match writers with unbiased beta readers. It will not only allow them to receive feedback, but also provide detailed analytics.
Ahead of its launch, fresh.ink is hosting a writing contest. $7,500 in prizes are available across 4 fiction categories: short story, novelette, novella, and novel. This contest is live.
Fresh.ink is also launching a digital literary magazine which will feature the best work across the platform and reprints from previously published literary works. All authors will be paid for their submissions.
This means writers can upload a story or novel for feedback, enter it into the writing contest, and possibly get published in the magazine all in one submission.
Read on to learn more about this amazing new tool for authors!
Whether an author plans to publish in a literary magazine, self-publish or traditionally publish, we envision fresh.ink as the connector between authors and agents, publishers and editors.
Interview with Matt Brindley, founder of fresh.ink
Tell us about yourself, Matt. You’re a product and software developer. What made you decide to make the transition to the publishing world?
The idea for fresh.ink was the result of many experiences and conversations over several years. I was first exposed to the writing world and the challenges writers and publishers alike face via my wife, Mary, who is a writer and editor.
While researching and evolving this idea, I met some brilliant people who were very generous with their time. One London-based editor took me to see her company’s office in a converted Victorian house. It was a beautiful building with a grand staircase, books lining every wall. She talked enthusiastically but realistically about working in the industry, the challenges and frustrations, the wins that made it all worthwhile, and the joy of reading. Another advisor, a literary agent, spoke of her passion for reading, of discovering authors, and her reasons for switching roles (she had recently moved from a senior editor position at Macmillan). Their passion was infectious!
I also had the opportunity to speak about the project with an author who had published a number of books with Hachette and was working on her latest novel. She walked me through her story of how she first found an agent, the ins and outs of working with a publisher and the feeling of seeing her book advertised on the subway for the first time.
I have a lot of respect for the publishing industry, for the decades of work it takes to succeed in it, but I was intrigued by the ways in which technology could be used to complement both traditional publishing and self-published authors. Writing great software is about empowering others with just the right amount of technology to improve their lives. I’m very excited that we’ve found a way to strike that balance here and genuinely help authors, agents and publishers.
I wish I had the skills and patience to write! I’m much more comfortable in a code editor than a word processor.
You love a good book, who are your favorite authors?
We Brits love a good murder mystery, so I’d be remiss not to mention the Agatha Christie books I grew up reading. More recently I’ve been reading through everything Ruth Ware has written, Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders and The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.
On those occasions I fancy fiction where the protagonist isn’t solving a whodunnit, I enjoy a pretty wide range of genres. I recently enjoyed reading Red Clocks (Leni Zumas), Goodnight Stranger (Miciah Bay Gault), Where the Crawdads Sing (Delia Owens) and Less (Andrew Sean Greer).
What gave you the idea to help writers with feedback on fresh.ink?
I’d like to claim it was a brilliant idea of mine that came in a eureka moment, but in reality, the idea was formed over many interviews, much research, and ongoing involvement in online writing communities. I was keen to contribute to the literary world, but the idea took multiple years to fully shape, and will continue to evolve.
How does the platform work for authors?
Authors submit their fiction (of any length) to fresh.ink. It should be a final draft, free of typos and mistakes and ready for beta readers.
If a story is accepted, we analyze it to match it to readers who we think we’ll enjoy it to give it the best chance of being well-received. Readers can only see stories they’ve been matched with, otherwise work remains private.
Once reading starts, authors receive detailed analytics on open rates, if and where readers drop off, and ratings. Much like test screenings in film and television, understanding a reader’s behavior can be hugely beneficial in understanding how to improve a story. Readers will also answer more detailed questions about what they liked and what they think could be worked on, as well as join a book club with the author for further discussion and commentary.
Preview of fresh.ink’s story dashboard
How does one become a beta reader on fresh.ink?
We’re aiming to open up to beta readers in mid-October, so sign up for the waiting list at https://fresh.ink/#readers now to be first in line!
Tell us more about fresh.ink magazine and the fresh.ink app.
Our reader app has two sections: reader matching and our premium section, fresh.ink magazine, of which Mary is the editor. At launch, fresh.ink magazine will feature hand-picked writing from around the world. After our contest concludes, the magazine will begin including the best work that has come through fresh.ink’s matching service. All authors who are invited and agree to be featured in our magazine are paid, either via payment upfront or via revenue-sharing.
When is the official launch date?
We’re open to author submissions now, and readers will be invited in mid-October 2019. Not long now!
What is the future vision for fresh.ink?
Our vision is to create the de facto process for getting great writing out into the world.
Publishing is a tough business, especially for smaller houses and literary magazines. We want to support them all and help them thrive, either by matching them with proven writing or providing additional readers for their own content.
Whether an author plans to publish in a literary magazine, self-publish or traditionally publish, we envision fresh.ink as the connector between authors and agents, publishers and editors.
Have you ever asked yourself this question and truly answered it?
This is important to define for yourself, the quality of your work. 2020 was a year of chaos, fear, and upheaval. As we begin the new year, it’s the perfect time to let the dust settle and get laser-like focus on why you write and how you’re going to get your words into the world.
It’s not easy to be an aspiring writer. Just tell someone you want to become a successful fiction author and their reaction will be something like:
Laughs awkwardly until they realize you’re serious.
Shows concern about your mental health
Says, “Really? Uhhh… Good luck with that.”
It’s the same look adults gave you when you were six years old and you told them you wanted to be an a pegasus when you grew up.
That’s because writing fiction is a time and energy-intensive pursuit that never guarantees a big material reward.
As a marketing strategist for authors, I see many writers approaching their writing career with a “lottery mindset.” They scribble out a book, feverishly upload it to Amazon, and wait for overnight success.
When they don’t wake up on the bestsellers list, they give up.
This the paradox:
Only by NOT writing for money or fame will you possibly become a successful author because once you begin writing for sales, your words will lose heart.
You must have a bigger reason than to become wealthy and famous. You need to think about who you’re writing for and how you want them to think and feel after reading your work. Either that, or writing must be so satisfying for you that it is its own reward.
Maybe you write because it’s therapeutic, allowing you to express yourself and make meaning of your experiences. Maybe you want to make people laugh and forget their worries. Maybe you just want to scare the hell out of them.
Not only will a writing manifesto help you on the hard days when nothing is working, keeping your mission in mind will inspire you to produce stories that will impact your readers and the world.
You got this!
Create your Writing Manifesto!
Join us for the Ultimate Author Planning Workshop in the Writers’ Mastermind.
Develop your own powerful Writer Manifesto.
Crystalize your vision of what it means to be a successful author.
Reverse engineer a step-by-step plan to your career as a fiction writer.
Avoid wasting time, overwhelm, procrastination, and paralysis.
Does life somehow always get in the way of your writing?
This is Writer’s Drift.
And guess what?
It’s completely in your power to change.
In fact, it’s your responsibility alone.
Life is not going to realize how badly you want to become a
successful author and suddenly hand you the time and resources to sit alone in
a room and finish all the stories you wish you could write.
And the longer you wait to dominate this problem, the faster time slips by. The more hopeless you will feel as nothing happens for your writing career.
The reason I know is that I’ve been living it.
I write when I “find the time.” I submit or publish whenever I “get around to it.” I sporadically post to my blog, newsletters, and social media.
And I’m increasingly resentful about the fact that I have to put my writing aside for work, family, and all the other interruptions that come with life. Why can’t everyone just leave me alone?
But I’m going to be tough here, because I had to be tough on myself.
This is playing the victim.
This is feigning helplessness.
This is downright self-sabotage.
If you think you have so many things going on that you can’t
buckle down and finish your stories, you’re consciously or unconsciously
letting yourself off the hook.
When you tell yourself you “never had the time” or energy to commit to becoming a writer, then it won’t be your fault if you fail. Right?
Am I hitting a nerve?
If so, then call yourself on that bullshit today.
If you truly love writing…
If you really feel like you have something to offer the world…
If you want to feel satisfied on your deathbed knowing you gave it your all, then I will tell you what you need to do…
First:
Think about why you are writing. Is your reason big enough to help you push through the everyday distractions and obligations of life?
If not, there’s nothing wrong with writing in your free time
for your personal enjoyment.
But if you want to make a name as an author, then you need to have a big reason.
This reason should be bigger than to make money or become
famous.
Your readers need to feel that reason. So do agents and publishers. And it needs to have depth so you can write through the lean times as you carve out your place in the literary world.
You also must get clarity around what you want.
What is your vision of being a successful author?
This is different for every writer. Is it to earn your living solely by writing fiction? Or is it more than that? Imagine the details of this life and what it will take to get there. Create a writer manifesto.
Second:
Recommit to your writing. Make a vow that starting right now, you are going to do what you need to do to make things happen.
This will require self-discipline, setting boundaries with
your family and friends, and making sure you bring your best self to the desk.
No more excuses to anyone, especially yourself, about why you can’t produce all the stories and books that are churning in your brain.
Then declare it.
Take it step further and announce your commitment to your family. Post your vow on social media. Letting others know will mean you’ll be less likely to back out.
Third:
Create a solid map that encompasses everything about your successful career as an author. Draw out a detailed plan for writing, editing, submitting, publishing, marketing, and creative nourishment.
I know. This is SO simple, but the main cause of writer’s drift is not having a detailed short-term and long-term plan.
If you don’t plan what you’re supposed to do next, you’ll likely do anything except work on your writing career.
Start Here
I’ve created a planning guide to avoid writer’s drift. You can download it for free using the form below.
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Join us in the virtual Author Planning Masterclass 2020!
I’m thrilled to announce that the first masterclass for LGP’s Writers’ Mastermind will be an Author Planning Workshop.
We will reverse-engineer a step-by-step plan to your making your dream life as a writer come true.
Get on the Waitlist and reserve your spot for only $9. Click here.
