SFA 054 – Social Media for Authors with Tee Morris and Pip Ballantine

For this week’s show, we welcome fantasy and non-fiction authors Tee Morris and Pip Ballantine. They’ve recently published the book Social Media for Writers: Marketing Strategies for Building Your Audience and Selling Books, so we wanted to ask them how authors can best utilize social media and which platforms are best for which genres.

Here the questions we asked our guests:

You’ve been writing and podcasting for quite a while. What made you want to explore all of these social media platforms?
What is the real goal with social media? We usually tell people that it’s more for growing the connection with existing readers and keeping in touch between releases, but is it possible to pick one of these platforms starting out as an author and actually leverage it to sell books to new readers?
How focused on marketing should you be in your various social media platforms? Will you fatigue your audience with too much promotion? If so, how do you temper your presence to avoid that? (Tee mentions Chuck Wendig’s Twitter as an example of the right amount of personality and promotion.)
Would you give a couple examples of what you mean by best practices for social media? And on the flip side, what are things that even experienced authors might do that they shouldn’t?
Twitch is big with gamers, but what are authors doing on it that actually moves the dial?
Should we avoid being too personal on our author platforms? Can we do harm by mixing too much “social” into our social media?
Our listeners write mainly sci-fi/fantasy, romance, and mystery. Which platforms would be best for these genres? Which should they consider not spending much time on? (Our guests listed Tumblr for YA, Pinterest for non-fiction and some romance, Snapchat for younger audiences and romance, Facebook for 30+ age groups, and that sci-fi readers tended not to be as active on social media.)
YouTube and podcasting seem to have the most potential for growing an audience from scratch. Thoughts on that?
YouTubers tend to treat THE ALGORITHM like the boogeyman, even more so than indie authors. One thing that people in particular seem to focus on is how often you need to put out content. Is Youtube the sort of place where constant content is king? Can it still have value with videos put out at longer intervals?
What is the sweet spot for how frequently to post content, and which days of the week work best for both podcasting and YouTube? (Conversely, which days should authors who are considering doing either avoid?)
For non-fiction authors, it’s a no-brainer for what to talk about, but if you did want to try YouTube or podcasting, what could you do as a genre-fiction writer? I feel like most authors fall into the trap of telling people how to write (or we tell authors how to market!), which doesn’t do much to sell fiction.
Is there any point to trying to monetize the social media platforms (YouTube, Twitch, podcasting, etc.) that allow that?
A question about audience building. We know from other shows that there are right and wrong ways to build a newsletter. Building a mailing list in the wrong ways can weigh you down with inactive subscribers. Are there similarly wrong ways to build an audience on other platforms? Does it even matter when you’re not paying per follower like you do in a newsletter?
The description of your book mentions crisis management. What do you mean by this?