On the 28th of September 2014 Josie Caporetto, as yet unpublished, decided it was time to put up a Facebook page to begin developing her author platform as a cookery book writer.

Josie, who plans to write under the name Giusy Caporetto, is a member of MRWG and agreed to share what she did and what happened.

By her own admission Josie had no idea what to do or where to start, so she did the most sensible thing she could.  She researched.  She went on what she called a virtual tour of Facebook Pages for people she liked, from celebrities to family friends, looking for common threads.  A Google search suggested she start by inviting friends.

Tip:  when Googling for ‘how to get Facebook Likes’ there are some excellent and some seriously dodgy sites.  Some of the latter suggest strategies that would do the completely opposite of what you’re aiming for or could even get you thrown off Facebook.  So here are two trustworthy sites that have proved themselves over time:

Impactive8   http://impactive8.com/: Lots of free stuff, sign up for the newsletter (free) and they also run courses and provide personal coaching.  Based in Melbourne.

Jon Loomer  http://www.jonloomer.com/ You’ll probably need to fillet this website to find the info you want.  Jon Loomer teaches people how to use the immensely powerful Facebook advertising machine, which is also immensely baffling if you’re not an advanced marketer.  The good news is that he also posts lots of really good (free) info about how the Facebook algorithm works (or how people think it might work, because no one really knows except a few souls at Facebook) and that’s invaluable for building Facebook likes organically (ie without paying for ads or promo).

Josie invited the 558 Friends she has on her personal Profile to join her Page.

Tip:  how to invite Friends to a Page you manage.  Here’s the link https://www.facebook.com/help/174333482624856 to Facebook’s instructions for how to invite Friends from a personal profile to a business page, but be warned: the link often disappears and then reappears a few days later, amidst much conspiracy theorising in the forums about forcing you to advertise, etc etc. 

Josie comments that 232 of her Friends acted on that invitation which is an excellent response.  They also then, without asking, told their Friends about it.

Next she moved onto joining Groups. 

Tip:  Different groups have different rules, so it is always vital to check them out before mentioning your Page.  Some Groups will throw you out for so much as a breath of promotion.  Others seem happy to be constantly spammed. 

Tip: Facebook Groups require you to participate as your personal Profile, not your business Page.  So if this a Group where promo isn’t acceptable or if you want to be a bit low key about it, and you say something sensible or interesting that people want to know more about they will want to link to your personal Profile not your business Page (which they know nothing about).  As they used to say in the Sixties “the personal is political”.  Now in the 21st century it’s become the “personal just ain’t no more, especially on Facebook”.

Josie comments though that she checked with the admin first before promoting in any Groups and over a few weeks commenting and posting links helped her make it to the magic first benchmark of social proof:  500 Likes.  The general rule of thumb in Facebook marketing is that you need 500 Likes to be considered to be worth paying attention to.  The internet is full of wannabes and charlatans, so looking at how many Likes a Page has is one simple way we humans have developed for trying to pick a safe path.  It is, of course, imperfect, but when were humans ever perfect?  Of course, there will be exceptions to The Rule of 500, but by and large it’s a useful one.  (The next magic benchmark is 1,000 Likes.)

Then Josie hit the real motherlode.  She says “I was so proud that I had reached 500 Likes that I wanted to keep everyone interested.  I started posting photos telling my followers a story, my story and the story of everyone who was interested in my particular subject”.  Her Likes began to sky rocket. 

Tip:  This is the big secret about Facebook.  People go there to be entertained and engaged.

Josie’s story is passionate and inclusive, and it’s based around something universal:  a love of good food.  Turning that into entertaining, engaging stories brought fans in by the thousand.  Literally.  With this approach Josie believes she broke out of her immediate circle of acquaintance and was now attracting complete strangers.

Her next exploration was into using Promote Post.  She said “I thought what the heck, let’s see if this will be a waste of money or can be used to my advantage”.  She aimed for Page Likes and carefully capped her spend at $10.  In a week Likes had risen from 4,000 to 5,000.  This brought a key insight.  Having people Like your page isn’t enough, Josie realised she had to reinvent herself with every post to make sure they didn’t get tired of the page and, as she says, ‘take their Likes away’.

Tip:  Promote Post is a much better way to advertise on Facebook than Boost Post.  Promote Post provides you with some options for targeting to particular types of people.  Boost Post is simpler to use, but much more of a blunt instrument and therefore more hit or miss.  Take some time to understand Promote Post and you will be glad of it.

At that point one of Josie’s posts went viral and racked up a Reach of 56,412. That was on a Page with, at that time, just over 5,000 Likes!  That’s how Josie learned that posts can reach far beyond your fans.

So what are the key rules from Josie’s journey?

1.       If you don’t know ask .. friends, google, anyone who will spare a few minutes of their expertise

2.       Ask your Friends for help getting the ball rolling.  There’s no need to badger them and if they are friends (with a small f) then they will be more than happy to help.

3.       Join Groups, but check their rules first.  Recognise this may well further contribute to muddling up your personal and professional life, at least as long as you continue to paddle in Groups.

4.       Tell stories.  This is so important.  Make it entertaining. 

5.       Every post matters or as Josie says your newfound friends will take their Likes away.

6.       Don’t be afraid to advertise.  It’s not expensive, you can pause it whenever you like, or cap the spending.  It’s a great way to quickly gather in like-minded strangers.

7.       Be patient and consistent.  It takes time.  You can hurry it along with advertising, but it still takes time.

What does Josie plan to do next?  She says her next mission is to build engagement.  She has a sound base of fans, but having fans doesn’t necessarily mean you have willing book buyers.  Not yet, anyway.  That comes with building engagement.  As Josie said one recent post reached 17,512 but “they didn’t give me a Like yet, if I keep them interested enough they will push that button soon”.

Is this useful?  What have we missed?  Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.  In the meantime, we all wish Josie the very best in continuing to build her author platform and for developing the cookery book.  We’ll announce here when it’s published.

Josie’s Facebook page can be found a Pane Vino e Peperoncino.  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Pane-Vino-E-Peperoncino/896279153736204  Check out how many Likes she has now.

Additional commentary was provided by Sara Hood and her Facebook page is Marketing4writers.  https://www.facebook.com/MarketingforWriters  

Both Josie and Sara are members of MRWG.

Originally post on Marketing 4 Writers.net

How many times do you hear people say "down with Facebook, up with Twitter" because Facebook decides who gets to see your posts and Twitter just shows your tweets to everyone?

Then Twitter introduced a free, basic analytics service.  And the reality hit home.  Hard.

Your tweets may go out with no algorithm to decide who sees what, but unless your followers are online 24/7, poised over their smart phone, they will miss the vast majority of them. And the analytics prove it.

The current rule of thumb is that a tweet has a life of about 30 minutes (unless you're in someone's list, and that's a whole other topic). By comparison a Facebook post is supposed to have a life of more like 3 hours, though I have to say on many of my business pages it's more like 3 days.

And those who do see your tweet?  Well, they kinda don't read them much.  When you look at the analytics they can't be. Those links to erudite web stories that you're tweeting?  Well, they're being RT'd without being read.  At all.

How to set up Twitter analytics
Couldn't be easier. Log into your Twitter account. Directly into the Twitter account, not through Hootsuite or Tweetdeck or any other service. Then go to where the URL is written into your browser at the top of the screen and type in analytics.twitter.com and hit go.  Don't open another tab. Type it right on top of that line that currently says twitter.com.  And there it is.  Your analytics.  Don't panic that it's empty.  It's not retrospective. It starts when you first dial into it. Send a few tweets and then come back tomorrow to see how you're going. Be prepared to be surprised.

What does Twitter analytics tell you?
It lists your tweets and tells you how many impressions each got, how many engagements and what the engagement rate was.  
Impressions = how many people saw it.  
Engagements = how many people did anything with it.  
Engagement rate is a daft number because it's.:

engagements
impressions

So if you have a few impressions and a lot of people RT'd it you'll get a high engagement rate.  If you got lots of impressions and only a small number RT'd it you'd have a low engagement rate.  But that could be more actual individuals engaging with the second tweet than with the first. Personally, I ignore the engagement rate figure.

Why does this matter?
Your marketing goal is to take people shopping to buy your book. You have limited time and limited money. So you need to know where to put your effort for the greatest return. Analytics is useful. It helps you work out things like what content gets the best engagement and what times of day/week to tweet for the best response. It helps you see if you are progressing.  You may be getting more followers, but are they bothering with your tweets? What it also does is reveal how ephemeral the medium is. It's very much in the moment. That's not a bad thing. But it clearly shows how different it is to Facebook.  - See more at: http://www.marketing4writers.net/#sthash.2X2V3wM6.dpuf

Just back from the Romance Writers of Australia’s conference and I pitched twice, so thought I would share the experience for those who may not have done this already.  You never know, it might be helpful!

I pitched last year and it was truly horrible.  It was a completely different book to the one I pitched this year and that book is definitely odd. I opened my pitch with a ‘this is a speculative fiction novel’ and I could see the editor was already at no.  As Jenny Cruisie at Argh Ink says the top ten reasons for why an editor rejects your book are:  

1. She doesn't know how to sell it to readers
   
2. She doesn't know how to sell it to readers
   
3. She doesn't know how to sell it to readers
   
4. She doesn't know how to sell it to readers
   
5. She doesn't know how to sell it to readers.

You get the point. I didn't read that until too late! I felt that I walked into the room with my new baby and whilst I didn't expect everyone to love my new baby as much as I did I had expected that my new baby would at least be recognised. My poor baby got blanked. Oh well. That taught me not to have any expectations and to toughen up.

So this year I went in with something that is my other great love, which is Mills and Boon-style romance, and I made sure to pitch to people who bought that sort of work. This went so much better.

For a start I prepared much better. I had thought through more clearly what I wanted to say and what they needed to know. It was way more professional. I then spoke from the heart. I had three pages of prose that I had intended to pretty much read, but even I thought it was a bit boring. But then sitting, trembling quietly, waiting to go in for my first pitch I sat next to a good friend and published author and I noticed she only had one slice of paper in her hand and when she showed it to me it was an ad from an old newspaper which had been the stimulus for the first book in the series that she was pitching.

Bingo!

I needed to start my pitch with where my book’s life had started. Which was that line in the newspaper that said that Prince William didn't want to be king.  Who knows if he ever really said it and who could blame him if he had ... that would mean his father and his beloved grandmother would have both had to die first ... but I started thinking what if you really didn’t want to be king? But were an honourable man but an alpha male, so not having choices just would not be your bag, but your honour would mean you had to. How would you behave? So that’s where my book starts. My poor hero is back from having a wonderful time in New York to saddle up for a life time of being trapped in a broken down and nearly bankrupt kingdom, on a threadbare throne, and, as he discovers in the first few pages, he also seems to be married to an absolutely appalling woman. Triple bad news. And then I dreamed up a heroine to match him. So that’s the story I told, focussing on the themes and motivations of the characters, and just enough of the story itself to give a sense of whether it was a comedy or a tragedy.

That seemed to work and I have two requests.  In fact I got so carried away in the second pitch that I completely forgot that the editor was meant to be saying yes or no, we were too busy laughing.

Both people I pitched to were lovely. Both asked where the book was at so I had to say second edits, and not ready for anyone to see. It’s actually a bit of a horrible muddle. James Scott Bell’s  workshop explained to me why it’s a horrible muddle so now I have a path to fixing it, so they both said not to hurry and to send the early chapters in when I was ready. They were both encouraging and warm about the story, which was so important after last year. Finally I'm on the right track! Yes, the speculative fiction will get written one day, but to be honest it was probably a bit ambitious for a start-up writer. It meant I had to learn to manage historical research and weave it into the story without sounding like a high school history teacher, as well as learn how to write a novel. I’d write a scene and the hero would need to take a drink and I’d get stuck thinking what would he be drinking out of, what liquid would he be drinking, and then I’d wander off into my history notes and when I came back, hours later, I would have forgotten where I was in the story. And I'm not sure it’s speculative fiction anyway. I just can’t find a box to put it in. It’s that odd. Fun, but odd.

Who else was pitching?

All sorts of people. The writer I mentioned above who has written romance novels for years but wants to break out into a different path with a cosy mystery series, and so needed to find a new publisher..  

One was a multi-published author, which was a huge surprise, but she wanted to have five minutes with the local arm of her publishing house.  She’s signed to them in an overseas market and wanted to talk about Australia. 

Lots of writers like me were there with first books and who had done this before.  Lots of writers with first books who hadn't done this before.

And finally an unpublished writer who is a member of one of my writing groups. She really wanted to pitch but felt overwhelmed by it so hadn't applied for a slot, but after lots of encouragement she put her name down for a cancellation and got one.  She then spent most of the night holed up in a bedroom with a writing friend honing a pitch spiel. Next day she was pale and taut but determined and afterwards she couldn't believe how lovely everyone had been and how enthusiastically her story had been received. Yes, she has a request for the first few chapters.

So, all sorts were pitching and despite being a romance conference they were pitching all sorts of genre stories.

So what have I learned:

• A pitch is a great way to determine if a book is sale-able to and by a traditional publisher. My first book idea was too left field. My business plan says I at least start with a trad publisher, so that meant a big re-think.
• Pitch with passion.  If you’re not passionate about your story, how can you expect the editor or publisher to be? Find a way into presenting the story that shows your passion.
• Don’t tell the story, talk themes and motivations, and give them enough of the story to get a flavour of it.
• Be objective. If they say no they are not rejecting your baby. They just don’t know how to sell it. (Ugly mixed metaphors there, sorry.)
• Be professional. Respect their job and their professionalism. In turn also respect that this is a business for you and you need to treat it accordingly.
• Just do it.  Once you've done it, it’s nowhere near as scary ever again.

Hope that helps. Now I have to get to work on Haute Montagne so it is ready to be seen in public. Very exciting!


Sara runs Pursue True North, an online community for writers on the road to writing and publishing their first book. 

You can find the community here http://www.pursuetruenorth.com/ or on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/PursueTrueNorth?ref=hl