Creating a professional facebook page | Life in the Realm of Fantasy

In 2011, when I first began this crazy journey, I was advised to create a professional Facebook page. Whether you are an Indie or are traditionally published you will be responsible for putting your own social media into place, as in this world, no one will do it for you. You don’t get a personal assistant and a publicist when you get that first book deal, so you may as well get on with doing these things yourself.

For my blog post on how to make a professional Facebook fan page, click here: Building the Brand. Today we will talk about making it work better for you, with only a small amount of effort on your part.

While I had to sever my relationship with my first publisher, that was the first of two important, things he told me. (The second was to blog regularly—which also was good advice.)

SO – how do we encourage people to ‘like’ our professional Facebook page? After all, we are all trying to get exposure for our books.

In my experience, people will look you up and like your page as they become fans of your work. You will gain followers, just not real rapidly.

For those who are too impatient to wait, they can join a Goodreads page-swapping event, where the participants all go out and like each others’ pages. This is voluntary, and I tried that when I first started. I liked about 50 authors, and 15 liked me back. 6 of them used their fan page despite being asked to use their personal page, and their likes didn’t raise my count.

So, that didn’t go as well as I thought it would. And, guess what? Nothing happened, because they weren’t readers—they were authors who didn’t give a rat’s tail about my work.

Before you do anything desperate in trying to raise the visibility of your Facebook page, you must first identify your target market. Are you trying to sell books only to other authors? That is what you are doing when the only place you post the link to your page is in a page-swap forum. If the only people who are ‘liking’ your fan-page are authors, you are shooting yourself in the foot. You are limiting your visibility to a small number of people who most likely won’t buy your book, as they’ve books of their own to write, and you don’t write in their genre.

Make it easy for your fans to like your page by posting the link on your blog/Website, and on your Goodreads and Smashwords profiles, Amazon Author Page. Those places are where people who buy your books will look, and that is how fans will find you.

Identify who your target audience is. You are looking for READERS.
Make sure your Facebook link is prominently displayed on your website/blog and let it do its thing.
Post something every day on your FB fan page. This, more than anything else, raises its visibility.
Don’t let fear of failure ensure your lack of success. Make the attempt, learn from it, laugh about it, and make what did work into the foundation of your next attempt.

My author blog posts to my professional Facebook page three times a week. I also post other things that I find interesting, things from Atlas Obscura, or Lit Hub. Books are my hobby and my life, so my conversations revolve around what I am reading or working on. Whenever I post something funny or interesting on my Facebook page, I gain new views, and sometimes that translates into sales.

I do recommend that you avoid political comments or comments regarding religion unless that is what your work is about. IF Politics and/or Religion are your main subjects, Facebook is a great arena to generate some controversy, if that is what you are hoping for.

What are you interested in? Here are two easy sources of content for your page:

Check out Pinterest for unusual images and comment on them.
Search the web for links to blogs whose authors post regularly on the subjects you are interested in. Subscribe to them via email subscription, and you will have a steady source of FB fodder in your mailbox for your page. I am vegan, so Minimalist Baker recipes appear regularly on my page, and they always generate a lot of comments and shares.

The way to gain likes is to post things people will want to share. If you have done the above footwork, it will take five minutes in the morning to post some intriguing thing on your page.

If nothing else, post a status update regarding your current work in progress. If you have hobbies outside of writing, post a status update mentioning them. Talk about a movie, or the book you are reading.

When you don’t make your work available on a professional level, your potential readers have no way of finding your work. Your website/blog and your professional Facebook page are your opportunities to connect with your potential readers.

When the big five publishers want to market a book, what is the first thing they do?

They begin building a brand based on the author’s name, because the one thing that links ALL his/her books is that author’s name.

But in today’s market the indie author is not the only author with a limited budget for publicity. The newly signed author with a traditional publisher is also unlikely to rate a full page ad in the New York Times.

For all authors, there are several absolutely necessary steps to take, all of which are free. They do take a little time if you are unfamiliar with them, so consider doing one or two steps a night for a week.

Communicate that brand though social media.
Blog, and communicate—write what you know or what you want to read and post it regularly.
Make a Google Plus Profile
Open a twitter account.
Make an Amazon Author Page
Make a Goodreads Author Page
Make a Facebook Author Page
Make a pinterest page
Get an about.me account

If you google my name this is what the page probably looks like. Sometime times Goodreads is the top, and sometimes my Amazon author page is, but today this was the order:

1. This blog, Life in the Realm of Fantasy (See? Regular blogging does pay off.)

2. My Goodreads Page

3. My professional Twitter Page

4. My Google Plus Page

5. My Facebook Author Page

6. My LinkedIn Page

7. My Amazon Author Page

8. My Smashwords Author Page

The next four pages after the first page were all mine also, with various author interviews on other blogs, and professional events that had been made public since 2011.

When I first began this wacky adventure, I did all the steps mentioned above, but my facebook author page was the only thing out there to let my my potential readers know about me. It took several months for everything else to sift out to Google.

SO – since FB is the quickest to show results on Google, today you are going to get yourselves out there on Facebook with a professional page.

First, you must go to www.facebook.com and open a personal account if you don’t already have one. You don’t have to use it, but you can’t get a professional page without one.

Facebook is what you make of it. YOU REALLY DON’T WANT TO SPAM YOUR PERSONAL FB FRIENDS about your books ad nauseum—it’s rude and ruins folks’ grumpy kitty picture and snarky meme moments. Keep your personal page private, and make your professional page as accessible to your prospective fans as you can.

Once you have that taken care of, you go to the ‘create pages’ page, https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php . There are 6 squares representing the various sectors of professional pages. You want to click on ‘public figure’.

Click there and a new menu will open up.

You will select ‘Author.’
Fill in your Pen Name exactly as you want it to be.
Place a check in the little box that says you agree to Facebook’s terms and click the ‘get started’ button.

This will take you to a place where you will fill in the blanks and soon you will have your professional fb page up and running. You can use your personal page to invite your friends to ‘like’ your page once, that is not considered too rude.

My author page on Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/cjjasperson and I’ve tried to make it represent me as a professional. Everyone has a different style, this is mine:

I hear some of you saying that Facebook is just like twitter—you don’t have anything to say. I am telling you that it IS EXACTLY like twitter, and requires just as little work if you use some common sense.

Keep your tweets and your Facebook posts light, and keep them short. This is where you let your prospective fans know what is going on with your work.

On Facebook, occasionally post about things you are doing, such as word-count on a current project, the projected date of publication for the new novel, these sorts of things. Also post your book signings and appearances at conventions, anything that can show people that your work is available and that they might like to read it.

My blog is a WordPress blog and posts automatically to my professional pages, and also to my Tumblr site, so that the content there regularly updates itself and my page doesn’t stagnate. This is a feature of WordPress and is a really good resource.

Now that you have your Facebook page, you can get started setting up the other accounts.

You should create a PRESS KIT with these documents in it so you have them at your fingertips:

Your Author Bio: short, and professional is the key to a good bio:

Connie J. Jasperson lives in Olympia, Washington. A vegan, she and her husband share five children, a love of good food and great music. She is active in local writing groups, an editor for Myrddin Publishing Group, and is a writing coach. She is an active member of the both the Northwest Independent Writers Association and Pacific Northwest Writers Association, and is a founding member of Myrddin Publishing Group. Music and food dominate her waking moments. When not writing or blogging she can be found with her Kindle, reading avidly.

Your professional photo, updated every other year or so.

Your List of Links:

Connie J. Jasperson Social Links and Media

Amazon author page: http://bit.ly/CJJASPauthor
Connie J. Jasperson on Twitter: @cjjasp
Connie J. Jasperson on WattPad: http://www.wattpad.com/user/ConnieJJasperson
Connie J. Jasperson on Linked In: www.linkedin.com/pub/connie-j-jasperson/33/94/b38/
Connie J Jasperson, Author on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/cjjasperson
Life in the Realm of Fantasy (Connie J Jasperson’s Author Blog) https://conniejjasperson.wordpress.com
World of Neveyah Website: http://www.worldofneveyah.com
The Best in Fantasy Book Reviews – http://bestinfantasy.blogspot.com

YouTube Videos: World of Neveyah Book Trailer Featuring ‘Sway,’ written and performed by the incredible singer and songwriter, Margaret: https://youtu.be/xeM8X50woqA

Facebook is a necessary evil, but it is only an evil if you make is so. Keep your page professional, and once a year or so, invite all your friends to check out your professional page, and some will invite their friends to do the same.

I don’t recommend the FB “Like Farms” that are out there all over the internet–where you pay to get an artificially high number of likes to increase your visibility. You’re giving your credit card info to a stranger in a foreign country, who likely does not have your best interests at heart.

Also, when you purchase cheap likes from foreign countries you get no real results–these are not people who will buy your books. You want real likes, from real people, and that takes a little time and a little effort on your part, but if you offer your fans something fun, they will share your posts and that will grow your likes.