7 Social Media Tips for Authors to Connect Over the Holidays

It’s Christmas! Time for all you hard-working authors to gorge on mince pies and generally relax, right? Wrong! Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year for bookselling, and a really good time to be engaging with people, and letting them know about your book.

Here are our top eight things authors can do on social media over Christmas, so you can sit with a mince pie, and still capitalize on those festive book sales.

1. Get personal

Make social media even more social by sharing your personal Christmas with your followers. Tweet a picture of your turkey, or share the books you were given as gifts this Christmas. People are more likely to support a human being, so remind your followers that you are one.

2. Wish your followers Season’s Greetings

You’ve built up some friendships on social media over the year, and Christmas is an important time to thank them for the help they’ve given you, and remind them of your friendship. You could even ask them nicely if they would mind sharing a link to the book on your behalf.

3. Promote your e-book on Christmas day

It’s Christmas, and you have been given an e-reader. The first thing you’re probably going to do is look for books to fill it. This is such a good opportunity for self-published authors — offering your e-book at a discounted price will encourage users to take a chance on an unknown author. Promote it over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ — as much and in as many places as possible to capitalize on this.

4. Run a Goodreads Giveaway

These are great for new releases, as they allow you to use the largest book-focused social media site to list a giveaway of your book. Christmas is a time for giving, and giveaways can be great promotion tools. Find out more about Goodreads giveaways, here.

5. Release a festive tale

Writing doesn’t have to be contained on a page. Use Twitter to release a festive short story over the Christmas period and widen your readership. Just tweet a section of your story each day. You never know who might like your writing and decide to buy your book! More about Twitter fiction, here.

6. Write a Christmas-themed blog post

Thousands of readers will be heading online to read off their Christmas dinners this year. Give them something new and interesting to read with a festive twist. It could be a piece of new creative writing, or even a section of your book that relates to Christmas.

7. Pin your favorite Christmas Books

Pinterest allows you to create themed boards of images that millions of users can see and share. Create your own board of your favorite festive books — and make sure you include a linked image to your own!

Sarah Juckes is Communications Manager for CompletelyNovel, where this post first appeared. CompletelyNovel is an online publishing platform and author community that aims to make book publishing simple through use of online tools.