The Importance of Scheduling

Welcome back to another post in the marketing for authors series. Marketing is, as we’ve mentioned before, such a huge aspect of the business. In order to generate sales of your fantastic novels, marketing is imperative. It doesn’t matter if your novel is the next F Scott Fitzgerald… if you’re not marketing, no one’s going to hear about it. Creating & sharing content on your website & through social media platforms is what gets your book in sight of potential readers. The aim of using a platform is to build your audience. Ideally you should be building that audience long before you actually publish. The bigger your audience when you launch your book, the better your book will do. I discussed the ways you can build that audience in the first post, The Importance of Branding.

Marketing in itself is a big job, whether you’re an indie author or are traditionally published. If you want to grow, you have to treat it as a business, & businesses need consistency. Because marketing is rather time consuming [& important!] scheduling becomes necessary as your reach builds. If you want to maximise your time to write, then scheduling should become your best friend. Carve out a chunk of time sometime in the week – whatever works best for you – to schedule all of your content for the week. If you run a page on Facebook, then click on the post box & at the bottom the words Publishing Tools will appear. Publishing Tools allows you to upload & schedule as many posts as you want on your page. If you use Twitter, then you need to head to TweetDeck – Twitter’s scheduling platform. If you use Instagram there is a way to schedule posts online – Creator Studio, it’s connected through Facebook & gives you the same control over scheduling as Publishing Tools. It’s also highly beneficial to have a calendar or something to make note of what content you plan to post when. I prefer to have a physical copy but you can also use something online if that’s preferable.

If you follow me, you’ll know that not only am I an author, I am also Chief Marketing Officer at Ink & Fable Publishing. I have a system for scheduling all of the social media content for I&F. I open up all the platform scheduling tools in tabs next to one another – Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram, & I go through day by day content. I type out the words for the content on Monday on Facebook, copy & paste it onto the other pages; Add the imagery onto each page & schedule them all for the same date & time. I then move on to Tuesday, & work all the way through to Sunday’s content. We have specific days for certain types of content so I don’t really have to spend much time working on what to post so all in all it takes me about 1 hour to schedule a week’s worth of content. Obviously if you’re having to create the content at the same time it will take much longer but it’s still time effective. I also use this same system for scheduling posts across my author platform. It means that instead of trying to remember to post every single day across all of the platforms, it’s all done in one go. It also means that when I have time to do marketing throughout the week, it’s done as a bonus to those initial posts. I can spend that time replying to people, engaging in others people’s tweets & forming relationships with like minded readers & writers. This takes my marketing one step further than just posting content. It enables people to get to know me & hopefully like me, which will then potentially encourage them to buy my work. Without scheduling all those posts ahead of time, I wouldn’t have the time to do those things & stick to my writing schedule.

How do you do your marketing? What author platforms do you use? Let me know in the comments!