Of course, book fairs and author signings aren’t the only way to get the word out. Recently, there have been more people using social media every day, and that number is rising. According to Statista, people on average, spend over 2 hours on social media per day. It’s a great, fast way to be updated on current world events and connect with other people. You can post nearly anything that you want, completely for free, on any social media platform as long as it follows their content guidelines. Not to mention that the way social media is designed encourages viewers to re-share content that they find interesting or engaging. Due to all these factors, it’s the perfect place to advertise your books.
There’s all sorts of different social media platforms, each with their own different “gimmick” and user-base: Facebook skews a bit older and is mostly text with some photos, Instagram is focused entirely on photographs, TikTok is focused on videos and skews very young, etc.
To keep things short and on-topic with AI, we won’t be covering every single format. Again, we cover it in a bit more detail in the marketing handbook. What we can cover is how AI can help with the social media process.
For one, if you have trouble even figuring out where to post, AI can offer great suggestions based on your needs and who you want to target. What makes it especially useful is that it often gives suggestions that go a bit beyond the “obvious” answer. Sites like Facebook and Instagram are obvious choices, with overwhelming amounts of people who are all there for different reasons. AI models may also give you a list of smaller, hobbyist sites, such as Goodreads, Litsy, IndieBound, and r/booksuggestions. These sites have less people, but they are far more engaged in the world of literature and thus are more likely to look at your posts and engage with them. Just ask for a few suggestions, get accustomed to the culture of these sites (a few of them do look down on self-promotion, so keep that in mind), and soon enough with consistent posting you may have a small little cult following.
As expected, you can also use LLMs like ChatGPT and CoPilot to create a list of ideas for what to post. Say you have a fantasy book where the twist is that the lead is actually the horse the knight rides on. How would you go about creating posts for it? You already have a dual target audience: Horse lovers, and fans of fantasy books. You could load up ChatGPT and ask how you could make your posts appealing to horse-lovers, or what kind of posts to make to stand out to fans of fantasy. You could offer trivia about the creation of the book, offer deals and discounts, create brief trailers or skits re-enacting scenes from the book, and more. You could even go the meta route and make posts about how you’re trying to sell your book, and the process it takes. And these are just a fraction of what ChatGPT said when I asked it; you can ask it yourself and it will offer even more ideas. Whatever it suggests, get creative with it!
Not only can you use AI to suggest sites to post on or what posts to make, you can even use AI to make the posts themselves! Like with writing, you should exercise extreme caution when using this, as much of its output can often be poor, and sites that offer generative video AI are often locked behind a paywall that isn’t usually worth it. When we used AI to create posts and trailers for our Instagram page, it took hours of configuring the AI tool, re-writing what it generated to be palatable to a wider audience, re-generating video footage over email multiple times at the request of the author, only for it to perform a fraction as well as a video filmed and edited in 15 minutes. That human touch is extremely important!
AI posts on social media can be less noticeable if it’s only used to generate text, mainly on sites such as Facebook that allow you to only post text. But it’s never a bad idea to double check and see if what comes out is good or not!
One final thing that I do recommend using AI for: Hashtags. These are tags added to the end of most social media posts that let your viewers see similarly themed posts to your post, and allow others that are just browsing that category to stumble across your post more easily. A few hashtags are a given: You are going to want the name of your book as a hashtag (e.g. #HarryPotter, #LotR, #TheGiver), and your own name as a hashtag (#ConnorMayhorn). But as for what other hashtags to use? That’s where AI comes in. It can offer dozens, even hundreds of different hashtags, for you to pick and choose what the best fit for your post is. Sometimes more niche ones also have the most people actively scrolling through them, so don’t be afraid to get a little more specific than “#books”.
With AI permeating every aspect of both our online world and the book industry, it only felt right for us to develop a guide on how to navigate it all. Now that you have the skillset and good judgement on what to use AI for (and when), we hope that you use it to make your books faster, cheaper, and better than ever before. This concludes our guide to books, AI and you. Thanks for taking time out of your day to read through it all! If you are still interested in learning more about AI (or you just want to try it out yourself), here are a few links for you to check out:
The WIRED guide to Artificial Intelligence
Written by Connor Mayhorn
ChatGPT was used for additional research for this article.