Is Social Media Really “Free” Book Marketing?

Part two in an ongoing series thinking through the relationship between social media, marketing, and being an active writer. You can read all installments here.

Is Social Media Really “Free” Book Marketing?

THE UNWAVERING FAITH IN SOCIAL PROMOTION

Writers are not alone in being seduced by the potential marketing power of social media. One perk that comes from running a small publishing company alongside my writing career is the freedom to access opportunities aimed at small businesses. 

In recent years, this has meant being part of programs that pair emerging small business owners with industry mentors who can offer advice and insight. Through them, I’ve learned some interesting techniques in monitoring finances, staging growth, accessing merchandising, and more.

On the topic of marketing, however, the default advice has been incredibly consistent. My first mentor advised me to start a podcast, looking towards Joe Rogan as an example of the power social media can have. Another suggested YouTube, citing Alex Hermozi’s powerhouse influence.

“Social media is free,” they both informed me, “and the potential reach is huge.”

As someone who grew up with social media and has experienced the enshittification process multiple times, I agree with half that statement.

TIME AND LEVERAGE

My most recent mentor, who made the case for YouTube, made their argument because of another client in a similar space. 

They worked with a book YouTuber who’d spent four years building up their audience and were now profiting from views on their videos and the ability to leverage a 10,000 strong audience via Kickstarter. They were having phenomenal success, and my mentor saw a solution to my current business problem of “how can I increase pre-orders on new titles”.

But here’s the question I asked my mentor: how much time is devoted to making those videos every week? How much up-front investment in tools and training did they do to make their videos look as professional as they do?

Any form of social media—whether text based or video or podcast audio—requires an investment of capital. Most writers—me included—have a limited supply of capital to spend, and want to make smart decisions. 

In short, we want to spend the least amount of capital for the most significant results possible. 

I’ve written about the modes of capital we use in the publishing industry before, and it draws upon a broader study of publishing by John Thompson in Merchants of Culture. 

I recommend both these resources as a supplement for what follows, but this runs through my head every time a mentor suggests I start a broadcast channel like a podcast, TikTok, or YouTube channel.

CAPITAL EXCHANGES IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media, much like publishing, involves an exchange of capital in order to generate effects. When my mentors recommend social media, they’re often focused on the potential capital gains social media is capable of.

The benefits of social media, when done right, are simple:

• • It generates Social Capital, building relationships and networks with readers and other creators, all of which can be leveraged to help your career.

• • It also generates Symbolic Capital, in the form of prestige and/or the slow accumulation of status around your presence in certain fields of the industry.

I want to be clear: both these things are useful. Brain Jar Press launched on the strength of my social capital as a publisher; I started the press with a contacts list born of several years running one of Australia’s largest writing conferences. I knew a lot of successful authors, and they trusted me personally to do right by them. 

I used those networks to put out a bunch of books that were attached to existing big names in Australian genre fiction, or emerging names who were on the rise. Our early list featured multiple World Fantasy Award winners, Hugo Winners, and a New York Times best-seller. 

It gave us a profile and prestige far beyond what you’d expect for a small press that was primarily me working on a laptop while reclining on the couch.

BUT WE OFTEN HAVE TO SPEND CAPITAL TO GAIN CAPITAL

I built Brain Jar Press off my social capital, which was earned through my human capital (I had a skill set that my employers wanted) and my intellectual capital (I’d published a bunch of stories, which brought me into genre spaces where I got to know my future boss).

The benefits of social media often involve similar exchanges. 

So when my mentors tell me social media is “free”, here’s what I’m already thinking about.

First and foremost, social media requires Financial Capital. 

I know. This sounds counter-intuitive, given that social media is “free”. That’s the inherent trap of thinking about cost in terms of cold hard cash and credit, since they’re the most visible (and, let’s be honest, useful) forms of financial capital out there.

And in social media, much like everywhere else, cold cash can solve a swathe of problems and really turbo-charge the value you get from a platform. 

Don’t have the time to build an audience organically? Throw money at the site to boost your presence and advertising your services. Don’t know how to edit audio or video? Hire yourself an editor to produce new content faster than everyone else!

So money changes the equation around social media, but that’s not what I’m thinking about here. Because Financial Capital isn’t just about money. Financial capital can represent chunks of time you can allocate to a project—money is, after all, just a useful social metaphor representing time and its value. 

Similarly, Financial Capital also captures how long you can devote running something at a deficit before you need it to profit. Investing time without having a pay-off is an inherent advantage, which is why so many apps and services in our world siphon down huge chunks of venture capital. 

If they can run at a loss for long enough, undercutting the competition until they’re the last app standing, then they’re going to make a long-term profit that drastically outweighs the short-term cost. That’s the philosophy of Amazon and Uber and Facebook, and countless pieces of tech that have launched in the years since.

And it’s true of creators as well. If you can devote four years to slowly building an audience on a platform, with no need to monetise that time upfront, that gives you a huge advantage over a creator who is squeezed for time and needs to make every hour they devote to their writing business count.

Even free social media requires the expenditure of time. Worse, the return on investment is a) uncertain, b) slow, and c) vulnerable to the enshittification of the platform destroying the time investment (see, authors trying to rebuild their platforms after the destruction of Twitter)

BUT ITS NOT JUST TIME AND MONEY

The financial capital of “free” social media is an important consideration, but it’s not the only one.

Leveraging social media often requires the author to develop skills, which we dub Human Capital. The moment I consider starting a podcast or jumping on YouTube, I’m already thinking about the skills I’d need to develop in order to really maximise my time expenditure.

I’m not a natural presenter when put in front of a camera, nor am I comfortable speaking out loud. I’d have to build up skills in editing and mastering this form of media, learn how to best leverage the platform I’ve chosen, and possibly even learn how to use their advertising platforms to maximise reach.

If I don’t know how to do any of that as a baseline, I have to learn it or hire out. More financial capital traded away for the skill set. 

Finally, producing social media content involves creating intellectual capital. This is the writer’s stock-and-trade. We create a piece of intellectual property—a poem, a story, an essay, a book—and try to trade that property for money and other rewards. 

Creating intellectual property for social media often means creating less of the core work we’re trying to sell. Sure, you may earn creator fees from a platform, but unless you dreamed of being an influencer, that’s more time away from the writing you hoped would pay your bills.

There’s an opportunity cost inherent in creating all those forms of media, and writers need to be comfortable with the trade-off. 

WHERE AM I RICH? WHERE AM I BROKE?

When I sit down with a mentoring client to talk publishing, I usually kick off with a discussion about the five forms of capital and publishing and ask the most important question any writer can ponder:

Where is your capital strongest? Where are the gaps where your leverage is weak? 

If you’ve got a lot of pre-existing skills that make video or audio production easy, plus a good job you enjoy working that allows you to make videos after hours, then your strengths are Human Capital and Financial Capital.

In that situation, a YouTube channel might leverage those strengths to build the connections and network that will help your career flourish, especially if you don’t have many social or professional links in publishing and reader spaces.

Video and audio are not my strength. I’ve got a mild lisp that I get very self-conscious of when recording. My social anxiety runs riot when talking about writing and not being able to see an audience. My skill-set in these areas is rudimentary, at best.

Personally, I don’t have four years to build up an audience and help this pay off. Not if there are other opportunities that a) play to my strengths, and b) minimise the potential for algorithmic fuckery destroying all my efforts. 

Which is not to say I don’t believe in the power of social media, just that I’m judicious about which forms of social media I pursue. Especially in situations where, as I am right now, time isn’t on my side.

I’ve experimented with YouTube before. Recording and editing a ten-minute video represented about two hours of work, on average, and even assuming that came down as I grew more comfortable with the software…yeah, that’s three hours I’m not writing a book.

It’s three hours I’m not editing, or leveraging the skills I’ve already built up over years as a working writer.

It’s not even three hours where I’m writing newsletters like this one (or, more likely, three newsletters I can schedule over a week). 

And the perk of writing a newsletter is that nobody cuts my potential audience in half because I have the temerity to post a link to my books and take folks out of their email program.

THE ADVANTAGE OF THINKING BROADLY ABOUT PLATFORM

I started this series by asking writers to broaden their understanding of social media. 

The three hours invests in YouTube, or creating Facebook content, or hanging out on TikTok, it all has potential value.

But I could spend those same three hours writing a short story, and it’s easier to see the value of those three hours. I know from experience three hours can be enough to do a solid 2,500 words. If sold to a magazine, those three hours will earn me around 5 cents a word.

Both will expose me to potential readers.

But the short story readers have just seen a clear example of what I do as a writer, whereas a YouTube clip where I talk about books I’ve loved or thread offering writing tips is showing me one step removed from the books I sell. 

Sure, the story might not sell, but there’s no guarantee social media content will take off either. Plus, in my experience, the short story will have a long afterlife. My record is selling the same story five times, making three times more than I made on the first publication, and the stories then found their way into a collection.

Plus, that story might become social media content itself down the line.

If I have time to think about YouTube one day, my first port of call would do readings of my stories and putting them on there. 

If a story sells, I can talk about the sale and the publication on social media, which is likely to get more likes and re-posts from other users (launch posts, in my experience, get much higher engagement than anything else I post on social media. There are reasons for this we’ll probably get to as this series goes on).

So I don’t hate social media. Hell, in writing this series I’m essentially engaging in social media marketing. This will go out on newsletters and get talked about on social media and will appear on my blog. 

It’s a piece of evergreen content I’m hoping will bring people to my site to hear me bang on about books for years to come. 

Should circumstance change and I find myself with a little more time on my hands for trialing video content, I may even transform this into a YouTube video.

Eventually, it will have a second life as a book that people can purchase and keep on their shelves.

I love this aspect of social media, but there’s a key philosophy at the heart of my approach. 

I create for my platforms first. If I don’t control it, the content I create there is an outpost, pointing back to terrain where I have the most control over who sees it.

Building intellectual property that is primarily aimed at YouTube, for example, is of greater long-term benefit to YouTube than it is to me.

Creating something that I can put on YouTube and get people to follow me here is considerably more valuable.

The heart of what writers do is build intellectual property in order to generate capital. Social media is one form of doing that, but it’s worth questioning what it costs us to put work out there and whether we’re getting a proper return.

ACTION STEP

By nature, I’m pretty big picture when I talk about things like social media. My goal is to get people to think about what they’re doing and question some of the conventional wisdom about how and why we spend time online.

Especially when there are countless messages being thrown at writers—aspiring and established—about the efficacy and necessity of being active in these online spaces.

But I’m going to break stride here and suggest one action step which will pay dividends as I progress through this series.

Install a piece of time tracking software on your computer and other devices, so you can get an accurate picture of how much time you’re really spending on social media.

My tool of choice is RescueTime, which is installed on any computer, phone, or tablet I use regularly. It has  app-blocking capabilities to enhance focus, but ten years into my relationship with the software, I rarely end up using them.

What I look at is the time logs. How many hours were spent nose-deep in my works in a project this week? How many hours were spent in meetings? Were spent laying out books? Were spent writing newsletters?

How much time did I invest in being on Facebook, or Instagram, or Threads, or Bluesky?

Rather than trusting my gut or my memory about the effort that goes into all these channels, I want clear data. I want to compare the results of my social media efforts with the time invested in making them happen.

The results can be startling.

Ultimately, the question around any social media becomes: are the gains worth the time I’m investing in this platform?

Answering that question starts with getting an actual idea of just how much time you’re spending trying to make those gains, especially when the dopamine hit of “Oh, I got a new follower!” makes it easy to overestimate just how effective your online presence is.

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

1. Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice (You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing) and my PhD research into the poetics of series fiction.
2. Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.
3. One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writers festivals, and non-profit organisations.