Pinterest for Authors
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As we continue breaking down social media for authors, today I want to talk about Pinterest! My love of Pinterest runs hot and cold, depending on what I use it for. At this point, as a blogger, I’m kind of over Pinterest – but as an author, I’m rediscovering why I love this platform.
While most people consider Pinterest a social media website (and it is to some extent), it’s more a search engine like Google. It’s just more visually pleasing. Now, that begin said – it’s almost impossible to get a “marketing” strategy on Pinterest as an author.
Now that doesn’t mean you can’t have a Pinterest account as an author – you just have to think of it differently.
Pinterest for Authors is Not….
It’s not for constant book marketing. Like I said before, out of any social media platform, Pinterest is probably the one where it’s hard to actually overshare your book because of the algorithm. Instead, you want to do your book marketing in a more organic way and we’ll talk about that in a moment. First I want to talk about what we can do to track potential book sales or mail signups. You will not get many from Pinterest, but we want to make sure we cross all our T’s just in case.
Let’s talk about the Pinterest account
Here’s a screenshot of my Laura Teagan Pinterest account. Right away I see a few spots I could update – like a link to my sign-up page. Remember a few weeks ago when I said you needed to push people to your mailing list? That hasn’t changed.
When setting it up, add your picture and bio and then create some Pinterest boards.
Any book you have could have a board, in fact, I have boards for each book in my series. A few other ideas I have brewing also have boards. Right now, I’m currently working on a book called Hit List, so that’s my main focus on the boards. I’m a big believer in scheduling things and I’ve used different schedulers to schedule pins. Right now I use board booster, but I’ve also loved Tailwind.
Pinterest isn't your typical social media platform, but you can still use it as an author! Share on XFor my books, I share images of the location (like London in this book), pictures of what I imagine my characters to look like, some pictures of weapons and guns (I write a series about an FBI agent, it works) and quotes that match the attitude of the book.
The main focus you want with books is to create those storyboards with the aesthetic that matches your book. But what else can you pin about?
Books – I have a board specifically just for bookshelves because I love looking at bookshelves. I’ve talked in the past about my social media game for Laura Teagan being book related more than writing related and this is another example of that – all the books. I love a good bookshelf. So, of course, I want to share photos of those.
The other thing I do a lot of sharing of is home offices. Since I do most of my writing here at home, I constantly want to create a wonderful writing environment for myself, so I post a lot of home office pictures as well.
I also have some writing boards on there but I never update them. I created them back when I was focusing on Laura Teagan being writing-based, but my marketing strategy is now book related – minus those book boards.
As I said before, it’s hard to use Pinterest in a purely marketing aspect. For SEO purposes, you still want to have some kind of account on there, but allow yourself to have fun. Let Pinterest inspire you in a way that the other social media platforms can’t.