How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

How can you effectively use image-based social media to reach readers and sell more books?

How can you avoid time-wasting but still build a community? I discuss these questions and more with Frances Caballo in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention my personal update and how I organize and batch my time, as well as Things app.

Plus, if you’re unhappy with the changes at Mailchimp, check out my tutorial on how to set up ConvertKit for your author mailing list.

Today’s show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, where you can get free ebook formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Get your free Author Marketing Guide at www.draft2digital.com/penn

Frances Caballo is the author of Social Media Just for Writers as well as Avoid Social Media Time Suck, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• On the changes in social media in the past 5 years

• The continued importance of visual images on social media

• The importance of Instagram Stories if you’re using Instagram

• How to find hashtags to use with Instagram

• Using Pinterest to drive traffic to a website

• How Pinterest differs from Instagram in terms of marketing vs. brand awareness

• Why the scattergun approach to social media doesn’t work

You can find Frances Caballo at FrancesCaballo.com and on Twitter @CaballoFrances

Transcript of Interview with Frances Caballo

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. And today, I’m here with Frances Caballo. Hi, Frances.

Frances: Hi, Joanna.

Joanna: It’s been ages, and we’ll get into that. But just for an introduction for anyone who doesn’t know you:

Frances is the author of ‘Social Media Just for Writers’ as well as ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck’, which is super important, and other books on blogging and social media. She provides coaching and social media management for writers.

Frances, it was 2014 when you came on the show talking about social media, as we just said. It feels like so much has changed but it also feels like not much has changed because we’re still talking about social media.

What do you think has changed since 2014? In the last five years, what’s the shift in the social media environment?

Frances: The interest in Facebook has dropped about five percentage points. I have friends who have dropped Facebook for Instagram. I, personally, don’t use my Facebook page account very much anymore. I am going to be focusing more on Instagram.

I still use Twitter. I think Twitter is still important for authors. It’s a great news site but it’s also a great way to connect with colleagues who write in your same genre and to help authors in your genre share their posts, share their books and meet readers. There are a lot of readers, a lot of librarians on Twitter.

Twitter is among the top six most popular social media networks, but we don’t need to forget about it and it is going through some revamping. So that’s good. And now you can do 280 characters whereas 5 years ago you could only use 140 characters. But it’s better not to use the 280 characters because text-heavy posts don’t really work on Twitter.

On Facebook, even though Facebook started out as a pretty much a text-only app just like Twitter did, you should never post anything to Facebook without an image or a video. Now, with the exception that sometimes text-only posts do work on Facebook.

On my Facebook profile, I wrote a pretty text-heavy post about a German Shepherd dog that came after me barking and snarling. I wrote about that experience on Facebook and I got huge engagement. But that’s the exception.

What happens on social media, in general, and we’re going to exclude Instagram and Pinterest from this conversation just for this one point, is that you have to use images. Images are what attract the eye. The brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text.

People remember text in images better than they remember what’s said in a text post. So images are really important.

On a blog post, they’re really important. You have to have at least one image for every blog post. Multiple images are good on a blog post provided that they’re not all stock images. So there’s that.

Early on, back in 2010, I was taking a lot of social media workshops from this one person, I forget her name now. And so, she said, ‘You should always allocate one social media as your fun site.’ And so, for a long time, Pinterest was my fun site.

And then, that became more important for my business, so then I made Instagram my fun account. Well, now I’m revamping my Instagram account. In fact, it’s filled mostly with Black Labs, so I’ve given my Black Lab an Instagram account. And I just started her account on Friday and she already has I think almost 50 followers. So she’s doing really well.

But I’m always taking social media courses, even though I specialize in social media and I read a lot of social media posts. And I realize I’m not giving you any opportunity to ask any questions, Joanna. But I like to take courses.

I’ve signed up for two courses, one is through Social Media Examiner, it’s their society, and I’m taking a course from Kay Coroy. She’s British and she’s an Instagram teacher. What she focuses on for Instagram, is your sole brand essence and finding what your brand colors are and sticking to those colors on Instagram. So that’s why my dog now has its own Instagram account because I’ll be focusing on my brand colors. So, all right, it’s time for questions.

Joanna: We’ll be circling back on Instagram and images.

But just sticking with what’s changed, so I think your point about continuing to learn is also important because, as we know, these sites change all the time. They change their functions. They change what’s available.

But just going back to Facebook, because this is really interesting, and I just wondered what your thoughts were on why Facebook is dropping. So, when we think back to Myspace, before Facebook, that was taken over. Everyone did that and then it was Facebook and Myspace went back to being very niche.

Is that just the natural trajectory of a social media site? And then, of course, Facebook might’ve seen that coming because they bought Instagram. So is it a natural progression or is it a backlash against the privacy issues and the big tech issues that Facebook is facing? Because, of course, authors use Facebook for advertising. It’s very important to a lot of businesses.

What are your thoughts on what’s happening with Facebook?

Frances: I think one of the things was the way the Russians were able to affect the outcome of the election of Donald Trump in this country, and how sites were able to use custom audiences that were really horrible in controlling the advertising for that election. I think that had a lot to do with the backlash against Facebook.

They used to have terrible custom audiences like Jew haters. It’s a terrible custom audience to have for advertising on Facebook. Facebook has gotten rid of a lot of those custom audiences and has really worked on that.

The other thing against Facebook is its algorithm, especially for businesses. And authors may not see themselves as businesses but if you have a Facebook author page, you have a Facebook business page, and so the algorithm for business pages is such that only 2% of what you post on your Facebook business page will actually penetrate the News Feed, unless you buy advertising.

Facebook has to monetize itself. The way it monetizes itself is through advertising. So if you want to do well on your Facebook author page, which is a Facebook business page, you have to advertise.

And I think people are upset about that. People like Toyota and Mercedes, big brands, that’s just part of their marketing budgets. With a lot of especially indie authors, that’s difficult to do.

Mark Dawson has a fabulous Facebook advertising course, and I recommend that all authors take this course, but you can’t do much with a Facebook author page unless you advertise and unless you know how to use Facebook advertising well. So that’s difficult.

I used to say that every author had to have a Facebook business page. Now I don’t.

Joanna: Well, that’s interesting. A question about news sites. I have not used Snapchat, now called Snap, and I have not used TikTok, which I only really heard about when I was in London last, and the whole underground was plastered with signs for TikTok.

And then I’ve heard that it is a music video or something like that. Anyway, I have not tried either of these things. Many authors do not want to get on another social media site.

What are your thoughts on the new emerging sites?

Frances: Snap is really popular among the youth and millennials. The author of ‘Wool’, I think it’s Hugh Howey, he was able to increase his emailing list by galvanizing this following on Snap by adding 11,000 people to his email account.

So if you’re a YA author and you want to galvanize your readers on Snap, then that’s a site to use but to know how to use it well because your posts disappear once people read them. And that was my issue with Instagram Stories.

I didn’t think they were a viable issue for authors because you work on creating an Instagram Story and then it vanishes within 24 hours. But now you can archive them, so now I like Instagram Stories.

TikTok I just looked at this morning and it’s videos and it’s music and it’s all young adults. So I didn’t see anything else, so that would be a place for YA authors. But I’m not yet sure how they could use it but they could definitely use Snap. Hugh Howey is great at using social media but he’s great at using Snap also.

Joanna: How did you find out about Hugh and Snap?

Frances: It was on his blog years ago. Probably two years ago.

Joanna: I’ll see if I can link to that in the show notes. Let’s circle back on Instagram because I, like you, have not really used Facebook on my personal side for years mainly because my mom’s there. My mother-in-law is there. It’s kind of a thing where I’m not necessarily sharing so much.

I’ve started using Instagram and I really love it too, and kind of like you, I’ve started to go, ‘Oh, maybe I should be using it more like a business, but how do I do that?’

If people have an Instagram account and they have done what you’ve done like, ‘Here’s a few a few personal things,’ how have you been revamping Instagram for business use?

Frances: I haven’t yet but I’m going to, but I do manage accounts for other people. And what I do is I create Instagram Stories.

If you’re going to be serious about using Instagram for business, you have to use Instagram Stories. They don’t appear in the News Feed. They appear on top of the News Feed and they are the circles. And what you can do is you can highlight an Instagram Story and it stays right beneath your bio. And so, I recommend that you use Instagram Stories. They’re just really powerful.

Joanna: Give us an example of what is an Instagram Story, if people don’t know.

Frances: Some people think it’s a story and you have to do a lot of writing because we think of stories as writers, right? But it’s not. You can use Canva.

Canva has a template for Instagram Stories. You can use multiple pages in your Instagram Story, but I don’t recommend that you do that because the first page has to pass, and then the second one comes up and people usually don’t wait that long.

It’s just an image with text on it but you want to have the text low enough so it doesn’t get caught up in the Instagram type. And you could say, ‘This book is on sale for two days,’ or, ‘This book is free now, come to my website.’

You can do an Instagram Story about, ‘This is my favorite place to walk. This is my favorite place to write.’ Whereas Instagram images are these block images, these square images, Instagram Stories are the length of your smartphone, and so you have more visibility, a bigger place to write.

Joanna: I like using the images. I understand that. I’m doing that quite well now, sharing my images. I’m doing some hashtags. But Stories I really haven’t got the hang of.

I don’t really know what is a story and what is an image on the page. And also, I think, we don’t want to always be saying, ‘Here’s my book. Here’s my book.’ So give us some ideas of what are the other things that we put in a story if we are just living a normal life?

I don’t really have as much of a story to tell today. So what do we put there?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be this big thing. It could be your husband taking a picture of you writing. It could be somebody taking a picture of you riding your bike through Bath.

The story is simply, ‘I’m working on my next book,’ or, ‘This is where I like to ride my bike.’ They’re just images about your life or about other authors.

You may be holding a book and reading it and it’s by another author, and you could say, ‘I love this book by…’ And so, it’s just a larger image that gets more visibility. It could also be a video.

It doesn’t have to be a static image. It can be a video. And they’re important because they get greater visibility. People don’t have to thumb through their News Feed to see them. They’ll see them at the top of the News Feed. So you just have greater visibility. So I’d say they’re for things that you really want to get out there.

Joanna: I think still that we haven’t really tackled the big thing in the room which people wonder how social media sells books, and Instagram feels even harder. So Twitter, when I share a tweet, I can put a direct link to a bookstore on Twitter and I can like, ‘Here’s me with my new book. And here’s the buy link.’

But on Instagram, you can’t even put a link in the image or the text.

How do we go from doing a nice image and a story to actually someone being able to buy the book?

Frances: Right. So you change the link in your bio. On your bio, it may say ‘thecreativepenn.com’ or it could be ‘jfpenn.com.’ But if it’s for a specific book, you would say ‘jfpenn.com/’ and the name of a book. And so you would say, ‘Go to my bio and download.’

Joanna: And you only need to get one link. I’ve been using Linktree, which is you can put multiple links. It’s premium so you pay like $6 a month, I think, and it pops up and it has multiple links on. And, of course, I’m @jfpennauthor on Instagram so people can go and see Linktree. So that’s something I use for those multiple links.

Probably the other thing that stopped me with Instagram is I don’t know how to schedule it. I’ve heard of some things that people are using. I don’t like to sit on social media all the time.

Do you know of any good scheduling tools for Instagram that would make it easier for me?

Frances: You could use Buffer. You could use Later. I like Later. You could also use Hootsuite. And I think there’s Schedugram.

Joanna: Okay. You can use Buffer because I have Buffer. Maybe I just haven’t looked at it properly.

Frances: You have to have a paid account for Buffer?

Joanna: Okay, because at one point, you couldn’t schedule things I think on Instagram, I think when it first came out. So if we’re going to schedule, like you talked there about a color palette.

Any other tips on how you curate your account?

Frances: It doesn’t have to be all about you. It could be author quotes. It could be writing quotes. My philosophy about social media is that, for example, I don’t have competitors on social media, I have colleagues.

Rachel Thompson does what I do, and she includes me on her blog, I include her on my blog. I promote her events, I promote her chats. She invites me onto her chats. So we do the same thing for the same demographic, but we’re colleagues. I refer people to her, she refers people to me.

So it’s sort of a philosophy, ‘Don’t look at social media as you’re up against your competition. You have all these colleagues on social media.’ And that’s the beauty about social media, I think. At least that’s my perspective about social media. I think about it in terms of colleagues.

Joanna: I think the same thing. It’s always like the coopetition is what I’ve always said, the cooperating with your so-called competition. And, on Instagram…see, on Twitter, again, I just say from, you know, @Caballo_Frances because I know your handle on Twitter.

On Instagram, we tag people who we want to tag, right?

Frances: Yes. On Instagram, you can use up to 30 hashtags. You should use at least 11 because hashtags are keywords and the more keywords you have, then the more likely people will find you. And there’s a trick to adding more hashtags, if you want to, and that’s to put an ampersand in front of the second-to-the-last hashtag. And then, you can add more hashtags.

Joanna: Ooh, a little trick there.

Frances: For my clients, I try to use a minimum of 25 hashtags.

Joanna: How do we find those hashtags?

Frances: One of my clients is a psychologist who’s writing a book. If it’s about depression, I will look up hashtags on Instagram for depression.

Or you can type in ‘Depression’ on the search bar on Instagram, and then look at posts and see what they’re using. And if you have an Instagram business account, which you can only have if you have a Facebook business account, then you can see which hashtags are performing well and which aren’t.

And then, you can get rid of the hashtags that aren’t performing well and keep the ones that are performing well.

Joanna: That’s an interesting thing because I’ve seen some people say you should go back into your account and, say, delete some posts, change up the hashtags, that type of thing. Which seems to me a lot of work.

Frances: I wouldn’t.

Joanna: So because it’s a feed, so you could pick up a photo that you had a year ago and then repost it.

What about reusing photos?

Frances: I will look at your analytics and see which photos have done well in the past, and then reuse those, definitely.

Joanna: Because that’s the other thing. I take a lot of photos but still there are some that I’d like…say, if I’m talking about, ‘Oh, I have a sale on a book that features Rome,’ I want to go back and find my Rome pictures and kind of post them again.

Frances: Right. Yeah.

Joanna: Okay. Just one more thing on images. It’s fine when you’re using your own images, but what about, like you mentioned, Canva has a template, how do we know that we can use an image? I think there’s a misunderstanding of images on the Internet. What about intellectual property around images?

How do people know that they can use an image if it’s not their own?

Frances: Right. Well, when I said ‘template on Instagram,’ I meant that they have the template for the correct size of a post but they also have canned images. And Canva will tell you if they’re free or if they’re not free.

You can also buy images on Canva. I subscribe to a service called Freepik, and it’s, I don’t know, $60 a year. And some of the images are pretty goofy and I would never use them but some of them are really nice so I do use the nice ones.

I don’t use the ones that scream ‘Stock photo, stock photo, stock photo.’ So what I don’t do is download images from Pinterest because those have been taken by people. But I do use photos that I get from my service and I do use photos that I can buy on Canva.

Joanna: Actually, just on Canva, I think they’ve just introduced an Easy button that helps you resize everything. Because this is the problem with social media, right? Twitter has one size, Facebook has another size, Instagram has two different sizes. It’s ridiculous. But I think there’s now an Easy button. I think it’s in their premium section.

Frances: Yes, it is.

Joanna: I just thought I’d mention that to people because it’s very annoying. Okay, so yes, watch out for intellectual property on images.

You mentioned Pinterest and I wanted to talk about Pinterest particularly. You have a little book on Pinterest which people can get from your website.

What are the differences between Instagram and Pinterest?

Frances: It’s an excellent question. Pinterest versus our discussion five years ago or four years ago, whenever it was, you can now use hashtags. And so, it’s important to use hashtags on your images. Instagram doesn’t have pin boards, virtual pin boards.

Pinterest has virtual pin boards so you can develop pin boards on Pinterest around the book you’re writing, the books you have written, the books you plan to write, favorite places to go to, certain social media accounts, great book stores, great libraries, author quotes.

At first, it was Black Labs, I have a Black Lab one. So, at first, I was using Pinterest as my fun account. I really built it up with social media pin boards, with my blog pin board, and author quotes, and bookstores. And then it went on Barcelona and hairstyles, that kind of thing.

But I only use Pinterest now to drive traffic to my website. With every Monday blog post, because my Monday blog posts are about social media, in some way, I always create the top image which is for social media, and then at the bottom I put a Pinterest graphic.

It used to be ‘Pin an image,’ now I like an image to my pin board on Pinterest for my blog. And then, on Fridays, I do a roundup of the week’s best posts and on that one I do a quote of the week and I create a Pinterest graphic with an author quote. And then, I like that image and I like it onto my pin board on author quotes.

Twitter is the number one referral source to my website. Pinterest is the number two referral site to my website. So I use it for website traffic.

Joanna: This is interesting to me because how I use Pinterest very much is for images with no text on, and the same with Instagram. And what I’m getting the sense from you is that, for marketing purposes, adding text onto the image to get traffic is really important because on Pinterest you might not see any other text. You might only see the image, right?

Frances: Right.

Joanna: Are we still having image dominance with a quote, or are we just having a quote on a plain background?

Frances: On Pinterest?

Joanna: Yes.

Frances: Well, you see a lot of images without quotes on them. My images always have quotes on them. So Fridays, it’s author quotes. Mondays, it’s the topic quote, topic headline or something.

But you see both on Pinterest. The fun side of my Pinterest account is about dogs, so I look for quotes with dogs in them. And then, what I pin to Pinterest always has writing on it.

But, as I look at Pinterest, there are a lot of images without any writing on it. So you can do it both ways. I don’t think there’s a correct way to do it.

Joanna: It’s interesting because I’ve started much more clicking through…what I like about Pinterest, as opposed to Instagram, is I will go on Pinterest, find something I like, and click through to read the website.

So this, to me, seems why Pinterest would be better at traffic generation because I can actually click it. I’ve got a new website since we talked last, called ‘Books and Travel.’

Frances: Oh, that’s right. I know about that.

Joanna: booksandtravel.page, in case anyone’s interested. But there, I’m going in and pinning all the pictures and people will, hopefully, find them and like and click through to my website. Now, it’s brand new so I don’t really have any data yet.

But I’m struggling with Instagram. My feeling is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Pinterest might be better for traffic.

Frances: Exactly. The founders of Pinterest say that it’s not a social media app. It’s a browser.

Joanna: Ah, that’s interesting. Because I use it for research, so I might go in there and say…I wanted to find the place where they did ‘Avatar’. It’s a place in China. It’s a national park with these amazing landscapes.

I went in and just typed, ‘China, National Park, Avatar,’ and got all the images that I wanted to look at and write about in my novel. So, yeah, I used it as a browser. Totally.

Frances: Absolutely.

Joanna: Fantastic. That definitely gives me a clue.

The other thing I’d heard about Pinterest is from Social Media Examiner, which is a great site, that Pinterest drives purchases more than other social media.

Frances: It does.

Joanna: Should we have prices on there?

There is a business Pinterest, isn’t there, where you can put prices and things?

Frances: Everyone should have a Pinterest business account. Every author should because then you get free analytics with your business account and you can put prices on your images.

Joanna: I still have a personal Pinterest account. I haven’t gone the business route. And this is what’s so interesting…and for people listening, you and I have known each other online for 10 years, I think, since Twitter back in the day. I think that’s how we met originally.

And it feels like I still haven’t got a handle on everything and I know there are people listening who feel quite overwhelmed with all of this. So this is your other superpower, your book ‘Avoid Social Media Time Suck.’ So now we’ve done lots of technical things.

Tell us how do we avoid social media time suck with all of this going on?

Frances: It’s really easy. The first step is to know who your reading demographic is. So if it’s YA, you know that they’re most likely not going to be on Facebook, so don’t bother with a Facebook author page and just keep it personal and that’s fine. Definitely use Instagram. If you’re brave, use Snap.

Supposedly, YA readers are on Twitter. I have a hard time believing that, but they might be. But definitely use Instagram.

If you are a romance author you have to be on Facebook and I would say you have to be on Pinterest and Instagram. So what I’m saying is don’t use everything. Don’t use Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn. Google+ doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, just don’t use everything. Focus and start with one account or one application that you know that your reading demographic is on and learn it.

And then, maybe add a second one. And then just stick to those two. You don’t have to be on everything. You don’t have time in a day to be on everything and you don’t have the resources to pay someone to be on everything. And so, even I don’t focus on everything. I only focus on certain social media brands. So don’t be on everything.

And then, the next step is to know that 80% of what you post should not be about you, 20% can be about you, and to use a scheduling application, whether it’s Hootsuite or it’s Buffer or whatever you choose, use it.

You should probably get the paid account. I think with Buffer it’s $10 a month. This is not very much.

Schedule everything in the morning and then you can just walk away from it. Spend like 15 minutes scheduling, and then go back to your writing. Go back to your day job. Go back to walking your dog. Whatever you do, do that.

And then what I do is at the end of the day, I’ll go back and I’ll look at what’s happening on social media because social media is social. You can’t just post things and then never interact with anybody. It won’t get anywhere.

Interact with people, answer questions, ask questions, follow people in your niche or in your genre that you look up to. Go to Facebook, comment on other people’s stuff, retweet other people’s stuff. Look at Instagram, like things, share things, comment.

Joanna: Be sociable. I think my tip would be, like you said, you need to time block this. So, for example, what you could say is on a Sunday afternoon you fancy doing some images or you schedule like, ‘Two hours, I’m going to get all my images together,’ for the whole month.

And then you could do even 15 minutes a day checking and responding, right?

Frances: Right. And I always like Joanna’s term which is social karma. It always comes back to you. And the thing about social media is it’s important to be authentic and to retweet, reshare, leave comments on Instagram.

Because people thought that all you had to do to do well on Instagram was post images and use hashtags. Well, no. You need to do more than that. And you need to do Instagram Stories but you also need to go through your News Feed, like and leave comments, and follow other people.

Joanna: And the other thing I was going to say is, and we’re talking about a business perspective here, selling books. So we’re not just doing this for no reason. We have a good bio that goes to a good author website.

We need the functionality in place for it to actually achieve something, or e-mail sign-up list or something.

There’s no point having a hundred million followers if you’re not achieving your goals with it.

Frances: Right. And the other thing about Instagram is that your URL or your website link doesn’t have to be static. Change it. Change it with the different goals that you have each day on Instagram. If you’re trying to sell something or you’re trying to give something away, then just say, ‘Go to the link,’ and have a different URL. So change it up.

Joanna: That’s a good tip actually because, again, you kind of think like once you’ve set it up, that’s it. But you can actually change it up.

I feel like we’ve covered lots of different things but you have, on your website, lots of super blog posts, details and tips and things. So tell people where they can find you and all your books online.

Frances: Right. So you can find me at socialmediajustforwriters.com. And I have a free email-based social media course, and with that you’ll get a free e-book on Twitter. And then I sell my Pinterest e-book, I think, for $5. And there are links on my website to all my books on Amazon and elsewhere.

Joanna: Fantastic. And all your social media links are on your website as well.

Frances: Yes.

Joanna: Is there any one particular one you like to be contacted on that you’d wanna tell us?

Frances: Instagram.

Joanna: Which is?

Frances: Frances_Caballo.

Joanna: Ah, there we go. Fantastic. Well, look, thank you so much for your time, Frances. That was great.

Frances: Thank you, Joanna. I really appreciate it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Can self-publishing be a viable route for literary authors? If you write cross-genre, can you be successful with your writing? I talk about these topics and more with award-winning author, Jane Davis, in today’s interview.

In the intro, I mention the AI text generator that has now been released in a modified version [TalkToTransformer.com] after being considered too dangerous to release in Feb [Techcrunch]; Google’s new AI that can help you speak in another language in your own voice [The Next Web]; and how to turn your book into a podcast with text-to-speech AI, Amazon Polly [The Creative Penn blog]; and how moving house is like learning to write and publish.

Plus, my interview on how I run my author business plus my thoughts on a voice-first future [Unemployable Podcast]; my Mum, Jacqui Penn, on writing as Penny Appleton and a behind the scenes look at our creative relationship [Kick in the Creatives Podcast]; and how travel and writing can help you deal with death and grief [Books and Travel Podcast].

Do you need a professional editor or book cover designer? Do you need help with marketing, publicity or advertising? Find a curated list of vetted professionals at the Reedsy marketplace, along with free training on writing, self-publishing and book marketing. Check it out at: www.TheCreativePenn.com/reedsy

Jane Davis is an award-winning writer of literary fiction. Her first novel, Half-Truths & White Lies, won the Daily Mail first novel award. And she recently won the Selfies Award at London Book Fair 2019, for best self-publish work of fiction for her book Smash All the Windows.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• Making the decision to move to indie publishing

• On the many factors and issues around book pricing

• Why you need to try different marketing strategies until you find what works for your books

• Finding your target audience

• Looking at what a book has earned as a whole, rather than how it’s priced at any one time

You can find Jane Davis at Jane-Davis.co.uk and on Twitter @janedavisauthor

Transcript of Interview with Jane Davis

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from TheCreativePenn.com. And today I’m here with Jane Davis. Hi, Jane.

Jane: Hello, Jo. Hello, everybody.

Joanna: It’s great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction.

Jane is an award-winning writer of literary fiction. Her first novel Half-truths & White Lies, won the Daily Mail first novel award. And she recently won the Selfies Award at London Book Fair 2019, for best self-publish work of fiction for her book Smash All the Windows.

You’re actually a multi-award-winning author now, Jane. Congratulations.

Jane: I’ve got a couple more than that as well. But some of them are quite small ones. But, yes, it’s my second. The Selfies Award was the second award that recognized self-publishing standards as well as the writing. So to me, as a self-published author, that means something special, and it’s one for the team, which is nice. It’s not just for me, it’s one for the whole team.

Joanna: I love that. We’re going to come back to that.

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.

Jane: A very convoluted route, I suppose. And I think as a child, I was quite creative. But I wasn’t one of these people who grew up storytelling and writing. I was far too shy and retiring for that. But I did spend a lot of time drawing.

I come from a family of musicians and artists. And I think my parents had some idea that we’d all be able to make a living in the arts somehow. So we were all sent off to ballet lessons and to play musical instruments and nothing like that happened at all.

In fact, I didn’t even get that far as to really look realistically at a career in art because the work I produced for my O level art, the examiners hated. I had been projected to get an A and I didn’t fail, but I got to C and it was a little bit just and thought, “Oh, maybe I’m really not very good at this. Maybe I’m not good enough.” And so I actually left school at 16 and went to into the world of insurance where I stayed for 25 years.

Joanna: Sexy.

Jane: Exactly. I had no creative outlet whatsoever. And I think once I’d achieved the things I wanted to do, I bought my own house, I had a car, a nice wardrobe, things like that, it begins to bunk you that there actually is no creative outlet.

Domething happened in my personal life that I wanted to make sense of, and I turned to writing. I remember a very drunken evening with my partner, Matt, down by the…I call it a second bottle of wine evening, down by the Thames and a lovely summer’s evening. And I pitched a book to him, which is something I’m not very good at doing to this day.

But I pitched an idea for a book for him and he said, “Do you think anybody would want to read that?” And he said, ‘Well, I’ll read it.’ And I thought, “Okay, then and I’ll give it a go.” Not realizing that it would take me four years of writing in all my spare time.

It didn’t get me a publishing deal but it did get me a literary agent at the time. I thought I’d written a crime novel as well at that point and they said, “No, Jane, this isn’t crime.” I’ve never been very good at working at more genres.

Joanna: What year was that first book or how many years ago was that?

Jane: That was when I was 36 and it took me until I was 40 to write it. So we’re talking…I’m not very good at math. That’s not a strong point. About 16 years ago now.

Joanna: So you’ve been doing this a while. I think that’s important.

Jane: I’ve been doing it a while. Yes.

Joanna: You mentioned genre there and you’re a literary fiction author. So even though you said you’re not that good at genre, I think literary fiction is a genre. So I’m really interested in your thoughts on the category on Amazon of literary fiction.

Why do you choose that? Why is that what you write?

Jane: In short, I don’t choose literary as my first choice of category. In the official classification codes, there is no such thing as literary fiction. It’s general fiction. And so working out where you sit is a process of elimination, because you’ve eliminated historical, you’ve eliminated sci-fi.

What you’re left with is this thing called general fiction. I saw Adele Parks gave a talk at a conference. And she said that she was actually given the choice whether to have her work marketed as commercial fiction or literary fiction.

There isn’t really a subcategory as commercial fiction, either. It tends to be things like women’s fiction, but that’s the sort of thing they meant.

And she said, “Well, what’s the difference?” And they said, “Well, literary fiction sells 7,000 copies on average, and commercial fiction sells 70,000 copies on average.”

And so she said, “Well, I’d like to eat and pay the mortgage. So I’ll be commercial, thank you very much.” And it’s those sort of choices that you made that is a little bit about the way the book is marketed.

Once you’ve decided in your category, you tend to be pigeonholed if you’re under contract. We have a bit more choice if we’re publishing independently because as Kathleen Jared said to me recently when I interviewed her that self-publishing gives her the freedom to flip between genres if she wishes to.

But it’s true that most readers associate an author with a certain type of fiction. And I don’t sit down thinking I’m going to write literary fiction. I’m someone who left school at 16. I’ve got an O level, and a swimming certificate. And that’s a word that I associate with the classics, with Austin, with Dickens with Will Self, and to some people they might think it’s a difficult read, it’s not going to be accessible read.

What I try to do is I like to write about meaty, thorny subjects and I like to write about moral dilemmas. But I always try to make them accessible by showing them through the eyes of perhaps one or two characters, the case of my last novel, rather, a lot more characters and that actually with multiple points of view.

But usually breaking it down in that way so it makes a subject that accessible to people. And I do like to inform people, but I also want to entertain. And so if I have the choice, I’d say contemporary fiction because historical fiction is easier to market as well.

If I’ve written something that I can categorize as historical fiction, I will. Literary fiction is kind of a label that gets attached to me and you know on Amazon that we have the choice of different categories so that we can chart in different ways, in the rankings, then if literary fiction is a choice I might use that as one of my 10 choices, but it’s not my first choice. I prefer to say contemporary if I can.

Joanna: So many genre writers or commercial writers write in series.

Are authors who write mainly standalone novels classed more as literary writers rather than genre writers?

Jane: I don’t know that that’s got anything to do with it. Kate Moss said not so long ago as well that she distances herself. She prefers to think of herself as a storyteller, which I thought leaves you open to all genres really.

Joanna: Little bit broad there, Kate.

Jane: I don’t think anyone sits down and says they’re going to write a literary novel. The challenges that I set myself for to write something that’s authentic, something that’s honest, something that feels true. And if people say to me, by reading a review that someone says to me, “I believed that everything happened as it was written on the page,” which is reveal had recently.

And I thought, well, actually, that means I’ve done my job. Because I’m writing about made up things, quite a lot of them are based in truth, but the events themselves, the people are fictional, obviously. And if I get a comment like that, then I think, yes, actually that’s probably one of the best compliments I could have.

Joanna: You mentioned getting a literary agent earlier on in your career. You’ve won prizes. Your writing is excellent. Many people would then say, “Well, why choose to be Indie?”

You’re in the UK. I would say you’re significant in the genre in the UK because you’re always at events, you’re talking about it, which is fantastic.

Why choose the independent way? Tell us a bit about your story and how you to have chosen to publish?

Jane: Yes. Well, the truth is that I had my 15 minutes of fame, and was told I was going to be the next Joann Harris. And then, actually, I was dropped by my publisher.

So although I would say now that self-publishing is a positive choice for me, it came as a bit of a shock at the time. I didn’t realize because I was very green, and possibly my business background may be less challenging than I should have been.

I’ve sat on the board of directors for 16 years. You’re very used to in a situation, putting a case forward, arguing your case, but not actually winning the votes to get your policy put through to get your idea accepted. But the truth is that nobody actually asked me, “How do you see yourself as a writer?” when I was published.

And I was so grateful to get a publishing deal that I didn’t really challenge it at all. And I thought, “Oh, you’re going to be on our Black Swan label.” Apologies. I didn’t say, “What does that mean?” I just thought, “Great.”

I just looked up a couple of authors who on there and they were authors I liked, who were fabulous. And it was only when I presented my second book, which was actually quite soon after my Half-truths & White Lies was published, probably in about three months down the line because the production took quite a long time. And they said, “Yes, we love it. But of course, we can’t publish it because it’s not women’s fiction.”

It was only at that point that I realized that that was how they saw me and that it wasn’t possible. They weren’t going to publish me if I wrote anything else. And it had never been my intention to write only for women.

As someone put in one of their reviews, it’s human fiction. This isn’t women’s fiction because it was a book that they’d bought it under the category of women’s fiction. I said, “This isn’t women’s fiction, it’s human fiction.”

My fiction was always supposed to be for everybody. I presented them with a book where the main character was a 12-year-old boy, a book that became A Funeral for an Owl, and it’s my best-selling book now. And they said, “No, we can’t take it.”

What I set out to do after that was I set out to write what I thought was deliberately quite a commercial women’s fiction novel with a really feisty ass-kicking female lead. And, again, that was of a historical bend and, again, it was something they didn’t want.

So I actually was in the end, in the not very enviable position of touting three quite different books around the market at the same time. And I really stumbled upon…I paid like many, many people… I mean, this was back in 2009, in 2010. Self-publishing was probably still in its infancy and the advice at the time was no self-respecting author will self-publish.

And you pay thousands of pounds to get this advice and of course you listened to it. And it wasn’t until I actually thought, “I should go along to a conference and see what this is all about. Just check up on it.” And I realized that I was walking into a room of absolute professionals, people who had been traditionally published before, whose latest book hadn’t sold quite enough copies.

There was someone there who’s writing what he called lad-lit at the time, and so chick-lit. He felt he was writing the equivalent of chick-lit but for men. And there was no market for that at the time so he decided that he would go ahead and self-publish.

And there were people who had ghost written novels for other people, but had choosen to self-publish their own work because it didn’t fit neatly into a genre. Or something was literary that was classified as being too quiet for the current market because we know that it is a business decision that the big publishers are making.

I reread recently Diana Athill’s memoirs stats about her many years in the publishing industry. And she talks there and reminds us that the Booker Prize was set up to try and tempt non-readers or people for whom reading was one of many options to get them out of the cinemas and the bingo halls, to get them to pick up a book by making it newsworthy.

She talks about how if a book came across her desk that she categorizes literary fiction, she would almost hope it was bad because then it would be an easy decision, she could just turn it down. Whereas if it was good, it had to have an editorial meeting to decide whether it’s something they would take on board in the knowledge that if they took it on, they would probably sell 800 copies and they would make a loss.

And of course the publishers, they have their more commercial books that will prop up that costs that will support it. And that’s one of the things they want to do as publishers. But when you’re publishing on your own, you don’t have those other books to prop things up unless you delve into nonfiction.

Roz Morris, for example, has her own writing series. I think you do as well, you have nonfiction books as well. And of course, they support and they give credibility to your skills as an author as well. It’s something I haven’t ventured into yet, simply because I think there’s so many books out there.

Joanna: We know there can be many books on the same topic. So I don’t think that should stop you for sure. But I want to come back on the word self-publishing because you have talked about on your blog and things about how self-publishing is a misnomer.

Tell us about your publishing team and why it’s not self-publishing.

Jane: The only part in self-publishing is where you push the button, at the end of the day. You’re the only person who can decide whether you’re going to put that book out there. I still hope that if I’ve written something, spent a couple of years writing a book on the professional opinion that it wasn’t good enough that I would actually abandon that project.

I’ve never got to that stage but I still hope that if that’s the opinion I’m getting that I would have the integrity to do that rather than put out something that was substandard. I also feel the pressure mounting with every book because readers have certain expectations.

They keep on saying, “Well, we see the development with every book,” and you’re thinking, “Oh, my goodness, what am I going to give them with the next one to top the last one to meet those expectations?” I think it gets tougher.

One of the reasons self-publishing is now my first choice is because I’ve built a team around it. Of course, my first attempt at self-publishing I didn’t have that. I was changing services as well as I was using professional services. But it took me a while to get a team that I was completely happy with.

And not only professional services, but I have a core team of beta readers, probably about 20. And then for every book as well, I actually look for someone with specific skills. So, for example, if a book has a medical subject matter, I might ask a doctor. I might be looking for sensitivity readers if there are issues of diversity or ethnicity. So I’ll pull in some extra people every time.

But after I’ve self-edited the book myself to within an inch of its life, and I just can’t be objective about the thing anymore, that’s the point at which I’ll send out to beta readers. I collect all of their comments back.

And really, if more than one people are saying to me, “I’ve got a problem with that part of the book.” Even if you don’t agree with the solution they’re suggesting, you know that there is a problem with it. So you’ve got to start making the changes and also weaving those changes the whole way through.

By the time my books get to a professional, they’ve been through quite an extensive state rounds of self-editing, really.

And so for my last book I use the structural editor. I don’t always use the structural editor. But it was a really complicated structure from my last book, and I used Dan Holloway, who’s been known to ALLi members as our news hound. But he obviously writes himself and he can just get to grips with something very, very quickly.

He’s very challenging, which is what you want people to do you work with. The whole idea is you’re not employing the yes-man. You’re employing the people who are going to push you to make the book as good as it can possibly be.

When Dan says, “Is that really the first thing you want the reader to know about that character?” You have to really be able to justify that and to think about what you’ve done because I don’t plot, I write quite organically.

So the book grows out of an idea. And I’m probably not thinking those questions through to myself that need to be asked at the structural stage.

Dan is great fun to work with. The cultural references are so broad. He’ll say, “Go and watch the first scene of ‘The Player,’ or, “Go and watch the scene from ‘Silence of the Lambs.” There are a lot books he’ll send your way to look at.

A cinematic approach can be really, really useful to trigger ideas of how you might tackle a particular problem. And he rather than offering the solution on a plate challenges you to find your own solutions or define what it is that we need to take it next.

After that stage of edits, I use a copy editor and I use some John Hudspeth who I haven’t actually met, I found online. I found online because his comments are so irreverent.

Joanna: Not irrelavant.

Jane: I can’t say innovation. Oh, I’ve done it today. But irreverent the people actually publish his comments to their work. There are blogs on which people publish his comments and they’re so funny.

Joanna: That’s brilliant.

Jane: Someone I can actually work with because he can present critique in a way that is going to make me laugh and I’m not going to take offense. Because it’s so easy when you get a critique paper back the first time round to read it through and go, “But that’s not right.”

And to be very dismissive to this because that’s your baby they’re talking about and you’ve been working on it for such a long time. And sometimes it’s good to have someone who can make you laugh at yourself quite a bit. And he also does a little bit like a school report at the end of each chapter as well.

Joanna: That’s fantastic.

Jane: On how it’s moved the novel on or if it hasn’t moved the novel on in the way that he wanted to see. And his writing sound really excited, “Where to go next with this,” or, “I’m not sure where you’re going with this,” or something like that.

But he’s putting his thought processes down as a reader, which is really, really useful as well. Then I go through the proofread stage before type setting. Type setting, another proofread, of course, and testing out all the various eBooks and the formats.

And then cover design has happened at somewhere in between this point in time. I work with them. Sorry, I wanted to mention JD, Jane Dixon Smith does my eBook formatting, my type setting for me. And she is fantastic help and resource with that. Another ALLi person.

My cover designer is actually someone who runs my local art gallery. And when I first decided to self-publish, I walked in and said, “Do you know artists, graphic designers, etc.? Do you know anyone who does cover design?” He says, “Jane, I do cover design.” So I’ve worked with him.

My initial cover designs were really quite simple but I like to get quite involved in the process. I usually source the photographs myself. I come up with the concept. And then I say to him,”‘This is what I have in mind. What are we going to do with it?” And actually, I push really hard to get the covers I want.

For my latest cover, he wanted it to be very simple. And I said, “No, we need people to have a place in mind. I want people to know it’s a London novel.”

Joanna: I like your covers. I think they’re very good.

Jane: Yes. So we have these conversations, like, “Can you put a deer’s head on a ballerina?” And he says, “Will you go away and find me the right picture, the battering in of the deer’s head? Because I’m not going to scroll through and find ones that like a dog’s dinner. I need the exact angle of the deer’s head to be right, the exact width of the deer’s head to be right, something the proportion is going to look cool, and you’re going to do that not me.”

I spend hours and hours and hours, weeks looking for the right photograph.

Joanna: For people who don’t know ALLi is the Alliance of Independent Authors, if people were wondering that. And I’ll put links in the show notes to some of the professionals you’ve talked about. Jane Dixon Smith does my covers and my interior print design as well. She’s fantastic.

Really important like you mentioned standards at the beginning. And clearly with all those iterations, you’re absolutely maintaining standards and growing standards.

I also wanted to ask about your thoughts on pricing because we had discussed this and when you spend years on a book like you do, it can be very hard to look at the pricing that people use online and make a decision.

Tell us what’s happened with your experience of pricing?

Jane: I’m really conflicted on this. I had been trying to edge my prices up. I worked on the basis, I think this statistic is still true, that only 5% of books sell over 1,000 copies regardless of genre. And so if you actually do the math and work out what you’re spending, work out what commission rates you’re going to get, hope for the best and hope you’re going to sell those 1,000 copies.

But you can’t really say if you don’t have a history of sales that you’re going to sell much more than that. And I worked out to begin with the minimum I could sell an eBook for would be $2.99. My paperbacks have always been the same.

I’ve never particularly made a profit on paperbacks. In fact, for several years, I was making a loss of about five pounds per book because I was trying so hard to do the footwork to get into bookstores. But it’s so important to me as someone who grew up surrounded by books.

I’m not the eBook generation. I love the feel of a physical book. I read physical books. I read my own books on eBook because I have to. I don’t enjoy reading books in eBook format. I know other people do. I know other people find them incredibly helpful. But my eyes don’t like them. I don’t find that I process the information the same way.

So for me, it’s always a paperback. It was so important for me to produce something that I thought was a beautiful thing as well as an object and to try and get those onto the books of bookshelves. And I have to say I’ve kind of abandoned my attempts to get stocked in bookshops. It’s so hard, it really is.

I forgot to mention Clays with my team. We only went as far as the production and Clays produce my paperbacks for me. But they also did they do more than that, they do distribution as well.

I have a catalog that I send to book shops in the UK. The slightly frustrating thing with Clays is that although they do the distribution to book shops, you don’t find out which book shops have bought your book. So you can’t find out what and grand worth that you’ve been doing has paid off.

But I’ve stopped taking my boxes of books and driving to book shops and saying, “Please stock my book.” I’ve just stopped that kind of activity that I was doing.

Joanna: Just on that so people know, so Clays is a printer and a distributor. So you would have paid upfront for them to print a certain number and then put in their warehouse. Whereas I do print through Ingram Spark so I only do print-on-demand.

Jane: I do print-on-demand and I do short print runs. So Clays do short print runs. It’s a service that they’ve only introduced for Indie authors in recent years. They will print you one book. Fifty books, it’s still quite expensive. But if you order 100 books plus it starts getting economical. If you order 200 books, the price comes down to below £2 for paperback.

And they will deliver to one UK address but they will also keep…I don’t know what the number is. It’s a box of books on site. And those they will distribute for you through Gardeners to book shops. So you have a stock for yourself and you have a stock that they keep there as well. And I think they will still do the distribution above that, but they will charge you for warehousing if you get a certain number that they keep free.

Joanna: So circling back on eBook pricing.

Jane: I started off at £2.99.

Joanna: So £2.99 or $2?

Jane: £2.99. I had been gradually trying to edge up to £4.99. Some of my books were selling it £4.99, some weren’t.

Something specific happened last summer. One of those things was that I got a Book Bub deal for my book A Funeral For an Owl And I had been trying to sell it at £4.99. And I did it at 99p. And it sold massively but it didn’t stop selling. So I didn’t reduce the price.

Now this was about the time that amazon.com were telling people in other countries you can only buy from amazon.com if you’re a U.S. resident.

So prior to this time, I’ve had quite a degree of success with Amazon Marketing Services in the U.S. At that time, those sales dried up and it became apparent to me that the people I was trying to reach all myself started to come from .com, .au. So Australia and New Zealand basically.

And it appeared to me that that’s where my market really is, the UK. I don’t appear to have a U.S audience. So there wasn’t much point carrying on with the advertising on .com. And in fact, the book sales continued to grow for A Funeral For an Owl. And I was putting all this work into trying to push for £4.99price.

But I was giving away so much of that money in marketing expenses that I actually decided to trial for one and reduce all my book prices to 99p. The reason for this was I started to help care for my dad, who has dementia, two days a week, and it was taking up writing time.

If I was going to write a next book, because I hadn’t written anything for a year, I realized I was going to have to cut back on marketing massively and walk away from it. And suddenly, there seemed to be a way of walking away from it. So it feels like selling out because I’ve always been against low pricing. I’ve always felt that books should be priced to represent their value.

And yet, where I get the value is because I need to put a value on my time. And I can’t be spending 70% of my writing time and a great deal of budget on trying to get the price at £4.99 for a book.

The other advantage for me with Amazon with the 99p is you are on the 35% commission rate instead of the 70%. And so, actually, you’ve got to make three times as many sales to make up for them. But the really good thing, as far as I’m concerned is that they don’t allow eBook lending at the 35% rate or you have to opt into it rather.

So it’s not automatic whereas at 70% you have to allow eBook lending. And because I go out and speak to book clubs quite a lot because book clubs are my market, I’ve been aware for some time. I used to be able to go to a book club and even if they’d already bought the book, I would be able to sell 20 or 30 copies of paperbacks at a book club.

I wouldn’t be paying for a market stall. I wouldn’t be paying money back to a bookseller. I wouldn’t be paying commission to a bookseller. So I would get 100% of that book price. So although I had gone and spoken to a book club and given up my time, I would actually get some sales out of it. And in the past year or two, I’ve not been getting any sales.

And when I actually asked the question, they said, “Oh no, we don’t buy paper books. One of us buys an eBook from Amazon and we all copy it and give it to this…”

So they’re downloading books from pirate sites. These are people who consider themselves to be book lovers, book worm people. They consider themselves to be supporting the publishing industry and yet they think it’s acceptable to buy one copy of an eBook and put it on an eBook library like Caliber and pass it around the whole group.

If you imagine now I’m only getting £1.99 per sale for a whole book club. It’s so destroying to be honest.

Joanna: I’m stunned that it’s a book clubs they’re normally women over 45…

Jane: It’s almost exclusively women mostly.

Joanna: That’s crazy. That makes me quite sad as well. We definitely should not be encouraging that.

This is almost nine months on from when you made those changes to your pricing. Do you get a sense of whether it was worthwhile?

Do you feel you’ve had your time back, the pricing is working, you’re still moving books?

Jane: I’m not selling as many. I am moving books. I’m not selling as many as I was for me because I think people start buying paperbacks around Christmas time, start looking at present buying. It dropped off.

So between August and the end of last year was absolutely fantastic. And I was thinking for the first time, “My goodness, this is actually a considerable contribution to my revenue. If I could do this every year, it would be a significant amount of income, not so huge but significant for me.”

Because I also work as a compliance consultant. So I could do some freelance work as well. And I thought, “Well, I can start building apps and a self-publishing pot as it were for future projects.” And it has tailed off a bit.

I tried the nerve of it, putting my prices back up to £1.99 and the sales just dried up completely. So I’ve actually gone back down. And that was always my aim that it would be temporary and that I will start nudging up again. But I don’t think I can do that.

The good news is for the UK market I can still utilize Amazon Marketing Services and it still pays for itself even at the 99p because my campaigns all run at about 15%. So there’s still money there.

And if I can get a new reader on board as well, he’s going to go and read the other books with that. And the ads in the UK still pay for themselves. So I’m pretty pleased with that even at the 99p because lots of people say, “Oh, well, if you’re going to advertise on Amazon, obviously your prices got to be high enough to pay for that.”

Joanna: This is interesting because when I heard Karen Inglis, of course, who you know is another Indie author. And I think this is one of the benefits of being in a genre, whether you want to call yourself literary or not, but within categories that are less targeted by Indies right now.

It’s very expensive in romance, in thrillers, in mystery, in crime. But if you’re in poetry or literary fiction or children’s fiction, you can still get good return on your ads because there are fewer authors actually paying for ads at that level and fewer publishers.

Jane: Definitely. My book that I’m advertising for that is historical fiction that runs at a, I might say lost but that runs near the break even. And whereas the ones that are contemporary literary, they run very, very well. So I think you’re probably right there.

Joanna: You’ve given us loads of tips on marketing there, Book Bub and AMS and book clubs and things.

Do you have any other thoughts for writers in your genre on marketing?

Jane: I think it’s quite individual. I tried Facebook ads and they didn’t work for me. And I quite quickly clocked up a lot of money, got very scared and ran away from that. And since 2012, I’ve been interviewing other authors.

I have a blog called Virtual Book Club. And the idea being that they get a bit of publicity and in return I get other visitors on my website and hopefully they might stay and have a bit of it explored like what they see there. Social media, I suppose, has been quite successful for me, certainly in terms of nurturing some contacts and friendships.

I have several hidden Facebook groups with other authors who will support groups and bits and pieces as well. And I’ve done some joint ventures with other people.

I did a joint venture with some other members from the Alliance of Independent Authors a few years ago. A box set called “Outside the Box.” And as a result of that because we got there with the power of several individuals, we were able to get in several national newspapers, which I don’t think it would have been possible to do on our own. And so that was very exciting.

But it’s a sort of scattergun approach. You have to try and see what works. And I think it’s very important to not write off the things that didn’t work for you two years ago, because the market is changing.

Publishing is changing so rapidly that you have to constantly revisit the way that you’re doing things and make sure that you haven’t missed a trick. And perhaps go back and try something that didn’t work before, perhaps something you’re doing now just stops working.

So you’ve just got to find the next thing to latch on to. And the chances are that that won’t work forever. I’m sure that my pricing strategy at the moment is a temporary thing. And so you have to constantly keep looking at it and experimenting. Be willing to experiment. It does take time.

Joanna: I think it’s that being willing is exactly the point. And I think particularly in literary fiction, there are people who are less willing to engage with some of these marketing activities.

You mentioned the word ‘sellout’ around your pricing, which I totally would never use that around anything you do at all but you clearly feel that.

Jane: I do find it difficult. And actually, I got a really supportive response from somebody because I felt it necessary to put my reasons down. I felt it necessary to blog about my reasons for reducing my prices. And I wanted people to know that this is not the value of the book.

There are no books out that are only worth 9-, but I’m sure there might be some. This is a year, two years of someone’s life they’ve spent on professional services. They haven’t just written it and pushed it… This is one of the reasons I dislike the term self-publishing because the perception of people, there is still the dismissal, “Oh, you’re self-publish.”

And the thought that it’s not seen as a professional way of doing things. It is and it costs money. And the idea that a book that’s been two years in the writing and had all that money spent on it should only be worth 99 P. I do find it difficult.

David Gaughran sent me a lovely response and said, “Never look at the individual price of the book, look at the total income from that book. I only look at that. And if that makes sense, then keep on doing what you’re doing.” And that’s the thing that makes sense now to me.

Joanna: That’s fantastic. Well, look, we’re almost out of time.

Tell us what are you working on at the moment, or anything you want to tell people about what you do write.

Jane: I’m quite superstitious about talking about work-in-progress and with very good reason, really. You always feel as if you’re discovering something for yourself when you’re reading it. And like other people, I read three biographies last year and I found that there was a connection back.

I found there was a connection between three people in the biographies. And I thought, “That’s really interesting.” And you feel as if you’re the only person in the world who could know this and I already have found out that someone is writing something quite similar.

And so you get a bit scared about that, ‘I’m going to have to read that and make sure mine is different enough.” There’s always a state where you’re writing when a book takes a long time to write, you think, “Oh, my goodness, they’ve written my book, and they’ve got their’s first and it’s already out there.”

And the thing is they won’t have your characters. They won’t have your story line. They won’t have the structure. They won’t have anything else.

Joanna: There is a work-in-progress. Good to hear.

Jane: There is a work-in-progress. I’m about 65,000 words in, which is quite early days for me. I don’t know if it’s going to be as long as some of my other novels but it is first draft.

Joanna: Fantastic. Well, tell people where they can find you and your books online.

Jane: My website is jane-davis.co.uk. And I’m on Twitter. I’m on Facebook. Those are the two main ones, actually.

I don’t spend a lot of time on other social media websites. I’ve never quite got into the Instagraming thing but post plenty of my photographs on Facebook. I like to, as you do, post a few pictures of where I go on a day-to-day basis in my travels in bits and pieces like that.

And of course my last book was based in the city where I go to for my day job. So I often feel as if I’m revisiting the scene of the book, actually. It does that for you, doesn’t it? It transforms the landscapes when you’ve actually written a book there. And you’re not just thinking, “Oh, this is where I go to work.”

It’s where all the action in your book took place. So that’s some people I think like to see those bits and pieces, especially, particular places that have inspired scenes in your books. So I do remember listing those.

Joanna: Fantastic. Right. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jane. That was great.

Jane: Thank you.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

We are on the cusp of an explosion in audio content — but human narration takes investment and AI voices are improving all the time. If having your book narrated and turned into an audiobook is not within your current budget, why not try turning it into a podcast using speech to text technology? Makoto Tokudome walks us through how to do this using free and inexpensive tools. 

Are you a self-published author? Are you looking to get your book into other mediums such as audio?

Do you wish someone would narrate your book? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to turn your book chapters into podcast episodes?

Well, by using some free online tools, now you can!

I’ve put together this comprehensive tutorial to walk you through the process I used to turn the chapters of my book into a podcast. You can check out my example here.

In a nutshell, I used Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech (TTS) service to create MP3’s of my book chapters. And then used Anchor FM to create and publish the audio as podcast episodes.

The idea of creating podcast episodes out of a book was inspired by Mark Coker and his podcast episodes of his Book Marketing Guide book.

*Caveat – Although text-to-speech (TTS) technology is quite impressive, my understanding is that Audible/ACX and other vendors still require audiobooks to be narrated by a human.

So What Can We Do With Our Text-to-Speech Audio Files?

1. You can create a podcast

2. You can use the audio files of your book to be a lead magnet. Give your audio files as a free audiobook download in exchange for email signups.

What is Amazon Polly?

Amazon Polly is a text-to-speech service that can convert text into audio speech. Text-to-speech technology has been around for some time. You may have even used it on your Mac or Apple device.

But up until recently the technology has usually produced halted, robotic voices. But Amazon Polly is able to create more lifelike speech that is quite impressive.

Amazon Polly currently offers this service in 26 different languages (e.g., English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, etc.).

I chose the male voice “Brian” with British English to narrate my book chapters. (Listen to a sample.) You can sign up for an account here.

Take a look at the pricing. My understanding is that you can request up to 5 million characters (i.e. not words) a month for free, and then $4.00 for each additional million characters:

Using Amazon Polly

After you sign up for an Amazon Polly account (i.e. Amazon AWS), you will first need to create a S3 bucket. (Out of this entire tutorial, this is probably the most difficult/technical part.)

This S3 bucket is basically an online drive or cloud storage in which Amazon Polly will save your MP3 files that you converted into speech.

Follow this guide to create an S3 bucket.

Select a unique name for your bucket (e.g. mtokudome)

Make sure you make a note of the region in which you create your bucket (e.g. US West Oregon).

Amazon Polly lets you convert up to 3,000 characters to speech on-the-fly. You can play around with the different languages and voices.

Anything beyond 3,000 characters needs to be a task request that gets processed by Amazon servers. This is why you first needed to create an S3 bucket.

At the very top of the page, make sure you select the same region in which you created your S3 bucket.

You also need to specify your S3 bucket name. Click on “Change S3 task settings” and input your S3 bucket you just created.

Now you should be all set up to start turning your book chapters into MP3s.

(If you have problems, email me or leave me a comment below and I’ll try to help.)

The first step you need to do is prep your book chapters. Open up your book document (i.e. Word document). You need to remove any page numbers, footnotes/endnotes, hyperlinks, etc. Otherwise, all of these will be read out loud.

In my own book, I had a few foreign words and some acronyms that needed to be tweaked. In theory, you could copy and paste your entire manuscript, but I found it better to work in batches, chapter by chapter. I also did this because I use these separate MP3 files as different podcast episodes.

Once you have cleaned up the text, copy and paste it into the Amazon Polly window. Then select the language and voice you want to use. Double-check your S3 task settings to make sure that your S3 bucket is set correctly.

Once you’re ready, click on “Synthesize to S3”. The task will be processed and completed in a few minutes.

Now go over to your S3 bucket where you will find your newly created MP3 file. Click on the MP3 file to download.

After you have created the audio file, you will most likely want to listen to the file. You may still end up finding words or pronunciation issues that need to be fixed in your chapter text.

If you’re happy with the results, you can continue to convert the rest of the chapters of your book into audio.

What is Anchor FM?

Anchor FM is a free podcasting tool / platform that allows virtually anyone with a smartphone or computer to start creating their very own podcast. And it’s 100% free.

Anchor FM removes the complexities of things like podcast hosting and distribution. Your episodes are hosted for free and distributed to all the major podcast networks (e.g. iTunes, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.)

You can sign up for an account here.

Using Anchor FM

There are plenty of ways to get fancy with podcasting, but the goal of this tutorial is to keep it as simple as possible. The goal here is to add cover art, some basic description, and create a basic intro and outro for each podcast episode. I include some basic audio editing suggestions below, but they are not necessary.

Editing Your Podcast Details and Episode Details
At the top of the page, click on “Settings” This is the settings page of your podcast. Give your podcast a name and description. Fill out the other details.

You can also upload cover art for your podcast. If you have the graphics for your book cover design, you may simply choose to upload this file. If you have some photo editing abilities, you may want to modify your cover design to fit more of a square aspect ratio.

If you don’t have editing abilities, you may choose to use a free tool like Canva to create a simply design. Check out their templates for album covers.

Adding Your Audio File

At the top of the page, click on the “New Episode” link. At this page, you can drag-and-drop the audio file of the chapters you just created. For example, drag-and-drop chapter 1 of your book to create your first podcast episode.

Creating an Intro and Outro

The next step is to create an intro and outro. The simplest way is to click on the “Record” button and record yourself. If you have a microphone or headset, it can improve the quality of the audio. Once you create the intro and outro, you can drag them around in the correct sequence.

What to say in the Intro and Outro?

You may be wondering what to actually say in your intro and outro. You can google for some tips and ideas. But at the minimum, you probably want to introduce yourself and give an overview of who this podcast might be for. Here’s my intro as an example:

Hello and welcome to The Thoughtful Language Learner Podcast. My name is Makoto and I’m also the author of the book The Thoughtful Language Learner.

Are you a struggling language learner? Do you feel like you lack the confidence and skills to learn a foreign language?

I believe that cultivating self-awareness and understanding who you are as a learner is the key to success.

Through this podcast, I’m bringing you the contents of my book. Each episode will cover a new chapter. Sort of a like an audiobook. And what’s cool is that I’m bringing you each chapter through some text-to-speech technology. I hope you like it.

Since the goal of your podcast is to get people to know about your book, you probably want to mention that somewhere in your intro or outro. The outro might also be a good place to have a call-to-action or a lead magnet for people to sign up for your email list. Here is my outro example:

I hope you enjoyed this chapter of my book. If you found it helpful, send me a message and let me know.

Also I have a free PDF that introduces some of the assessment tools mentioned in my book. If you are interested, just go to rebrand.ly/freepdf

Thanks for listening.

Editing Your Episode Details

You’re almost ready to publish! After you click “Save episode”, you will want to fill out details about the episode. Give it an episode name and description. Again, use the episode description to be a place where listeners can learn more about you or about your book.

Once everything looks good, click “Publish this episode”.

Congratulations! You’ve just created a new podcast and put out your first episode.

The episode will be immediately available to listen to (and over the next day or two will become available on the other networks such as iTunes, Google, etc.).

Improving the Audio

Although this is not a necessary step, there are a few simple things that you can do to improve the quality and production value of your podcast.

You can use any audio editing software you like, but I’m using a free software called Audacity.

If you listen to podcasts, you probably notice that many intros include some sort of background music. There are some places such as Youtube’s Audio Library that provide royalty free music that you can use for projects. (Note that some of them are free to use but require attribution.)

Find some music you like and download it.

Using Anchor to record your intro and outro is okay, but you can use Audacity to also improve the audio quality.

Finally, I noticed that the audio file created by Amazon Polly was a little too quiet. I used the “Amplify” effect in Audacity and increased the amplification by 3 dB.

Conclusion

I hope you found this tutorial helpful. I know that utilizing text-to-speech may not be for everyone. I personally find Amazon Polly’s speech quality acceptable, but some may disagree.

As a self-published author, this was something new I wanted to experiment with. I’ll honestly be happy if the podcast leads to a few more people finding out about my book.

Have you thought of turning your book into a podcast? What do you think about using speech-to-text? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation.

Makoto Tokudome is a husband and father of two. He is a language teacher and language coach who loves to help learners get motivated and gain confidence. With an engineering background, he is constantly looking for new and innovative ways to improve learning.

Do you want to successfully self-publish in ebook, print, and audiobook format?

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