Does Anyone Really Understand Social Media?!?

Now we're to the part of the venture where in the past all of my other projects have completely flown off the rails. Marketing. I am awful at marketing. I just always have been. When I created an iPhone app for a WWE Wrestler, when I self published a book, and when I owned two different breweries...the one common thread among all of them was the fact that I was awful at marketing.

To be fair to myself social media wasn't the animal that it is now back then. I would have been making so many TikToks back in the day when I owned my brewery if it was something that existed back then. I have zero interest in ever owning another brewery though. I love making beer. I love seeing people enjoying my beer. I absolutely hated all the the red tape, reports, paperwork, and general minutae that had to be done to be able to operate a brewery. Sooooooo many different reports and things to file. So many.

My results on social media over the years have been mixed to say the least. I don't have the physical or emotional energy to be incredibly active on more than one or two platforms. I've tried. I seriously don't know how the people who are active on all platforms manage to do so. It's exhausting.

I've got like thirty-thousand followers on Threads. Sounds like a lot until you realize that the majority of them are bots. I'm not exaggerating when I say that at least 90% of my followers on Threads are probably bots. It's insane. I tried making an alt account called joebrewingbooks, but it doesn't even work. I created a new email address for it, I created a new Threads account, and I associated the account in my account manager. The feed won't load, my notifications won't load, and I can't even edit my profile.

It's taken four long ass paragraphs, sorry, but now I'm going to talk about what I really want to focus on. I wrote a book. I am going to be selling a book. So it makes sense that the people I will want to see about my book are people that read books. The marketing geniuses would say that those people are my "target audience." So...I'm trying to build up a presence in the book space.

There's 4 things that I'm going to focus on:

• Fable: I'm still super new to Fable and figuring it out, but it's a social media platform that is geared specifically towards books. It's a place for people to talk about what they're reading, leave reviews, and apparently post pictures of their cats. There are soooooo many pictures of cats. There's an app. You scroll through a feed like any other social media platform, but it's geared specifically towards readers. I've already had one person join my Newsletter from Fable. Hi RA1PsychicWitch!!! I'm planning on being incredibly active on this platform. Hopefully I can grow a lot there over the next year.

• Goodreads: This is a old reliable staple in the book review community. I've never exactly been active on it, but I have friends on there that I'd completely forgotten about. I can even set up my blog posts here to post there over RSS Feed. So of course I did that, because the more eyes I can get on these posts the better. I'm just going to keep posting reviews there and see what happens.

• Bookstagram and Booktok: I lump these both in together, because I'm basically going to be posting the same content on both. I am transitioning all of my Instagram and TikTok content away from being gaming content and towards being book content. People who read books are going to be the people that buy my book, and I want as many of them to know who I am by the time that my book is published. Yay!

So that's it. There's still not much to update on. I'm hoping that I'll be able to meet with my editor next week. I'm still working on lining up Letters to Tom. I'm hoping to have the first one of those to go out in the next two weeks. I'm still emailing breweries about doing collabs. I think I may have the first one lined up. They at least definitely seem to be interested. We just need to plan when it's going to happen.

Thanks for reading!!!