Business Post: The Promotion Squeeze (Patreon)

As I'm writing this, the Fool's Play Kickstarter is going on. We are funding a lot slower than usual for it, especially compared to the Climbing the Ranks Kickstarter that we ran a few months ago. For a book one in a new series, the slow funding is a pain; though we expect we'll still manage to hit our goal (and possibly not much more).

Now, there's a lot of reasons this might be happening:

- lack of demand for LitRPG in Kickstarter

- timing with back to school issues causing slowdowns

- increased number of Kickstarters during this period

- slowdown in the overall economy and funding crunches...

All quite possible reasons for this. But there's another one, and what I'd love to discuss here which is the promotion squeeze.

The Fall of Social Media

Many of you who read this blog regularly know I try to plan for the future. I also really dislike being reliant on any single method or form of business where I don't control. For this reason, we've got a bunch of social media promotion methods AND newsletters that we work with and launched the Shopify store ages ago.

Anyway....

Right now, social media - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc - are all in the 'squeeze' mode. This is probably partly due to the way the economy is crashing and their need to generate more revenue; but also it's just the process of enshiftification.

We all know what's happening with Twitter, though the squeeze in views if you aren't 'verified' is huge. The fact that they managed to fragment the audience that was there is even worst, because now there's a half-dozen other locations.

Then, we have Facebook. Advertisements no longer work ANYWHERE as well as it used to. We used to do things with specialised audiences and lookalikes. Now, we're looking at moving back broad again because the way the ads don't show is painful.

Views on groups have crashed. Posts into the usual groups no longer get seen by thousands of people, even as the groups themselves increase in size.

TikTok, once the new champion of book selling, has dropped in effectiveness, even for the people who are 'on topic' for the audience. Some people are reporting it becoming a second job just to try to get a viral post.

And on and on.

Social media as a promotion tool has grown worse and worst.

So now what?

Half-Solutions

Sadly, I don't have any suggestions that will fix things in the short-term. The general drop in economic activity as people are stretched can't be fixed by an individual. The only thing you can do is reduce your expenses and try to live frugally for a bit while the world turns around.

For promotions, long-term you need to work on gaining control of the promotional methods yourself. That means newsletters mostly, increasing the value of your own website so readers will come back to it.

However, that's a long-term game and won't help you in the short-term.

You might have to bite the bullet and throw money at it.  Ads via FB to fans of your author page. Broad base your ads to allow FB to waste some money but also to work with their algorithim to make it generate funds.

Start building your new social media platforms on other locations like Blue Sky and Mastodon. It's not great in the long-term because they WILL get worse, but... it is what you have.

Work with other authors. If everyone's reach is truncated, working together, you might still be able to increase your overall views.

And, as writers, as always - work on your craft and put out good work.

If you've got thoughts on how else to increase promotional reach, I'm all ears.