Featherstone 
How authors can repurpose book content for social media … efficiently
One thing non-fiction authors have at our disposal is pages and pages of great content. So, how can we repurpose all those great quotes and useful information to aid in our book marketing?
Here’s how I’m going about it in the run-up to the book launch of Look – It’s Your Book! (Write, Publish & Promote Your Non-Fiction Book: A Self-Publishing Guide for Australian Writers / Anna Featherstone / Available Feb 22, 2022)
- I saved my master book manuscript word document into a new file and gave it the name: Social media posts.
- I changed the colour of the font so I wouldn’t accidentally think it was the master file (it would be horrible to make a mistake at this late stage in the publishing game which could introduce errors to the final print file for the book).
- Page by page I looked for any pithy quotes (there were a bounty to choose from thanks to all the all the Australian authors, indie publishers and publishing insiders I’d interviewed!) and deleted all the other text around them. The deleted text was more about the nitty gritty of how to write, publish and market a book, whereas what I was looking for were the quotes that ‘popped’. By cutting away the text I didn’t want to use, it saved me retyping, copying and pasting. On the first run, it took the manuscript from about 105k words down to 12k.
- I wanted to set up about 45 initial social media posts, given it’s much easier to plan and do it in bulk like this, rather than to try and come up with one post each day.
- My fabulous book cover designer Tess McCabe had already set up a nice social media template for me in Canva, so I just opened the file and began copy and pasting in the 45 Instagram quotes I wanted to start with.
- As I did this, I changed the font to red in the Social media posts file so I could see which quotes I had used, and which ones I could come back to and use in the future.
- I discuss the use of social media scheduling tools such as Hootsuite, Sendible, Sprout and more in the book and they can be a huge time saver for authorpreneurs, but for now I’m happy to post as I go and to save on that extra expense. Part of the reason for my decision is that I’m taking a slow and steady, hands-on approach to the marketing of the book. I also don’t need to reach gazillions of people – just Australian writers who want to author a non-fiction book… but give me a week and who knows, maybe I’ll become a set and forget scheduler too! That’s the beauty of self-publishing, you get to make decisions and change direction when it suits you.
For non-fiction writers, our books can be a wonderful source of content for not just social media posts, but also articles, presentations, workbooks and workshops. Have a think about how you might repurpose your content, it really can give your book’s marketing on social media a boost.
And for fiction authors … you have so much you can use … photographs and maps of locales that inspired you, textures, patterns, fashions, key descriptions and quotes from the book. The key is to batch things up so as an author, you can make the most of your time and headspace.