Social media engagement - of interest to authors!

So, I have a number of social media platforms where I've built up a significant following over the past 14 years as an author. The question is: how useful are they for getting the word out?

Yesterday I spammed the cover reveal for my next book, Daughter of Crows, over all my platforms.

I know that they all bury any post with a link these days - they want you looking at Twitter/Facebook/Threads etc, not other people's shit. So I always add a "link in comments" bit and ... as promised ... put the link in comments.

It seems they've wised up to this though and bury such posts as well, with varying efficiency.

Here are the platforms I used, the number of hits on the cover reveal from them, and number of followers I have on each.

The lesson is simple enough and needs no further explanation from me:

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More detail on the Daughter of Crows cover!

Tom Roberts is adding incredible detail to the rough I showed you earlier this month!

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Three million in English!

I posted earlier this year that I was confident I'd passed the 3 million mark in global sales.

I made a call back to these posts:

Back in 2014 I posted about selling my first half million books. 

And at the start of 2016 I blogged to remark that I'd sold my first million.

& this graphic 

Now I can say that I don't need to make the numbers up with the sales from those countries where my works have appeared in 26 other languages.

I got figures from Voyager who publish me in the UK (also New Zealand and Australia). They sell a similar number of copies of my work to these locations as Ace do to America and Canada.

The total reported (since 2011) was 1,640,539 (and this is roughly half my total sales in English) ... which strikes me as a big number. I remember scoffing at the clause in my first contract that said my royalty rates would improve on any sales of the Prince of Thorns paperback exceeding 100,000. The notion that I would sell in excess of 100,000 copies of the trilogy in total across all formats seemed akin to my suddenly developing the power of flight.

Those sales break down across formats in the following way - though no doubt the manner in which they are increasing is diffent from that indicated by the underlying totals.

audiobooks:            246,000

ebooks:                   648,000

paperbacks:            635,000

hardcovers:            112,000

Anyway - thanks for sticking with me. And if I ever make it to 5 million, I'll let you know.

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The rough/sketch for the Daughter of Crows cover!

Although excellent in its own right, this is merely Tom Roberts' rough for the cover. The finished article will be along the same lines but different and considerably more detailed.

The book (starting a considerably darker trilogy than my previous one) is out in April

Pre-order for the win!

UK

US

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