Cross-Promotional Magic with Multi-Author Facebook Groups

While they can take considerable time to organize and administer, Facebook groups focus community and collective marketing power

At this year’s RWA annual conference, we had the opportunity to hear a panel discussion about the marketing strategies of six multi-author Facebook reader groups, including Fiction from the Heart, 4 Chicas Chat, Racy Reads Party Room, Bloom With Tall Poppy Writers, the League of Extraordinary Historical Romance Authors, and Kiss and Tell Book Club. Moderated by author Sonali Dev, who herself is active in Fiction from the Heart and Tall Poppy Writers, the discussion featured authors Priscilla Oliveras, Xio Axelrod, Joanna Shupe, and Tif Marcelo.

To set the stage: In the first half of 2019, Facebook responded to a user base decline by revamping its private and public group features, which still see active engagement. The groups allow focused discussion free of common newsfeed nuisances, such as overbearing ads, while moderators can control (among other things) the culture and the level of promotion allowed by group participants. (Side note: Facebook will soon be changing the naming conventions for its groups. The terms private and public will replace open and closed. The groups mentioned in this item are currently closed Facebook groups, but they will soon shift to private.)

Broadly, a multi-author group works like this: Writers with a degree of overlap in their writing (e.g., subgenre, tone, target readership) form a Facebook group together, invite dedicated readers to join the group, and take turns hosting the page. The host author starts discussion; posts memes, videos, and other engagement items; and shares giveaways, new releases, sales, or special promotions around their books. Authors may also occasionally guest host in other single- or multi-author groups.

Groups with more authors and readers have powerful marketing potential but require stringent planning and moderation. The largest group represented on the panel was Bloom With Tall Poppy Writers, a closed Facebook group with 45 author hosts and 8,500 readers. It is affiliated with the all-women author collective Tall Poppy Writers, a self-described marketing collective. The Facebook group is one of its promotional arms, with specific marketing goals and required duties for each Poppy. The group also runs a public Facebook page, the Tall Poppy Book Club, which is more of a hard promotional unit compared to the group, which is more geared toward reader engagement.

The Racy Reads Party Room was the only open (not requiring moderator approval) group represented on the panel, made up of around 7,000 readers and 30 authors hand-picked by founding members Kimberly Kincaid, Avery Flynn, and Robin Covington. It’s a celebration of erotic fiction, as its name suggests, with plenty of promotions and giveaways–because that’s what readers come for. “We cross-promo by giving each other shoutouts in social media [and] hosting release parties that include fellow Racies,” said Oliveras, one of the host authors (along with Axelrod). To manage the volume of contributors, two dedicated admins post every day to get the conversation going and recap the previous day’s news and posts with links and announcements.

Smaller and mid-sized groups can be more focused, discussion-based, and casual, but participants must evaluate time commitments. 4 Chicas Chat, led by four host authors and with 300 readers, focuses on Latinx contemporary fiction. They often refer to the space as the casa (house), “where the door is open and members are welcome,” said Oliveras, a founding member (with Alexis Daria, Sabrina Sol, and Mia Sosa). “The responsibility of representation is important to us, so we don’t shy away from sharing and discussing the topic, even in fun ways, like chatting about our fave rom-coms with diverse leads.” With fewer host authors in the group, finding a manageable posting schedule took some trial and error. At first, the weekly host author posted every day from Saturday through Sunday, but they have since dialed back to three days per week.

With 13 host authors and 2,700 readers, the League of Extraordinary Historical Romance Authors focuses on historical romance. The group’s authors write about a wide range of time periods and locations, to be fully representative of all history and historical romance—“not just straight white dukes,” added Shupe, a co-founder (with Sophie Jordan and Valerie Bowman). Fiction from the Heart is similar in size, with 12 authors and around 2,800 readers. While the group values having authors with a range of genres, locations, ages, and experience levels, it has a specific niche: “stories that straddle that line between women’s fiction and romance, focusing on family and sisterhood while also focusing on romance,” according Dev, who founded the group (with Oliveras, Jamie Beck and Liz Talley). More conversation-based than promotional, host authors rotate with one host per week, though the schedule is flexible to accommodate releases and news.

These Facebook groups can yield additional collaborations. 4 Chicas have written and been featured together in articles and interviews for publications including Entertainment Weekly and the Happy Ever After blog at USA Today. In June 2019, Fiction from the Heart released Once Upon a Wedding, a collaborative anthology that Oliveras says “beautifully depicts the diversity found within our author group.”

Bottom line: Authors banding together on Facebook can be a worthwhile strategy. Multi-author Facebook groups offer a great deal of marketing, reader engagement, and collaboration potential, depending on what the founders make of them. But they also require consistent scheduling, moderation, rules, and reader engagement. While larger collectives of authors have the potential for machine-like marketing power, they can quickly grow unwieldy, so dedicated moderators may be required to keep things on track.