Paying for Exposure on Social Media: What Not to Do

Today’s guest post is by author and academic Kirsten Bell.

There’s an old saying that goes “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Unfortunately, I am living testament to the fact that sometimes you have to learn a lesson more than once for it to really sink in—at least when it comes to paying for book publicity.

My initial misadventures, which I have written about previously, were at the hands of a dodgy book PR firm. In this article I’ll focus on my experience with social media marketing in the hope that this might prove instructive to others.

Now, before we proceed, it’s probably important to note that I engage with social media reluctantly and with deep ambivalence. My sole social media account when I published my nonfiction book Silent But Deadly was LinkedIn, and my strategy for dealing with it was the same I would use to retrieve an object from a burning building: get in, do what you have to, and get straight back out. Every minute you linger, you risk getting sucked into the inferno. (I’m not gonna lie, this is still my strategy.)

While I firmly believe this is a good strategy for a healthy life, it’s a spectacularly bad one if you’re trying to build an audience. I mean, it’s not like I don’t understand how LinkedIn works—after a few months of using it I figured I’d cracked the code. But I just couldn’t get over the idea that social media is basically the digital version of those family friends who got into Amway back in the 1990s—the ones where your parents went over for dinner and returned home with four bottles of overpriced washing-up detergent they felt obligated to purchase during dessert.

Still, about a year after the publication of the book, I figured it was time to experiment with other platforms, although none were particularly appealing. Instagram appeared to involve the lowest level of commitment, so I joined and started following various authors and bookstagrammers to get a feel for the kind of stuff they posted. However, it quickly became apparent that building a following on Instagram required a volume of work that I was disinclined to undertake. Bookstagrammers, on the other hand, seemed to provide a way to potentially outsource this labour to someone else. (If you’ve read my first post, this is presumably the point where you will be banging your head against the table and saying, “Does this woman never learn?”)

Curious about how one comes to the attention of influential bookstagrammers, I reached out to a couple whose feeds I liked, asking if they might be interested in a free copy of my book. Crickets. I then moved on to one who seemed very successful in the highlighter genre. For those unfamiliar with this genre, it’s popular in nonfiction, and its core premise seems to be that if you highlight some text in a book and photograph it, it will suddenly become deeply profound. This particular highlighter had well over 100,000 followers and reasonable engagement—often up to 1,000 likes—and a smattering of comments (mostly things like “This book sounds amazing!!!”). Plus, he had “DM me for book promotion” in his profile, so I figured he’d be open to reviewing the book.

I was aware that Instagrammers are supposed to disclose sponsored content, but figured it was obvious from his profile that he was being paid to promote at least some of the books he featured. Plus, this seemed commonplace amongst Instagrammers, where practices around sponsored content vary wildly.

He responded very quickly and gave me a range of options at different price points. As I no longer have an Instagram account (we’ll get to that), I can’t recall exactly what the prices were, but the package I chose was the cheapest option and cost £73 ($98 US dollars). This consisted of a single Instagram post with an accompanying textual review. Additionally, he informed me, part of the service was an Amazon review. Given that Amazon is clear that paying for reviews is a violation of its terms of service, I queried him on this. He assured me that this was completely legit because his service covered the purchase of a copy of the book from Amazon so it would be a verified, authentic review.

I have to confess that I did entertain the idea for all of ten minutes. I have very few reviews of my book (including a couple of malicious UK ones of my “novel” from my former dental clinic, but that’s another story), but quickly dismissed it as unethical. I told him that I didn’t want an Amazon review, although I was willing to pay the same price regardless for the Instagram post, given that it was his base rate. He was clearly surprised, and I think slightly bemused, by this decision, but made it clear that I was the boss.

With the arrangement finalised I made the payment, which is when I realised he was based in India. Although India has a strong bibliophile culture and a number of high-profile bookstagrammers, it felt like his account seemed designed to actively disguise his location, which struck me as slightly disingenuous. He then sent me a screenshot of the book purchase, which I hadn’t requested and am not convinced was real (to this day, I’ve never had a single sale from Amazon India) and asked for a PDF of the book.

Given that he’d already ostensibly purchased a copy, I didn’t understand the need for the PDF. In academia, there’s a thriving black market in PDFs due to the extortionate price of academic books and journals, and I was already paranoid about the book ending up in a shadow digital library, although I obliged him in the end. He then told me that a member of his team would read the book and the review would be ready in a month. Now it was my turn to be disconcerted. He had a team?!?

He messaged me a few weeks later to tell me that his team member had liked the book and told me that he was working on the review, which would be posted by the end of the weekend. I wasn’t sure how he’d be able to write an “authentic” review without having read the book himself, but assumed his colleague had made detailed notes for him to use. (This was pre-AI days; I assume the reviews on his account are now primarily AI-generated because that’s how they read.)

Now, I’m not sure if he thought that a book about the anthropology of everyday behaviour was a self-help book—although why anyone would title such a book Silent But Deadly is beyond me, unless it was written by a ninja. It’s also possible that self-help reviews were all he knew how to write. In any case, the resultant review was for a book bearing zero resemblance to the one I’d actually written. I mean, it was so painfully earnest that I found it funny—like someone trying to distill actual life lessons from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

I sent a link to my family, who I thought would get a laugh out of how bad it was. However, my brother, who is far more savvy about social media than me, pointed out that some of the bookstagrammer’s followers appeared to be fake. Once I started actually looking at his followers—something I’d obviously not bothered to do—I saw what he meant. Some had what looked to be stock photos in their profiles, and were signed up exclusively to his account. Closer inspection revealed that his followers seemed to consist primarily of three discrete categories: (1) fake profiles, (2) authors who’d employed his services, and (3) other bookstagrammers, which seemed to constitute the bulk of his following.

Naturally, the review did not sell a single book. Still, my expectations had been low, so I chalked it up to a failed experiment and decided to move on. But then, a day later, the messages started.

“I can guarantee you 50 paid Amazon reviews.”

“Your book sounds great—please DM me to discuss publicity.”

“Your book sounds wonderful—let’s chat!”

“I loved your book. Please DM me.”

Based on the sheer volume of messages I received, I can only conclude that the review had actually been an extremely successful marketing exercise, just not the one I thought I was participating in. You see, I thought I was paying to market my book, but what I was actually paying to market was myself—as a complete numpty willing throw money at dodgy bookstagrammers for marketing. In essence, as soon as the review went up, I had the metaphoric equivalent of “sucker” publicly plastered across my forehead.

Two weeks later, realising that as long as the review was posted, I was going to continue to be spammed with unsolicited marketing requests, I contacted the original bookstagrammer and begged him to take down the review. Again, he was clearly bemused, because this meant that I’d paid him almost hundred US dollars for precisely nothing. However, he again declared that I was the boss and removed the review. Although the flood of unsolicited offers to market my book thankfully stopped, not long after this experience I abandoned Instagram entirely. This was a game I decided I didn’t want to play.

If you’ve read my original post, it’s probably obvious that I repeated all the same mistakes I’d made the first time around: failing to do proper due diligence, ignoring warning signs, trying to outsource thinking about marketing to someone else, and praying that somehow the marketing I was paying for would work when all evidence pointed to precisely the opposite. But rather than dwell on those lessons, what I want to focus on here is what this encounter taught me about the nature of social media.

1. Although we’ve been trained to see follower counts as meaningful, they are a very poor metric of actual influence.

Perhaps they were more transparently useful indicators before the age of professional influencers, but there are websites aplenty where you can purchase social media followers—“No bots, no fake followers,” they promise. Sociologically speaking, this is a good example of Goodhart’s Law in action: “When measures become targets, they cease to be good measures.” In other words, once it was clear that follower counts mattered financially, everyone started to game them.

It’s worth noting that my own followers substantially increased as a result of the sponsored post. If such numbers were all that mattered, I could presumably consider this a win, because my new followers diligently liked everything I posted. But these were not the sort of people who would ever buy my book; instead, these were the sort of people who had a bridge to sell me in Brooklyn.

Genuine engagement clearly matters more than followers. If you have 100,000 followers and regularly have 1,000 people liking your posts, that is precisely 1% of your official audience (and a lone comment is precisely 0.001%)—something that only dawned on me later. You also have to beware of what’s been crudely, albeit accurately, called the social media circle jerk, where everyone likes your posts purely so you’ll like theirs in return—that’s not exactly meaningful engagement either. Ultimately, size matters much less than we think, and I suspect that 10 genuine connections will serve you far better than 1,000 superficial ones.

2. You have to consider the nature of the influence being wielded on social media.

The bookstagrammer I approached was arguably a genuine influencer, but of wannabe bookstagrammers rather than book readers, which are two entirely different things. In fact, if you look at the bookstagram hashtag today, it seems to consist primarily of bookstagrammers posting on how to be a successful bookstagrammer.

I’d hazard a guess that the audience of bookstagrammers at this point is primarily other bookstagrammers—and probably has been for a while. As Lit Nerds pointed out in a 2019 article:

There are some people truly in it solely for the love of books and the community. But those are few and far between. Even if you start a bookstagram account with that goal, sooner or later you’ll probably get swept up in the rep searches and the book blogging and the follower envy. You’ll want to be able to compete with the influencers, you’ll want to get the free stuff.

This is probably an inevitable feature of the contemporary social media ecosystem. As soon as someone has success, others flock to follow suit. The end result is that a good proportion of any successful influencer’s followers are likely to be other influencers emulating their content, to the point where it frequently becomes impossible to tell them apart—like all the Kim Kardashian clones on Instagram circa 2018. Let’s not forget that when I joined Instagram, I did the same thing myself—I followed a bunch of authors and bookstagrammers not because I was interested in their content but to see what worked.

3. It’s easy to forget that writers and social media influencers are in fundamentally the same business, although we like to imagine otherwise.

Although the former treats social media primarily as a gateway to their content, they are both content creators. As the Ad Contrarian has observed of content, it’s both a “Shakespeare sonnet and a picture of my cat’s ass.” Perhaps most importantly, the writer and catstagrammer are confronted with the exact same problem, namely, what the technology commentator Clay Shirky has described as “loss through abundance.” Standing out in an oversaturated marketplace is hard work, whether you’re in the business of selling books or social media content.

For this reason, if you’re not considered in your approach to social media, you potentially add to your problems rather than reducing them, because the medium you’re using to generate attention to your “real” content requires you to generate attention to it first. In this environment, it’s all too easy to end up like the old lady who swallowed the fly. All she really cared about was the fly, but she ended up swallowing a spider, a bird, a cat, a dog, and a horse in a bid to get rid of it.

If you’re not careful, you’ll end up spending a huge amount of time building an audience across multiple platforms without any demonstrable impact on your book sales. Even trade publishers have cottoned onto the fact that a large social media following doesn’t automatically translate into sales. (Do read Jane’s rejoinder to this article either way.) This is why so many experts advise you to be selective in the social media you engage with and to focus on those mediums that enable you to produce complementary content you enjoy.

As for paying for social media marketing, I suspect I would have been better off just paying directly for book ads on Instagram, which would probably have done a far more reliable job of targeting the people I actually wanted to reach.

The truth is that marketing books is hard and selling them is even harder. Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet, and anyone who tells you different is definitely selling something. Of course, sometimes the person whispering this seductively in your ear is, in fact, you. In that case, I would advise you to follow my hard-won advice and tell yourself firmly to shut your mouth. Because you know what they say about open mouths—they catch flies.

Note from Jane: In my reporting on the publishing industry, I’ve discovered that traditional publishers, especially the Big Five, have had some success in partnering with social media influencers to get exposure for their books. Sometimes these partnerships are organic (unpaid) and other times they are sponsored (paid). But either way this requires careful research and vetting, and I find many authors aren’t skilled at this (nor are they skilled at pitching influencers and knowing what they respond to).

Bigger is not necessarily better if you want influencers to talk about your books. At last year’s US Book Show, Charlotte Bryla, director of advertising and social commerce at Hachette, said, “Some of the creators that see the largest conversion rate [more sales] have less than 50,000 followers.” Their passion and community engagement is what drives better conversion. (See my full article for paid subscribers to my newsletter.) Also, some influencers on TikTok work as affiliates and earn money off of every book sale. Publishers may send out thousands of samples to their favorite creators on TikTok, who then create shoppable content and earn off book sales, not sponsorships.

How do publishers research the right creators to partner with? When it comes to smaller creators, Bryla said most of their success is based on self-selection: Smaller creators will reach out to the publisher with a request for a free copy. Only on occasion does Hachette reach out first to people who have engaged followings. TikTok creates tools for communication on both sides: They help creators find books that fit their audience and give them tools to communicate with sellers and they have tools for publishers or sellers to invite creators to sell products. Bryla said these tools have helped Hachette because they’re so scalable—it’s not easy to reach out to thousands and thousands of people directly unless the platform is offering the tools to do so.

For authors who think an influencer strategy is the way to go, if you don’t have previous experience with influencers and/or social media, I’d strongly consider hiring a marketer or publicist with experience to assist you. Later on, once you understand the ropes or build relationships, maybe you can go it alone.

Kirsten Bell

Kirsten Bell is an Australian anthropologist living in London. The director of the publishing experiment Caw Press, its first book, Silent but Deadly was released in 2022 and its follow-up, The Baggage We Carry, will be out in November. You can find her on Substack, where she writes the free Silent but Deadly newsletter, and her Facebook author page.