Authors, if you haven’t already heard about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, let us be the first to share the news: According to The Globe and Mail, Musk has reached a deal with the social media giant on an accepted offer of US $44 billion.

This purchase will move Twitter from a publicly-traded company to privately owned, giving Musk more control over the rules and regulations of the company without having to answer to shareholders.

We’re not here to tell you what to think about this deal. Rather, we’re here to share how this might affect authors. 

As authors, you are also entrepreneurs.

As entrepreneurs, you utilize marketing strategies.

In your marketing strategies, you may use Twitter to sell your book.

While no one can predict with certainty the outcomes of the Musk-Twitter deal and what effect it may have on your marketing plan, one thing is for certain: you don’t own your Twitter account, you rent it. 

Your social media accounts (including Instagram, TikTok and Facebook) are like rented real estate on the Internet.

You rent a small corner of a much larger landscape. You may spend time building, designing, cleaning and decorating to make it inviting for guests and readers – but it’s still a rental.

If you are renting a property on Twitter today, we’ve learned that tomorrow, your house could be taken from you. Or – most relevantly – a behemoth corporation could move in next door, covering your space with debris, construction noise, or trampling your lawn.

Or, perhaps a bigger building takes over your view and reroutes traffic, making it harder to get to your house.

You see where we’re going with this metaphor, right? The reality is: when you don’t own your space, anyone at anytime can ink a deal that kicks you out of it. 

Now, that may never happen. Maybe this new Twitter deal will help our profiles. Maybe it will hinder them. But for now, we’re not making any big moves on or off social media because it remains one of the most effective tools for authors to increase visibility and publicity. (We do love our Instagram account!)

However, it’s our job to help authors stay current and accessible – no matter what platform you use.

So, how can you own your online space & connect with readers? Keep it simple: EMAIL

HERE ARE 3 REASONS EMAILING SHOULD BE PART OF YOUR “OWN YOUR CONTENT” STRATEGY:

  1. Daily Views: The majority of people check their email daily. In most cases, when you send it, they see it.
  2. One Place: Most people have one primary email address (as opposed to the multitude of social media accounts they scroll each day). If you post to Twitter or Instagram, your viewer can’t automatically have your post forwarded to their preferred social channel (although, that seems like a great idea…trademark time?) So, if they’re not scrolling the channel you post to, they might miss it. Emailing your readers gets your message to the one place we know they check.
  3. Timing: You control when an email arrives. When you send your email, it shows up almost immediately. So if you want that email to arrive at 10am, it’ll arrive by…well, 10am. When you post to social media, the post shows up in your feed right away, but thanks to changing algorithms, your intended reader may not even see it in their feed until much later, if at all.

As if writing a book isn’t enough of an uphill climb, publishing and marketing your work is an additional summit that all authors are responsible for.

So, whatever team you build or publishing company you work with–our advice is to take a page from Elon’s book and own as much of your content and connection to your readers as possible.

See you online and in the inbox,

TSPA