God, I wish there was—I know enough computer people who could work it out for me.

Instead, you have to test and experiment and test again until you find out what works for you. And that testing is vital because what works for one writer most definitely doesn’t work for another writer. For example, I know authors on TikTok who are averaging huge amounts of views for their page flips or their vids where they stand there and be beautiful at the camera while quotes or blurbs from their books appear.

Neither of those work for me (believe me, I tried the page flips, and as for the “be beautiful at the camera” TikToks there isn’t a filter developed that will make me that captivating). As for other forms of social media FB ads don’t seem to work for me (although I’m taking Mark Dawson’s Facebook Ads expedition this week to see if I can figure out what I’m doing wrong), and Amazon ads do work … kinda. But I have to stay on top of them and ruthlessly prune any that are costing me money without garnering me sales or read-through. I crosspost from TikTok to Instagram which is getting some traction (I need to study hashtags and figure out which ones work the best), and Tumblr is fun but doesn’t do much except for allow me to post pretty pictures and snarky commentary.

Much as I hate to say this, I suspect I’d be a lot more successful with social media promotion if I was thirty years younger and a hundred and eighty pounds thinner or so. Yes, I know there are older authors and bigger authors who are mega-successful, but they either write in genres that I don’t do or they have had to work twice as hard to garner their success.

But I am who I am, I write what I write, and I need to make that work one way or the other. I just have to home in on what that magic formula is.