Tick Tock TickTock

Everyone says....well done for writing a book, you must be raking it in now! The reality. I'm not. I've previously mentioned the small return on book sales...but....to get even a small return, you need to sell books. To date, I've sold around fifty copies. I'm pretty pleased with that, but the majority have gone to friends and colleagues.
So, what I have been doing to boost sales. Well, check out my blogs from earlier. I've tried articles in newspapers and magazines, local bookshops and social media.
It's the social media aspect that makes me write this post. Mainly TikTok.

Some idiotic part of me thought it might be a good idea to promote my book on TikTok. I signed up and watched lots of book-related posts, so that I became a BookToker. Then I started following so-called Book Marketeers. These are people who have been on TikTok a while and claim to be able to boost your followers in a month.

The challenge is to post a TikTok a day for one month—the criteria, different styles of posts, promoting myself as an author, not just the book.

I refused to do a face version, sticking to carousels and short videos.

All in all, it took me three to four weeks to schedule 31 TikTok posts.

So....how's it going?

I am now 10 days in and have amassed 22 followers.

There are a number of issues I have with this idea.

1) Views are scarce. Each video gets from 50 to 250 views. In order to boost your service, you need to pay a few pounds. I did this twice, and both posts got around 1500 views. So, the first problem is trying to trick the algorithm so people will see your video. That's not easy.

2) Followers and Direct Messages (DM's) So far, the only engagement I have had on any of my posts has been from people trying to sell me services. Not the sort of engagement I was looking for. I've also been contacted by fake authors wanting to share ideas. One of these was definitely fake; the User Name and User Id were both famous authors (spelt wrong) but strangely different authors. The second was a "New York Times" best-selling author. I love to think this was a genuine reach out from another author, but sadly, you must face the reality. Why would a well-known published author be on TikTok, following 13 people, one of whom was an unknown author from Leeds? Unlikely....right?

In conclusion, I have found it a waste of time. No views, No Engagement, No Followers, No Profile Views, No Book sales. Just wasted time and unwanted attention.

There are still twenty days to go. I remain yet to be convinced it was a worthwhile task.