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When it comes to standing out in the online space as an indie author, there are several things to consider. The first is that in the age of technology, viewer’s attention spans have drastically decreased. In Episode 225 of Speaking of Psychology, Gloria Mark, PhD, shared a study from 2004 that determined the average attention span to be around two and a half minutes. Just eight years later in 2012, the average attention span dropped to around 75 seconds. Today, it is even lower, averaging around 50 seconds or less. Online users today are constantly bombarded with ads, pop-ups, and have fallen victim to “shiny object syndrome.” In the time it’s taken you to read this paragraph, you’ve spent about 35 seconds of your possible attention span reserves. Are you still here?
If yes, then you already know that the second most important aspect of standing out in the online space is attention grabbing copy. This can come in the form of headers, video transitions, or captions. To bust through the noise of the ever-growing online space and attract readers to your platform (and ultimately make book sale), you need to find a way to grab their attention right off the bat, reel them in, and convince them that sticking around will benefit their life. Below are five quick fixes to improving your online presence as an author that you can begin implementing today.
Step 1: Choosing the Right Platform
Between the many different social media platforms out there, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with FOMO if you aren’t on every single one. You may join a new platform this week and by Monday, an even newer platform has popped up. But fear not: you don’t need to be on every single platform. In fact, it’s actually better if you aren’t.
Before diving in, let’s get one thing straight: as an author, you are a business, and you need to start acting like one. As a business, the purpose of your presence online is to sell your products—i.e. your books. This can be accomplished in a plethora of ways which we can get into another time, but the fact remains that if you treat your writing career as a hobby, it will only succeed so much. If you change your mindset and treat it like a business (or a job if you prefer that wording), you’re much more likely to put in the difficult work to make sure your books are being seen, shared, and sold.
Having said that, you do not need to appear on every social media platform to make that happen. While having a strong social presence can, in fact, create more brand awareness and increase your visibility to reach readers, being selective on the platforms you choose is much more beneficial. This comes down to three main reasons:
1. The more platforms you’re on, the more time you’ll be spending creating content, posting, responding to comments/DMs/Stories replies, and managing the accounts.
2. Creating multiple types of content can lead to burn-out, especially if you’re early on in the game of building your author presence online, and when your content is sloppy, it can lead to the impression that your books may also be sloppy.
3. Your ideal reader is not hanging out on all the platforms. They’ve probably found one or two that they really enjoy using, and they probably aren’t venturing out too much to find the next hottest app.
It’s best to choose two, three platforms max for best results on social media. This ensures that you aren’t having to creating new content for every platform (because each platform has its own unique purpose—more on that later), and you can focus more of your time and energy into building a loyal audience and increasing the sale of your books. Start by doing a bit of market research for your ideal reader to learn their habits. (Check out the blog, Discovering Your Ideal Reader: The Best Way to Maximize Marketing Efforts for Your Book, to learn more about how to determine who your ideal reader is.) Knowing who your ideal reader is, where they hang out online, and how best to communicate with them is the ultimate gamechanger when it comes to building your online presence.
Pro tip: even if you aren’t using all the platforms, it isn’t a bad idea to lock-in your account name just in case you may use it in the future. Nothing sucks more than realizing your audience is migrating from TikTok to Pinterest but the username you’ve used on your other platforms has already been taken.
Step 2: Content Pillars for Authors
If you’ve been following me on TikTok or Instagram for any length of time, you’ve already heard me saying you need define your content pillars because these are the three to five topics that will help you become recognizable to your audience. The number one question I hear authors ask is, “How am I supposed to make content if I don’t know what to talk about?” If this is you, chances are you don’t know what your content pillars are. Having these three to five topic focuses will help you capture your author brand and values while communicating them in a way that increases visibility, creates relatability with your audience, and drives traffic to your book sales.
There are five main categories that content pillars fall under:
Educational
Entertaining
Inspirational
Promotional
and Behind-the-Scenes
These categories are the angle in which your content will be conveyed and should not be vague. You want to get very granular with your content pillars because they are the connective bridge between you and your audience.
As a starting point, use these categories to begin fleshing out the details of your unique content pillars. Maybe you’re really good at worldbuilding, so an educational-focused content pillar could be on worldbuilding and the creation of magic systems for fantasy novels. Or maybe you’re a naturally funny person, so you convey all your content with comical undertones.
One of my content pillars is talking about marketing in the online space for indie authors while increasing visibility and driving book sales, and the angle of which I convey this information is through an educational lens. My personal knowledge combined with the statistical research I reference on my website, in my blogs, and in my posts makes my content a source of credible information.
Another one of my content pillars is my husband and our two dogs, Freya and Teddy, which has been conveyed with an angle of inspiration and/or behind-the-scenes snippets. It’s not uncommon for me to post on my Instagram Stories a short video of the dogs sunbathing in my office or share a snapshot of dinner with my husband while reflecting on a certain aspect of our relationship. Both examples help my audience connect with me because it removes the barriers of me simply being perceived as an educator and infuses a humanistic connection. You want the same thing with your audience.
It also is likely that your content pillars will evolve and change overtime, and that’s also okay. You are human, and humans are notorious for evolving. Your interests may change, your geographical location may change, and even the genre you write in may change. Mine did. I used to write inspirational fiction (Christian romance), and now I almost exclusively write historical fiction so it wouldn’t make sense for me to continue making content about faith-based topics because that no longer resonates with me.
You should also remain mindful of what is resonating with your audience, and what isn’t. I am an iced coffee girlie, and I love regular trips to the salon to get a new nail set, but sharing my favorite coffee order or showing off my nails did not resonate with my audience. But what did resonate with them was homecooked meals. Every Story I’ve shared about homemade meals or family recipes performed really well. My theory on this is because food is a connective element, and psychologically speaking, people want to feel like they can relate and connect to others (this is another reason why content pillars are so important). When I was posting my coffee order and red holiday days, it felt very-much like “The Danielle Show,” and my audience was tuning out. As soon as I changed up the angle, they listened, and—not only listened—but responded. They would send me DMs about cozy family memories revolving around celebratory dinners or expressing excitement for the changing of the season because their mom always made her special non-pecan pecan pie for Thanksgiving.
Your content pillars will be the bridge that connects you to your audience, harboring an environment for trust, understanding, and appreciation. And with having three to five content pillars fleshed out for your author brand, you’ll be able to consistently create content around these topic pieces without facing burnout or overwhelm.
Step 3: Curating a Cohesive Presence
Remember 2016 Instagram where everyone was using one filter on all their posts, and it gave the overall feed a yellow-ish glow? The reason why that singular filter was so sought after by creatives was because it created a very cohesive feed even if the pictures were entirely random. Slap one, overly saturated filter on it, and you were good to go. While editing styles have changed since then, the principal fact remains.
Visually appealing presences help distinguish a brand from someone else’s and help a brand stand out. When creating an online presence as an author, you want the same. There are an innumerable number of authors around the world, and as of 2021, there were roughly 50k authors in the USA alone. If you want to have a profitable writing career, you have to stand out from the crowd.
You can do this by using a consistent color palette and font styles across your platforms, choosing similar style images that visually capture the essence of your author brand, creating content through the lens of your content pillars, and using on-brand audios, emojis, or memes/gifs in your content. All this combined as known as your branding. These elements should be crafted through a well-researched understanding of your genre market, audience likes and dislikes, and your literary goals. (These are all things we create together in The Visibility Advantage coaching program. The program itself provides personalized strategies for building a strong author brand, creating impactful content, and mastering online marketing to increase visibility and increase book sales with a focus on leveraging the psychology of branding, audience engagement, and evergreen content.)
Echoing what I said before, your branding may evolve overtime as your interests, ambitions, and literary endeavors change or grow, but the consistency customized branding brings you will help slice through the noise of haphazard posting, random images, and varying fonts, colors, and styles. Having a consistent brand helps you appear more sophisticated, organized, and dedicated to your craft which psychologically translates that you are someone who is reliable and trustworthy. Both these factors significantly impact consumerism and the profitability of sales.
Step 4: Growing Organically with Hashtags & Trends
Growing organically as an indie author on social media requires more than just posting consistently—it’s about being intentional with your content strategy. Hashtags and trends can play a key role in expanding your reach, helping you connect with your ideal readers, and building a loyal following. Using hashtags strategically allows you to target specific communities and conversations, while leveraging trending content can make your posts more discoverable and relatable.
When it comes to hashtags, the goal is to use a mix of niche, genre-specific, and popular tags that reflect both your book and your target audience. For example, if you write fantasy novels, a combination of broad tags like #fantasybooks or #bookstagram with more specific tags like #indieauthorsofinstagram or #selfpublishedfantasyauthor can help you tap into both larger and more engaged, specific communities. Be sure to research the most active and relevant hashtags within your genre and experiment with different combinations to find what works best for your audience.
Trending content is another powerful tool for organic growth. Participating in TikTok or Instagram trends—whether it's using popular audio, recreating viral challenges, or joining conversations around trending topics—helps your content appear in feeds that are receiving higher engagement at that moment. The key is to tie these trends back to your author brand or books in a creative way. For example, if there’s a viral audio clip on TikTok, you could use it to showcase a dramatic scene from your novel or introduce your main character. Trends move fast, so being timely and adapting them to your content can increase visibility and help your posts go viral.
However, it’s important to remember that both hashtags and trends should serve your overall branding and messaging. Don’t just jump on a trend because it’s popular—make sure it resonates with your author brand and will connect with the readers you want to attract. By staying intentional, you’ll build an engaged, organic following that truly connects with your books and your unique voice.
Step 5: Analytics 101
As an indie author, creating engaging content is key to building a loyal readership, but understanding how well that content performs is equally important. Tracking the effectiveness of your content allows you to refine your strategies and ensure you're reaching the right audience. While analytics may seem overwhelming, focusing on a few key metrics—engagement rates, reach, and conversions—can provide powerful insights without the need for advanced tools or technical expertise.
Engagement rates measure how your audience interacts with your content, which includes likes, comments, shares, and saves on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. High engagement rates indicate that your audience finds your content valuable and relatable. To track this, most social media platforms offer built-in analytics tools (e.g., Instagram Insights or TikTok Analytics) where you can monitor how many people are engaging with your posts. If you notice a certain type of post gets more interaction, it’s a sign that your audience connects with that style, topic, or format. Use this data to adjust future content and lean into what works.
Reach refers to how many people have seen your content, regardless of whether they engaged with it. This is a critical metric because it helps you understand how wide your content's net is spreading. A higher reach means more potential readers are discovering your work. Social media platforms and website analytics tools (like Google Analytics) provide reach metrics that show how far your content travels. Pay attention to which posts or strategies expand your reach the most and aim to replicate their success. Posting at optimal times, using relevant hashtags, and collaborating with others in your niche can all help boost reach.
Conversions, or the actions your audience takes after engaging with your content, are the ultimate measure of your content's effectiveness. For indie authors, conversions could mean anything from growing your email list, getting book pre-orders, or increasing blog traffic. To track conversions, consider using tools like Google Analytics to see how users move from your social media posts to your website or book sales page. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok offer tracking links that can monitor clicks from your bio or stories. Watching these numbers helps you see what content not only resonates but also leads to real results, enabling you to fine-tune your approach and focus on what's driving the most value for your author brand.
To help you maintain consistency and amplify your online presence, grab my free Social Media Audit Workbook! This comprehensive resource is designed to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of your current online strategy, providing you with actionable steps to enhance your author brand. With targeted insights, you’ll be able to optimize your content, engage your audience more effectively, and elevate your visibility.
In the end...
Building a successful online presence as an indie author involves several key components that, when combined, create a powerful brand and marketing strategy. Choosing the right platform is essential, as it allows you to focus your efforts on engaging with readers where they’re most active. By narrowing your content down to three to five content pillars—such as updates on your writing, behind-the-scenes looks, or personal stories—you provide your audience with consistent and valuable content that reflects your author brand. Creating a cohesive presence across all platforms by maintaining a consistent aesthetic, voice, and message helps reinforce your identity and makes it easier for readers to connect with you.
Additionally, taking advantage of organic growth opportunities like hashtags and trends can significantly boost your visibility without the need for paid promotion. This strategy helps you tap into broader conversations while making it easier for new readers to discover your work. Finally, tracking the effectiveness of your content through analytics is crucial. By monitoring metrics like engagement rates, reach, and conversions, you can gain valuable insights into what works best, allowing you to adjust your strategy and improve your results over time. When combined, these practices set the foundation for long-term growth and success, helping indie authors like you not only reach more readers but also drive meaningful connections and book sales.
Best of luck!
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