4 strategies to market your book without social media, with Astrid Bracke

I often get approached by people who are not keen on using social media to promote their book without it. While I have ideas of my own on ways you can do this, I thought I would approach Astrid Bracke, who has been successfully running her business off social, to share her thoughts on some things to consider before you decide to market your book without it.

Astrid isn’t an author, but the strategies she helps small businesses to implement are so clear and simple, and can also be directly applied to book marketing. If you’ve been considering finding ways to market your book without social media, this should be a great read for you!

This month marks one year since I’ve been off social media. I never enjoyed social media much, and being off it has been a huge relief. Before I left though, I tried out loads of things to make it work for me. In this post, I’ll share what made me decide to quit social media, and some strategies to help you deprioritize it too.

My main social media channel was always Instagram, but my experiences and how I felt will be recognizable to many of you on other channels like TikTok too. When I started my business, I didn’t even question whether I was going to market it through Instagram: it felt like a given to me.

I quickly realised that the more I posted, the more engagement I got. But it also quickly started to feel like too much. Two things bothered me about trying to market my business on Instagram: more than with other channels such as my newsletter, I felt out of control—as if I was playing a game without knowing the rules. The other thing that bothered me was the pressure to be ‘on’, especially how the app explicitly rewards you for giving it your time, energy and attention.

Over the years I tried to make Instagram work for me in lots of ways. I took courses teaching me what my posts and schedule should look like. I settled on dedicated theme days. I posted more. I posted less. I tried talking to stories more. I created a reel or two.

And all the while I knew I wasn’t enjoying it. Although I’ve met some lovely people through Instagram, I made very few sales through the channel. Creating content for Instagram felt like busywork, and there came a moment when I was done.

My time, energy and attention are my most precious resources, and I was no longer willing to give them to Instagram.

Talking to and working with other small business owners I knew that I wasn’t alone. When I joined a mastermind, many of our conversations followed a similar pattern. Someone would say that social media made them feel overwhelmed, icky, anxious, like a failure. “I’d love to spend less time on it!”, they’d say. “Or even get off it completely!”. The rest of us nodded in agreement. But we had started our businesses at a time when social media was the place to grow your business, so imagining how to go about it otherwise felt nearly impossible.

Since then, I’ve not only moved my own business off social media completely, but I’ve also helped others deprioritize social media or quit completely. If you, too, crave a different relationship with social media, or want to market away from it altogether, these are strategies to try

1/ How do you feel about social media?

This question is a good place to start because it helps you figure out what to do next. I hated the feeling of having to be always ‘on’, hated how fleeting the content was and really disliked reels and video. So when I started to look for other ways of marketing my business, I deliberately sought out ways to schedule content, to have content live longer (like on a blog and Pinterest), and to focus on writing, rather than video.

2/ What have you gained from social media?

Many of us don’t make the leap away from social media because we feel that it’s played an important or useful role in our marketing. Take a moment to really reflect on what you’ve gained, for instance sales, useful contacts, etc. Be really honest about this. Just satisfying your own sense of FOMO is not enough of a reason if you’re also feeling miserable on social media.

3/ What are your strengths?

I believe that we can market in a way that uses our strengths, rather than having to force ourselves to do something we don’t want to do. Make a list of your strengths: what are you good at, what do you enjoy? Do you enjoy video, but still want to spend less time on social media? Perhaps a YouTube-channel is a good idea for you. Do you want to dive deeper into writing? Focus on your newsletter, blog, guests posts and other ways of marketing by writing.

4/ Explore your options.

Once you’re not spending as much time and energy on social media, you can spend that time and energy in other places. Ask yourself: what is already a part of your marketing strategy that you can make work harder? I made my newsletter work harder, which for me means making signing up to it easier for people (with a pop-up and sign-up banners embedded in blogposts), and making it more attractive for people to sign up (being really clear about what they get and creating lead magnets). The next phase for me in this respect is continuing my newsletter on Substack.

A second thing I did was think about what I could add to my marketing strategy now that I was not spending my energy on social media. For me, that was Pinterest. I pin my blog posts to Pinterest (many of my blog posts are former newsletters), and I love being able to schedule pins months in advance.

Finally, if you’re not ready or willing to take the plunge away from social media completely, rethink how you use it. Perhaps you won’t be using it so much to “sell” but more as a shop window which you update occasionally with new projects that you’re working on.

If you’re ready to spend less time and energy marketing on social media, my free social media email series can be a great first step to take or go deeper and get my support and accountability in my new group programme Marketing without social media.

Finally, I’d love for you to know and remember that you don’t have to do the thing that everyone else seems to be doing. You can forge your own path, and no place or person that makes you miserable deserves your time, energy and attention.

Thank you Astrid!

Astrid Bracke is a tea drinking, book reading, plant collecting small business mentor with a PhD in English lit. She supports small business owners create the slow, gentle and profitable business they crave. Marketing off social media is a big part of that for her and a topic she’s passionate about. Find out more about Astrid on her website and subscribe to her Substack newsletter for more like this guest post.

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