I´ve always wanted to know where to promote my novel, but nowadays I only use this forum :´)
I prefer Instagram to Facebook because people now have such a short attention span. Instagram is a quick image and I hope to catch them within the timeframe it takes them to swipe through something. I look at Facebook and all I see is one big mess. Drives me nuts. I rarely post there now.
I had a twitter account when it first started, but I never quite understood why this was recommended for me. It felt like was filled with nonesense.
I had a Tumblr account as well, but it's too disorganized as a platform. I canceled my account.
Basically, when it comes to social media, we're in this constant battle with algorithm. It's hard to get out of the fog with that fighting against you.
I think is harder for novel writers to get audience from some of these social media as most of them rely on visuals. Though I think posting pictures with small parts of the novel and a background that makes sense for it can work.
Perhaps even a podcast.
I tend to forget about it.
Never been in tumblr, but is true that (at least a few years ago) I knew a lot of people that had one and frequented the site.
Yeah, that might work :´)
I think another problem of mine is that I´m too used to the Spanish community. I mean, I´m used to write in Spanish and in wattpad. And the Spanish community has like quite a lot of facebook groups to promote stories, therefore it´s kinda easy to be noticed by people. But then I came here, there´s no groups anywhere and I´m like, where did I get into 
For now, I´l try to interact more over here and maybe draw something
podcast is a great idea for novelists except how would someone even find you? What would you talk about, would it just be reading your novel aloud? Cause some of us authors are too shy to do that. Especially if we write romance.
Entiendo, hahaha.
Me he desconectado de facebook bastante (incluso del de uso personal), pero creo que los grupos están bien.
Quizá haya alguno en inglés también, recuerdo que estaba en uno de arte hace tiempo.
Yo había encontrado un grupo de Tapas hace tiempo, pero me ignoran más que mis vecinos cada vez que promociono. Real que el foro está mejor, y eso que tampoco se consigue demasiado
Creo que, en general, la gente de la comunidad inglesa no tiende a promocionar del mismo modo que la comunidad hispana. Porque también probé a meterme en la comunidad inglesa de wattpad y me pasó algo similar. Está el lugar desierto
Yeah, its really hard and if you have any type of life at all. Which most of us do. It's impossible to be actively engaging on all these sites daily just to stay relevant. You almost have to decide do I want to spend time writing or drawing or marketing the work cause no one will ever see it if I don't.
It's become impossible you no longer need to be an ant carrying ten times your weight. You are expected to be a god lifting up the entire world on your shoulders. To make any headway basically become your own independent self publisher. Which like when you think back 15years ago asking anyway to do the job of 50 people. You know to market, write, direct, edit, cover, hand hold, coddle, promote, hype, draw, tagline, blurb, pay thousands of dollars if you can't do all of everything things they had teams of people doing before. If someone had said to an author they were expected to do all of that just to get like 30 views. They would have been like F no. Yet, that is what we are expected to do today. Gone are the days when you could just plop a book on nanowrimo and have people go, hey an ebook! There are not tons of those out lets read that I can give it a shot I got nothing else I am interested in.
Nope, now we are in a content world that is so filled up that somehow the talent-less and talented have mixed and we have all become trash under the general populations feet. Them staring down at us like oh well one was garbage so it all is.
We have become like those flyers people hand out and say take one. So they do, and you are happy that someone took one. But then walking home you find your path littered with your hard work and determination and you feel lifeless and devoid as you stare at what you had hoped one human being could just care about for one second. Because it was your blood, your tears, and your soul. Your very effort to survive. But they don't and they didn't.
It's morbid and tiring, and we all deserve better. But we will never ever get better. Because thousands of people said this is what our worth is.
Yeah.
There are a lot of content creators nowadays and social media wants to capitalize on it as much as possible to the point where doing this alone isn't as sustainable as it was before; not mentioning how people wrongly perceive us as lazy/weridos/worthless because of what we want to do.
The university I graduated from had pretty much this "entrepreneur" idea thrown in all of its careers, and not only it looks hard, but even dehumanizing.
I try to be optimistic whenever possible, but I can't ignore that making a living (or at least get the attention we'd like to have) from our works is impossible without making decisions/actions that are pretty much impossible without enough money/resources/outsourcing, and even without following certain trends on the right times.
Best thing I can get out of this is that we need as many ways to get the resources we need as possible without doing something we hate, have people to help us deal with some of our problems (even if they are not related to our works, some personal problems made me insecure of making my comic and more years ago) and tune down our expectations and goals in regards of how much time we need to get to a milestone, while being realistic and not pessimistic.
I first wanted to make my comic 3 years long and then I realized it needed more time for it to reach more people, and for me to get it done in good form without overwhelming myself or hurting my lifestyle.
It really depends on the context we each live in to get through it and make something that at least pays back the effort. Some have it harder than others that already have it difficult.
But ultimately, aim for our well-being and health if possible.
I promo everywhere with one post a day at least, and its usually the same across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I also I stream twice a week on Twitch. Every other week one of my streams is a discussion on my ongoing story as well as @HippieGhost's content. I even promo on Tapas with a comic I started for fun xD I think its working cause I haven't had a day without views so far this month.
i had to make one of these for all my social links https://linktr.ee/HopefulAttempt
Yeah my goals and expectations were that I would put out a new novel every three months. But It took me 6 months for my first one. And almost 2years to be done my second one.
The sad thing is that being an artist was already a very hard career choice, even before all of this. It was a real struggle. But, now... it actually managed to get worst.
I don't think there's one platform better than another, you end up lost in the sea of amateur, hobbyist and professionals. Like we say here "C'est toute mix-mélanger!". 
Personally, the best social platform, is the face to face one. I've been a vendor at conventions, festivals, expos for 15 years. It's my golden ticket. The human interaction, even if it's more localized and the numbers are smaller. They last a much longer time.
I don't have the numbers online, I have them out there.
I was begged for years to open an Etsy shop to sell my stuff. I took the time to finally to get it done and it took forever! I spent so much of my time getting it ready. I promoted it online like crazy, even paid for digital advertising. In 3 years, I had 0 sales.
Same product, 1 day festival outdoors (It was a VERY VERY cold day) .... I almost sold out of everything. My comic does very well outside the web, but it just gets lost on social media.
Keep in mind, that I'm well aware of human interactions with COVID, I'm booked for 2 conventions in 2021, and they'll probably get cancelled again.
I couldn't even begin to start ranking them by effectiveness tbh. It all feels so varied and kinda random xD
For my first comic I stuck to Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, with mirrored content across the 3.
From those, my audience on instagram grew the most, but I'm not sure how many of those people actually converted into comic readers. A big downside of that platform is the inability to include clickable links in the caption. It also had my best engagement though so that's something!
Twitter had my 2nd largest audience, but also the lowest post engagement so I'm similarly not sure how much mileage came from it. One nice thing is those accounts that auto-retweet certain tags which is useful for at least some additional reach (although how many people actually look at those accounts is another factor xD) I feel like I ultimately don't use Twitter often enough for it to be truly lucrative for me though.
Facebook was a mixed bag. The majority of my audience there is, understandable, folks who i know irl and who wound up liking my art page. My posts there get low engagement so I thought it wasn't very effective, but I found out after the fact that a lot of my friends/acquaintances actually were checking out my comic from promotions there, they just weren't liking the posts nor had Tapas accounts 
but I'd run into people at parties and stuff and they would come up to me and talk about how much they liked my comic and I would just be like "oh, you've read it? nice!", knowing that facebook is the only place they could have seen it.
Overall while I don't mind any of these platforms and will continue to use them in the future, I've kind of given up trying to really pursue "growth" on them. Twitter was perhaps the worst offender, but the type and frequency of content you have to make on standard social media like those is just... not my favorite to make and I can't get enthusiastic about writing several posts a week.
Two new platforms that I'm hoping to incorporate into my new series' promotion are Twitch and Youtube. I've been streaming on twitch for about 7 months now and have been having a great time there! It's so so much more fun for me to do live content like that and interact with people in real time rather than writing insta/twitter/fb posts lol. The visibility for artists on that platform is pretty poor, tbh, but I've still made some strong connections and have managed to get people hyped about my new comic before it even launches, just by working on it on stream for several months ahead of time.
Youtube I haven't technically started yet (I have a few old gaming videos on my channel, then a trailer for my first comic from 2 years ago, then a few speedpaints) but I'm gearing up to launch my first comic tips & tricks style video sometime in the next week or two. That's been fun to work on too, and I really see the potential in Youtube helping to get eyes on your work if you approach the content that you make in a smart and strategic way.
So I guess for this new comic, it will be the wave of "video advertising" for me. Can't say which platform among the 5 (fb/twitter/insta included) will do the best this time around, but I'm at least having a lot more fun streaming and making videos than static posts~
I do promotion on Discord with various groups I'm a part of, which sorta counts I guess, but mainly it's all Twitter. And Twitter is famously terrible with conversion rates, so it's basically a losing battle with your time.
I try not to pay money on advertising since I'm not making any real money off my stories in the first place, but it's always tempting.
Teach us your ways! Facebook is so dead for me that I quit my account like 8 years back. But even still, if there were more reading blogs nowadays, like there used to be, back when blogging was more vogue, that would really help creators out a ton.
But other than that, I've been honestly thinking about getting back into not only reading, but sharing what I'm reading with other people on my timeline, to try and attract readers into my twitter space who like my taste. Like I forget sometimes that one of the skills of being a creative is just straight up having good taste. Right now, most of my twitter space is other creatives, who are awesome, and when I advertise there, I do get views from it. But, they're also also very busy, and can't read as much.
But obviously that all takes a lot of time.
And one last thing--is that Spotify on that list?
