Seth's Shelf

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Issue No. 3, 10/30/2026

"You cannot forget that you are one account posting one video in an endless feed of other videos, most of which are probably completely unrelated to yours."

My Content Gets Views, But Nobody Buys

Whenever I talk to authors about how to pitch their book and what to say on social media about it to get readers interested, I often get the same response from authors who have been making content about their book for a while. "My content gets views, but they don't show up to buy."

This is a common problem across social media, not only for authors, but the good news is that there's a a fix, and it’s simpler than you think.

Find Your Angle

There's an order of operations to figuring out how to sell your book specifically on social media. The first step is you need to find your angle.

In my last newsletter I talked about how to do that, and created a resource to help. You can find that here.

But even if you followed my advice, you probably ended up with five or more ideas about different things that might appeal to your audience. So how do you figure out which one works?

The answer is fairly simple, you try all of them, a lot of times.

Narrow it down to 7 angles, or less, and give them each a day of the week. Monday you talk about how your book is ACTUALLY morally gray. Tuesday you talk about how the dragons in your story are more accurate to how real-life lizards are. Wednesday you talk about how your book has an obscure trope in your genre that you love but don't see enough of.

Then you do that, over and over, for 6 weeks.

After those 6 weeks are up, you go back and look at those posts (it helps if you write down your descriptions for each one as you post them so you can find them again), and see which angle got the most engagement. Not views, we're looking for comments, saves, shares, and likes.

Stick To It

Then, for the next month, you post about that same thing. Every single day (or at least every other day if you can't make every day work).

For the first week you probably won't see any uptick, but I would bet by the end of the month, you'll see that more of your target audience has found you than before, and you'll start to see sales attributed to socials going up.

Won't People Get Tired Of Me Saying The Same Thing?

This is a common misconception that I think anyone who posts on social media has either felt themselves or heard other people talk about. There are three realities that make this a non-issue.

First, you cannot forget that you are one account posting one video in an endless feed of other videos, most of which are probably completely unrelated to yours. So while you might get tired of talking about the same thing, viewers don't.

Second, the target market for your book is significantly bigger than you think it is. Romance is one of the highest selling genres, and there are millions of readers a year. An extremely conservative estimate of 10 million readers means that even if your content took off and got 100k views, that's 1% of your target market. This applies to other genres too

Finally, as someone who works in advertising, the idea that people see a promotion or advertisement for the first time and act on it is audacious. The general rule of thumb in advertising is that people need to see the same ad 7-8 times MINIMUM before they act on it. Repeating your message is not annoying, it's good marketing.

The Gist

Find what works, stick to it, and never shut up about your book. You might see your story as niche or too personal to resonate, but the reality is that you already love it, so there are other people out there that will too.

If this was helpful for you, reply and let me know what angles you're thinking about testing for your book, or send it to an author friend to help them with their social media!

If you've received this email it also means that you're entered for a chance to win a free strategy call.

Thanks and happy writing!

Seth