TikTok Takeouts: How Cats Hijacked My Book Marketing

TikTok Takeouts: How Cats Hijacked My Book Marketing

Learning to Promote My Book on Social Media

After listening to the podcast Novel Marketing, I decided to try harder with my book promotion efforts. So I set myself the goal of joining and starting to create promotional videos on TikTok.

TikTok Is My Kryptonite

Videos are my kryptonite. Or perhaps I should say, audios are. I don’t particularly like watching myself on video, but I hate hearing the sound of my own voice. I’m also fearful of the technology.

A staggering 34 million videos are created on TikTok every single day. Entering such a bullring, trying to vie for attention among all that content, is a daunting prospect.

Still, in early August I decided to jump right in…well, step in gingerly, wincing every time the water rose higher. 

To get the hang of the technology, I created my first TikTok post: a video of Do Not Keep Silent, my Hong Kong protest novel, lying on a painting of Hong Kong’s skyline. There was no talking, but I found it easy to add music: One Lovely Day by Citizen Cope. It has a lot of significance to the scenes set on the Peak. 

So far, so good. It was an experiment, and I wasn’t expecting much from it. But it got 579 views, which is more than my other attempts to promote Do Not Keep Silent on social media. OK, I thought. There might be something in this TikTok thing after all. 

TikTok for Authors: The Catfather and Other Viral Experiments

Following the old advice that you shouldn’t just constantly promote, I put together a mocked-up film poster of The Godfather and called it The Catfather. Against the movie’s theme tune, I put a picture of Bertie and Nutmeg, our two cats, having a face-off on either side of the cat flap. 

The caption reads: “So Nutmeg, now you come to me and you say, Don Bertie, give me justice. But you don’t ask with respect, you don’t offer friendship.’ Again, no talking. This time, 844 Views. 

Since then, I’ve done three more cat-based movie scenes: The Princess Bride, Lord of the Rings and Dirty Harry, coming in at a rounded total of 2000 views. 

Mixing Book Promotion with Cat Content: My TikTok Mash-Up

My most recent one is a bit of a mash-up, featuring the paperback of Do Not Keep Silent in the background and Bertie in the foreground. 

The caption #attentionseekingcat runs across the screen. 

For the first time I talk: “I was going to create a quick promotional video about my book Do Not Keep Silent, about a Hong Kong protester who’s prepared to sacrifice everything, but Bertie decided to hog the camera.” 

As Homer Simpson once said, it’s funny cos it’s true.

Beyond the view count

Altogether, the four promotional videos come in at a total of 1600 views. 400 each, more or less. Not great, but not bad, especially since I’m just starting out. 

But then I ran the analytics on each of the ten videos and it turns out all those views aren’t quite so flattering. The average TikTok viewer is in a hurry, and scrolls through to the next clip after about four seconds. 

TikTok Takeouts: What I Learned as an Author Promoting My Book on BookTok

So my big TikTok takeout in terms of promoting my book is that you have to capture people’s attention probably in the first two seconds, before their thumbs start twitching, to have any chance of getting them to stay until the end of the video. And rather than views, count your likes and engagement.

The other TikTok Takeout (excuse the repetition, it’s fun to say) is more of a question: How on earth do people without pets create all this content? 

Links

Curious how a Hong Kong protest thriller and a cat named Bertie ended up on TikTok? Read Do Not Keep Silent and follow me on TikTok.

Update

I’ve written an update to my TikTok travails, which will go live on 6th September.