All eyes on social media now, feels author Savi

Savi Sharma’s self-published debut novel, ‘Everyone Has A Story’, was a quick entrant to the bestseller category. Her second book, ‘This Is Not Your Story’, cemented her place as an author to watch out for.

Rajitha Menon caught up with the young author to figure out how self-publishing and social media go hand in hand.

You left CA course to become an author. Why?

I always had the urge to share the things which I experienced in my life. I just had to clear the CA finals. But the story of Meera and Vivaan (lead characters in my book) got hold of me. The more I got involved in the writing process, the more I found the real me. Finally, I realised I didn’t want to write numbers but stories.

How does self-publishing work?

If I had gone the traditional way, I would have had to wait for months to get it published. I believed in the power of the internet, more so because I knew I had a good story to tell. So I chose self-publishing. There are a lot of ways to self-publish — some authors use agencies, some do it on kindle and some do everything themselves. I, along with my mentor and friend, Ashish Bagrecha, got thousands of copies of my book printed, opened seller accounts on Amazon, sent stock to their warehouses and started selling books on their platform.

How does social media impact marketing these days?

All the attention is on social media these days. There is a lot of content available on Netflix, Amazon Prime and other platforms which doesn’t require much effort to consume. So, an author needs to promote his work quite well — out of sight is out of mind.

How do you utilise social media as an author?

The best to promote any product is by providing value to your customers. In case of books, give the readers some free yet valuable content, tell them something about your book (it can be about the characters or an excerpt) and give them a strong reason why they should read that book. I reached my target audience via organic reach and paid ads.