From a marketing standpoint, the platform is best-suited to authors targeting a younger demographic – 59 percent of its users are under 30. Even so, all authors can use Instagram to stay connected to what publishers and readers are talking about.

To help you see Instagram’s potential and study how some of the most influential “bookstagrammers” are using the site, I’ve polled a few authors and book publicists for their favorite book-related Instagram accounts.

35 book-related Instagram accounts

Here are 35 of the best. If you’re on Instagram, be certain to follow these accounts and study how they compose images, write posts, and use hashtags.

Each option links to the Instagram account and includes their profile description.

I’ve also included names and Instagram links for the people who recommended these accounts, too. They’re in parentheses after the recommendations.

Authors

Victoria Aveyard: SC grad, screenwriter, #1 NYT bestselling author of RED QUEEN, GLASS SWORD, and KING’S CAGE. (Winnie DeMoya)

Andrea Jenny Han: New York Times bestselling author of the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before trilogy twitter: @jennyhan. (Andrea Kiliany Thatcher)

Leigh Bardugo: #1 NYT best-selling author, occasional fiend. Six of Crows Duology, Shadow & Bone Trilogy, The Language of Thorns, Wonder Woman: Warbringer (Andrea Kiliany Thatcher)

K.M. Weiland: Award-winning international author of the acclaimed Outlining Your Novel and Structuring Your Novel. Writes speculative and historical fic. (Winnie DeMoya)

Elizabeth Gilbert: Author of EAT PRAY LOVE. New book is BIG MAGIC: CREATIVE LIVING BEYOND FEAR. Click to help Syria: www.togetherrising.org/give (Karen Dybis )

The Bookseller’s Daughter: Welcome nerds Bookstore geeks  #Succulent mavens  #Anneofgreengables  expat living in Go Weak in the Knees with 10 Swoony (Amy Meyerson)

Chloe Benjamin: Writer (THE IMMORTALISTS & THE ANATOMY OF DREAMS), knitter, feminist. Twittering @chloekbenjamin (Amy Meyerson)

Rupi Kaur: mother of ‘milk and honey’ and ‘the sun and her flowers’ (Sandra Beckwith)

Alison Roman: author of Dining In: Highly Cookable Recipes, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017 available now writer + cook / contributor @bonappetitmag, @nytfood (Sandra Beckwith)

Book clubs

Belletrist: ︎discover, read, + celebrate a new book every month ♛@emmaroberts + @kpreiss ︎ april book — Laura & Emma ☆ (Winnie DeMoya, Andrea Kiliany Thatcher)

Our Shared Shelf: Emma Watson’s Book Club Inspire•Empower•Share Intersectional feminist wisdom Mar/Apr: Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot. Join us. (Winnie DeMoya)

Book of the Month Club: We make it easy—and fun—to discover what’s new and not-to-be-missed. Tag us with your BOTM box  #bookofthemonth (Winnie DeMoya)

Reese’s Book Club – Hello Sunshine: A community celebrating women’s stories, curated by @ReeseWitherspoon for @hellosunshine. April Book Pick: #Happiness by Heather Harpham (Sandra Beckwith)

Bookstores

Books Are Magic: Cobble Hill’s independent bookstore. Open M-F 10-9, Sat 9-9, Sun 9-7. (Andrea Kiliany Thatcher)

Duende District Bookstore: We are a collaborative pop-up bookstore by & for PoC. All are welcome. #TodasLasVoces Locations: Duende @ MahoganyBooks || Duende @ Toli Moli (Natalia Sylvester)

Books and Books: Est. 1982 Bookstore & Café Coral Gables | Arsht | Lincoln Road | Bal Harbour | Suniland | Grand Cayman | Key West | MIA Airport Coconut Grove (anonymous recommendation)

Strand Bookstore: Independent Bookstore since 1927 Share your event photos with #strandevents! (Sandra Beckwith)

Powell’s Books: Keeping ideas in circulation since 1971. (Brittany Rich)

Avenue Bookstore: Albert Park, Elsternwick, Richmond (Brittany Rich)

Publishers

Epic Reads: We volunteer as tribute to be the YA community of your dreams! Snapchat: @epicreads Twitter: @epicreads HarperCollins More bookish fun (Winnie DeMoya)

Viking Books: An imprint of @penguinrandomhouse. We publish great books. Here are some photos of them. (Winnie DeMoya)

Penguin Classics: A filtered glimpse into the life of the Penguin Classics editorial team in New York. (Winnie DeMoya) (Editor’s note: I’d recommend following all Penguin accounts.)

BookTrib: Where readers meet writers! Sign up for even more Booktrib on our website. (Jim Alkon)

Enchanted Lion: An independent, family-owned children’s publisher based in Brooklyn, NY. (Brittany Rich)

Readers

Bluestocking Bookshelf: Avid reader & book collector. bluestockingbookshelf@gmail.com  @storiarts: BLUE10  @deepreadersclub: BLUE20 (Andrea Kiliany Thatcher)

For Reading Addicts: She has read too many books and it has addled her brain. (Kelly Lenihan)

The Bibliotheque:  #bookster mama | bookblogger in search of true cheese. I mean… love. (Sandra Beckwith)

Booksugar: Book Addict & Collector. Nothing is sweeter than a book – except Colin Firth in a suit. (Sandra Beckwith)

Dragonflyreads: 又 I’m Sarah, I read a lot.  Sunshine in my pocket Romance novel in my hand Makeup on my face Tattoos on my skin Music in my heart Family at my side Feminist AF FL (Sandra Beckwith)

Secret Society of Books: book and reading curator | book peddler | book club| teacher| artist |reader|#secretsobclub #kidsbooks #picturebooks #ssobn onfiction #ssobshelfie (Brittany Rich)

Anne Bogel: Modern Mrs Darcy, Blogger at Modern Mrs Darcy. Host of @whatshouldireadnextpodcast. Author of I’D RATHER BE READING, coming 9/4. (Amy Meyerson)

Bookstaworm: Jovana ||25|| Serbia  Hufflepuff Booklover studying literature Fairy lights Queen Rep for @nyxsullivan.books  (Sandra Beckwith)

Topshelftext: Madeleine I New Englander | Bookworm | Teacher | Ravenclaw | Founder   @diversebooksclub | Reviewer @kidlitexchange  (Sandra Beckwith)

Other

BookBub: We are a free service that helps you discover books you’ll love through deals, handpicked recs, and updates from authors. (Sandra Beckwith)

Book Riot: Always books. Never boring. Tag #RiotGrams to be featured (Winnie DeMoya, Kelly Lenihan)

SCBWI: Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (Kelly Lenihan)

What Instagram accounts do you follow that you think other authors should follow, too? Please share them in a comment.

Tip of the Month

I like to share a “Tip of the Month,” a free resource or tool for authors, on the last Wednesday of the month.

I’m hosting a free webinar, “How to Sell More Books on Autopilot Without Constant Marketing and Promotion” next Tuesday, May 1, at 7 pm ET/ 6 pm CT, 5 pm MT, 4pm PT. Derek Doepker is going to show us how to use an Amazon tool that lets you sell more books while you get back to doing what you love – writing.

Register now before you forget! We’ll send a replay link to everyone who registers, so don’t worry about time zone issues or schedule challenges.

I’ve taken this class with Derek before, so I know you’ll get plenty of here’s-how information from him.
Get details and register on the class registration page.

Simple Ways Make a Difference in Yourself — and the World

How I use Instagram to sell more books

By Kate Hanley

When it comes to social media, I love Instagram above all other platforms. I used it strictly for personal purposes, primarily to share photos of my kids and my daily life. (Which may explain why I loved it; it was a work-free zone!) But as I was creating a promotion plan for my newest book, How to Be a Better Person, I hired an online marketing consultant who challenged me to re-think that.

Pointing out that I had nearly 500 followers and that my posts generally got a decent level of engagement, she convinced me that my Instagram feed was too good a promotional opportunity to ignore.

I saw her point, but I was nervous; I loved Instagram because it wasn’t the frenzy of promotion that Facebook has become. I didn’t want to contribute to the noise.

Presuming I could get over that hurdle, I also didn’t know how to use a visual medium to promote a book that’s filled with tips that are related to changing your outlook.

Together, we worked out a plan to spend one week on each of the eight sections on my book as a way of giving first and inviting people in to the book instead of merely asking them to buy—which can feel like a big ask to someone who doesn’t really know you and not likely to be very effective.

For each post with the themes, I decided write two to three paragraphs about the tip I was posting a photo of—call it micro-blogging. As a writer, this was a way for me to get excited about using a visual platform for something work-related.

Micro-blogging helped me come at book promotion from a spirit of giving and inviting, and not so much about “pay attention to me and buy my stuff!” That helped ease any reservations I had about using my Instagram feed as a promotional tool.

The How

Tech-wise, it hasn’t been seamless. I’ve typed most of these posts on my phone with my thumbs, which is slow-going and painstaking, but I feel it’s important to have access to an emoji keyboard to stick with the conventions of the platforms and to infuse tone.

You can install Gramblr on your computer and then upload photos from your hard drive and use your nice big keyboard to post—I just heard about this and am looking forward to trying it out!

One thing I have come to love about Instagramming for work purposes is that it shows you exactly how popular each hashtag is, so you can choose hashtags for your posts that jibe with your content and that will help new people find that content and, hopefully, follow you.

Instagram is also more conducive to building relationships with other followers whom you might not know in real life—perhaps it’s the heavy use of emojis and tagging that really engages people and makes it feel like a friendlier place.

Make sure you reply to all comments and use emojis to connect with your commenters, and people will be more likely to share your posts with their followers (although they, and you, will need to download an external app—I prefer the Repost App—to share other people’s posts to your own list.)

The Results

I released a book last May called Stress Less, which I didn’t do much social media promotion to support—mostly because I was on deadline to write How to Be a Better Person when it came out! (Having two books come out in the same year is kind of like having Irish twins; one will naturally get less attention when the other is more needy.)

But comparing the sales numbers, How to Be a Better Person has sold 30 percent more copies in its first month than Stress Less did in its first month of life. (I’m also up to 680 followers.)

Of course, the fact that How to Be a Better Person came out in prime new year/new you season (it was released on January 2) probably has something to do the strong first-month showing, but if you can boost book sales doing something you enjoy and that helps you engage directly with your readers, why not?

Other cool Instagram ideas I’ve seen:

• Develop 30 days of content counting down to a holiday that has some relevance to your subject matter in your own version of an advent calendar. Katy Bowman of Nutritious Movement is a whiz at this.
• Post a picture of a stack of three or five books and saying you’ll give them away to three or five lucky winners who post a comment that answers a particular question (perhaps something you’re looking for feedback on).
• Ask readers to post a picture of themselves with their copy of the book and tag you and/or use a specific hashtag

If you’re on Instagram, I’d love to connect with you there! I’m @katehanleyauthor. And if you’ve seen other great book promotion ideas implemented on Instagram, I’d love to hear about those too—please leave them in a comment here!

If you are, I’d like to use my Instagram business account to give your book some attention.

I’m about to make a few changes to that account that were inspired by Hilary Rushford’s “Free Instagram Class” on how small businesses can use that social network more effectively. I tuned in to last week’s webinar specifically because I wanted to start doing more with my Instagram business account and was looking for inspiration.

I got it.

What I’ve been doing on Instagram

I’ve used my business account (versus my personal account) to consistently post my weekly blog image and occasionally post an image that reminds people that I’m not a blogging robot.

It’s lame.

I know that.

Hilary’s webinar gave me ideas about what I could be doing differently. One of the best “ahas!” I got from the free training was that I should view the images on my profile as a collage of photos that needs to be visually balanced.

This screenshot below from my Instagram profile about a year and a half ago is a good example of what you don’t want to do — every post but one is an image with text. Most of those text images come from  blog posts.

It’s monotonous. There’s no visual variety.

What I’m going to do now

In order to figure out what types of images I can and should be sharing so I get both the requisite visual variety and relevant content for my Build Book Buzz brand, I needed to think about my purpose on that platform.

My goal here and on every social network I use is to help authors learn how to market their books.

I usually do that by providing links to helpful information online but that’s not possible with Instagram. Links are only clickable in profile descriptions and ads. So . . . I had to look at this network differently.

I had to shift away from providing how-to information to supporting authors in another way.

The solution is obvious by now, right?

I want to share images of your books!

By doing that with the full titles in the accompanying text (caption), I can bring more awareness to them.

Will it rock your world? Nope. Will it help you? Who knows? Will it hurt your book. No way!

Here’s what I’d like you to do

Will you let me to support your book with my Instagram account?

If yes, here’s what I’d like you to do — and please follow these instructions carefully:

1. Follow my business account. Find me on the Instagram app by searching for “Build Book Buzz” or “BuildBookBuzz.” This is required. I will follow you back. Followers mean book exposure.
2. Send me an email message with the subject line: Instagram. Click here to send the message. Attach a photo of your book cover. (Link not working for you? Email address is on about/contact page.) It can be just the book cover, you and your book, whatever — just make sure that the book is the main attraction. In the message, provide the full book title and your Instagram profile name so I can find and tag you easily.
3. Follow the instructions in steps 1 and 2 carefully. I’ve set up an email rule so that all messages with an “Instagram” subject line go into a specific folder. If you don’t send what’s requested and I have to contact you, we will both be disappointed in resulting delays.
4. Watch my Instagram feed for your book. Consider sharing it with your connections, too, so you have what marketers call “social proof” that people are talking about your book.

Note that if you don’t use Instagram, I won’t be able to share your book cover and title.

Thank you for helping me start using my account in a way that helps you. I appreciate it.

How do you use Instagram for book promotion? Tell us in a comment.