The Hub

Hey Brom, I don't know any books on the subject (I'm sure there are plenty, though), but posting stuff is the easiest step, really. It will probably take you like five minutes to learn. The difficult part is attracting an audience.

Whether it's Facebook, a subject forum, a blog, Youtube, or whatever, you can't just jump in and say, "Here's my new book. Please buy it," or "Hey, I'm a writer, watch me talk about writing." Well, you could, but it probably won't bring in much of an audience.

The reason why it's often recommended to create a social media presence long before you have a book to sell, is because it takes time to build an organic audience. There's as many different ways to go about it as there are people, but you generally have to offer people something of value to build up trust and goodwill before pushing your book. The most obvious example of this is probably what many self-pub writers do once they have a few books out. They offer one book for free (offering something of value) in exchange for people joining their email list (to build an audience), showing that they can actually write quality stuff before trying to sell their other books to that email list.

If you don't have anything published, what I've seen work the best is joining forums, Facebooks groups, whatever, where people discuss a subject that interest you and, ideally, also relates to your future books. This way you add value to people by joining in in the discussion, and you get to show you're not only there to push your books. (It could be groups on fantasy, your particular sub-genre if you got one of those, or something not directly related to stories, like a forum on medieval weaponry and armor if that's a big thing in your books).

Going to conventions and becoming part of the fandom is also a nice way to create a potential audience. And the cool thing about these methods are that though they take up time and requires you to be social, it's time you get to spend talking and learning about and things you are interested in.

A few other things worth keeping in mind is not trying to do media out there and to remember that the most important part of selling your book still is to write a good book. You can't be on every social media, not if you want to have a meaningful presence, and not if you want to have time to write; there's simply too many of them. So pick the one or two that suits you best (this might require some trying and failing) and stick with them. And make sure social media doesn't keep you from actually writing.

Personally, I've started with a blog (even though it's probably the most inefficient media to build up an audience) because it's the most comfortable way for me (as in, it's the method that requires the least social activity on my part) and you probably need a basic homepage anyway where fans (in the future where that's something we actually have) can go and read about you and your work.

Also, I'm years away from even beginning to write a book, so I have some time yet to build a presence on more active social medias, and in the meantime I don't want to lose too much writing time to building that presence.

As a final anecdote to get my point across my own blog, which focus mostly on writing, had basically no visitors the first year or so (like one a week or something), because, really, why would anybody drop by? But once I started visiting, commenting on, and following other blogs that interested me, my visitor numbers began to grow; they were still tiny, less than one visitor per day, but being active in the "community" definitely helped. And once I actually got some decent posts up, in my case book reviews/essays analysing certain books, the numbers grew futher, because now I had, in my own opinion at least, quality content to offer. And recently, being able to link to my published short stories and being able to link to my blog in the author notes of those stories have helped even more (again, offering something of quality, I hope, to potential readers). It's a slow process, and my visitor numbers are still small, but they're ten times what they were two years ago, which I think is pretty solid considering how little time I spend on blogging.