Learn what the best hashtags are to promote your self-published books on Instagram!
For writers who choose to self-publish, knowing how to market their book can seem overwhelming. In the world of social media, using the right hashtags helps you get noticed, and getting noticed helps you market your book, even if you don’t have a lot of followers on your social media accounts. This article focuses on my research quest to discover which hashtags self-published writers should use to market their books on Instagram.
What the Experts Say about Hashtags
To get an initial sense of which hashtags might work best, I searched Writersrelief.medium.com for recommendations. This site has helpful tips for the best writer-related hashtags to use for varying purposes on multiple social media platforms. Best-hashtags.com, another helpful site, provides a comprehensive list of hashtags for self-publishing. Among the suggestions from these sites are these:
- #bookstagram was used in 82 million posts
- #indieauthor was used in 1.5 million posts
Researching Writers and Hashtags
Recommendations online are great, but I wanted to see what hashtags writers are using. I looked through some of the posts that were generated under the #indieauthor hashtag and found three self-publishing authors, who had varying numbers of followers.
From each writer, I compiled data from ten posts that were related to the writer’s book (post type “book”), and ten posts that were about other interests of the writer (post type “other”). One writer’s “other” posts were reviews of books she had read, another’s posts were writing prompt memes, and the last writer’s posts were about her personal life.
From both the "book" posts and the “other” posts, I determined which hashtags were most used by each writer. Those hashtags consist of the following:
- #bookstagram
- #indieauthor
Researching Comment Quality and Hashtags
To begin my research, I recorded up to the first 30 comments on each post (though many of the posts had far fewer than 30) and then categorized the comments into the following seven categories:
- Positive interaction with the post
- Negative interaction with the post
- Inquiry (commenter asking a question)
- Request for the author to promote on another Instagram account
- Request for the author to check or send a message through DMs
- Neutral interaction with the post (a general comment that was neither encouraging/enthusiastic nor negative/critical)
- Tag of another Instagram user
To minimize bias in my categorizing, I presented 20 comments from each writer to an independent coder. When I compared my categorizing with the independent coder’s, the Cohen’s kappa score was 1 out of a possible score of 1—perfect agreement (see codebook below). This means that the data I analyzed for comment quality is reliable.
To determine the link between the post type, hashtag usage, and quality of comments in relation to marketing, I considered the context of the comments in each category. Negative (2) and inquiry (3) comments were primarily unrelated to the writer's post. Tagging (7) comments contained no other context other than the name of the tagged individual so the quality of those comments was indeterminable. Based on my own intuition, I determined that high-quality comments would fall into categories 1 (positive interaction), 4 (promotion request), and 5 (DM request).
Data Analysis
I started this research with a question about the relationship between recommended hashtags and engagement on Instagram. Because the writers in my data set had various usage of #bookstagram and #indieauthor and various followerships, I pivoted in my purpose. The data I gathered was helpful for determining the quality of comments in relation to the type of post.
After categorizing each comment, I aggregated all data for all three writers and analyzed the quality of comments for all “book” posts and the quality of comments for all “other” posts. My findings paint an interesting picture.
Overall, “book” posts generated more comments than “other posts:
Book—165 comments
Other—88 comments
Of the comments in “other” posts, 46.59% were positive interactions (1), which is 5.98% more positive interactions than comments on “book” posts (40.61% of comments were positive). The rest of the comments on “other” were
Negative 1.14%
Inquiring 3.41%
Promotional 3.41%
DM Request 0%
Neutral 40.91%
Tagging 4.55%
The comments on the “book” posts were
Negative 6.06%
Inquiring 6.06%
Promotional 9.09%
DM Request 5.45%
Neutral 30.91%
Tagging 1.82%
Conclusion
At the time of this posting, Author 1 has 1,958 followers, Author 2 has 60,600 followers, and Author 3 has 2,043 followers. Authors 1 and 3 are inconsistent at best with using #bookstagram and #indieauthor. One conclusion we can draw from Author 2 consistently using recommended hashtags #bookstragram and #indieauthor is that her larger following may be related to people (like me) having found her account by searching those popular hashtags.
Since “other” posts had more positive interactions than “book” posts, we learn that as a writer, it is as important to show your audience your interests that they might relate to outside of the subject of your book.
Because “book” posts drew more comments than “other” posts and a higher percentage of “book” posts (compared to “other”) were promotional (4) and DM request (5), we may conclude that “book” posts are more likely to draw quality comments that lend themselves to marketing.
Let’s not write off neutral comments! Even though there was a high percentage of neutral comments for both post types, these commenters were interacting with the author and that can indicate that the people want more!
I started this quest with hashtags. Though my data turned out to be aggregated for post type and comment quality, I still found my data by searching for the hashtags for writers: #bookstagram and #indieauthor. So for you, dear self-publishing author, here are my recommendations.
- Use #bookstagram for every post on your Instagram account to draw a wider audience.
- Use #indieathor on posts relating to your book to draw those offers to promote.
- Balance the number of posts relating to your book and posts relating to your life and interests. Instagram audiences like to feel a connection to the owners of the accounts they follow.