An indie publisher's Instagram reveals unexpected challenges to the strategy behind stories.
Are Instagram Stories really that effective? Both Wild Mind Creative and Hugh Beaulac of Just Publishing Advice offer tips and tricks for marketing your book with Instagram stories. Beaulac even asserts that using stories can help drive up your sales as an author.
But, as someone who regularly ignores my Instagram stories because there are just too many to watch, I had to wonder, “Does book marketing with Instagram stories really work?”
I decided to test my question by looking at an Instagram platform larger than a single indie author: a publishing house.
The Experiment
I found a small-scale publishing house near me called Immortal Works and studied their Instagram stories, both current ones and older ones saved as highlights. From these stories, I took books that were explicitly mentioned by name and headed to the Immortal Works website in search of a comparable book. A comparable book in this instance would be one in the same genre, age range, and 12-month release period as the book mentioned in Immortal Works’s Instagram stories.
In all, I was able to find 16 books with comparable counterparts, or a total of 32 books. I then found the books on Amazon and recorded how many reviews each book received. Once I had all the review amounts recorded, I conducted a paired t-test between the reviews for books marketed with Instagram stories and the reviews for books not marketed with Instagram stories. The result was p = .4853, suggesting there was no difference in the number of reviews between the books promoted using Instagram stories and those not promoted.
Analysis
This mini experiment suggests that marketing books with Instagram stories isn’t necessarily as beneficial as it seems. However, the data was selected from only one small publishing house. This exercise could be done for individual authors or larger publishing houses to see whether the results vary from those detailed here.
Long story short, though I didn’t find any significant correlation between Instagram stories and consumer interactions with books, that doesn’t mean you should shy away from marketing your book with Instagram. So go and do: get your stories out there and see what works for you.