Last week, we talked about how to set up your Instagram account for maximum attraction to book buyers:

1. Limit yourself to three topics.
2. Identify and adhere to an overall layout. Good article on that here.
3. Choose a limited color palette.

This week we’ll add some more pointers and talk about how that may translate into book sales.

First: Build an attractive, friendly profile.

1. When you set up your IG profile, the interface will allow you to choose an identifier for your line of work. This is optional but I chose Author.
2. Add some information about yourself to help potential followers determine whether you have common areas of interest. Mine are:
   • Romance author
   • Hiker
   • Flower photographer
3. Add illustrative emojis for more visual impact and connection.
4. Instagram allows you one, and only one, link (unless you have 10,000 followers or pay for a promotion). To get around this, you can use a service like Linktr.ee  or Shorby to create a menu of links.
5. Use the highlight buttons to save Stories (Instagram posts that remain visible for a single day and are vertical rectangles rather than squares). These should align with your three chosen topics, although you may have additional categories, or sub-categories. For example, one of my topics is hiking, and one of the things I often see when hiking are waterfalls.
6. You can buy the graphics for your highlights over on Etsy really cheap. A lot of people go for little symbolic icons (tennis, knitting, cooking, etc.) but I elected to stay more generic.

So that, at a high level, takes care of your profile page.

Next week: actually selling books via IG (for real).