For those that are Pinterested

I’ve mentioned Pinterest a few times when it comes to writing fiction on substack. I have experience of using Pinterest as a craft business owner and over the course of 3 years of consistent pinning and engaging with the app as a user, my monthly impressions sit at 350k a month, with thousands of people saving my pins and clicking through to my website, youtube, ravelry page and my newsletter. Most of my sales come from Pinterest.

Firstly, people assume that Pinterest is one or all of these things:

• A mood board app for people into art and fashion.

• A place to find wellness and lifestyle inspiration.

• A place for crafts and DIY for your house

It’s all of those things but it’s also more than that. Pinterest is a visual search engine. If you are familiar with blogging and SEO, you should also be familiar with Pinterest.

What do I mean by visual search engine?

Rather than searching for specific terms that link up with someone’s blog post or website metadata, Pinterest is about pins and the descriptions of pins. These pins do and will come up when people use search engines such as Google and Yahoo to look for related things, so you need to be in the game.

What is a pin?

A pin is an image or graphic that inspires, educates, illustrates, informs or entertains. It can be a photo, an infographic, a chart, a video— anything that achieves one of the aforementioned purposes. This image below is a pin. I’ve shared a microfiction excerpt in this case. It could also be a book cover or the title of something I wrote.

See how it not only contains the excerpt but also the title of my post and where you can find it? I have also included the link when I posted the actual pin but it’s all there to see.

This is also a pin:

Psst, give us a boost and save these pins above 😉

Why would Pinterest work for an author?

Your question should actually be why wouldn’t Pinterest work for an author?

It has 522 million monthly users. Surely even one of them wants to read your book!

But seriously, why would it work?

The answer is simple: it’s a visual search engine. The next time someone searches for gothic books to read, holiday reads, horror stories etc etc you want your pin to appear! Gaining some traction on Pinterest is no big secret. They have plenty of resources showing you how to make pins, tailor to your audience and engage with the platform.

Here are a few easy ideas to get you started:

• Set up your own website. You can then claim your website when applying for a free Pinterest business account. This gives you access to your stats, which then inform you of how well your pins are doing. You can see clicks, visits, impressions and comments.

• Sync your substack with Goodreads. Another URL, another backlink, another source of traffic.

• Use a tool such as canva to create interesting pins. If you don’t have the budget or time for that, you can also just copy a quote from your posts here and download them as vertical images.

• if you post a lot of your fiction on instagram, you can claim your instagram account on Pinterest. It then posts all of your previous and future Instagram posts for you. No extra work for you!

What do I pin about? What should my boards say?

The best way to use Pinterest is to think about what your ideal reader or your ideal customer would be looking for on there. Do they want book reviews? Do they want short stories? Do they want a new book on their kindle?

When you label your boards, try and think of things they will be looking for e.g. ‘Gothic novels to read’ or ‘Short thrillers.’ Try to vary your board names. No one is looking for the title of your novel or short story because they don’t know about it yet. This is the place to get leads. This is the place to create a funnel.

When you create a pin, Pinterest will only show the first half of the title or the first 50 characters of the description so keep it specific. You can also add a call to action such as:

‘visit now’

‘click the link’

‘subscribe to the newsletter’

‘Read more’

How much should I write?

I’d fill the description box with as much as possible, to be honest. The more copy, the more matches.

“I posted some pins and nothing happened.”

Your traffic will vary day by day, week by week, year on year. Pinterest is a long game. If you’d rather be writing than dancing around on social media trying to get people to look at your work, you might like Pinterest as a platform. The pace is slow. Everyone is browsing, pinning, clicking. What you post there lasts for years. It’s evergreen content.

Here are the estimated lifespans of posts on other social media platforms:

Tiktok: Seconds

Twitter: 15 minutes

Facebook: 48 hours

Instagram: 2-3 days.

Youtube: 20 days

Pinterest: Years

Simply uploading or scheduling even as little as 5 pins a week could make a huge difference to your traffic. Don’t think about this as a short-term project because you will fail. There are no overnight successes on Pinterest. What there are, though, are solid leads and inspired users who will become customers. You just have to show them where you are.

If you have any more questions about Pinterest, I’m all ears. Let me know in the comments.