Working with an influencer can be difficult. Anyone with a sizable social media following or active online community gets pummeled with requests to promote the products of strangers.

If you’ve attempted to contact one of these high profile personalities, you were likely met with silence or rejection.

As authors, every little bit counts and the competition out there is steep. So instead of aiming for the influencers with thousands of followers, start turning your attention towards “micro-influencers.”

Who are “Micro-Influencers?”

Micro-influencers are people who are just starting to acquire an online audience. They tend to have a niche focus on a particular topic (in the case of books, they may be focused on a singe genre). These people will likely have an audience of hundreds, maybe a couple thousand, but their audience is actively plugged in and engaged in the content this influencer is producing.

They certainly aren’t the “whales” of the influencer world, but by checking their blog, social media accounts or other platforms, you should be able to determine whether they are just posting for fun or fostering an active community.

4 Reasons Authors Should Work With Micro-Influencers

Though there is a lot of appeal in forging a promotional partnership with someone who has access to thousands (if not millions) of engaged buyers, there are a lot of compelling reasons for authors to start by aiming smaller.

Micro-Influencers Are More Accessible

When an influencer has tens of thousands of followers, they are overwhelmed daily by pitches from businesses. Your attempt to contact them, even if you’ve done everything right, could result in nothing if you’re joining a slush pile of hundreds of emails.

A micro-influencer is likely not being pitched as often. They also probably aren’t managing dozens of existing partnerships yet. The odds of getting in contact with and establishing some sort of a deal is significantly greater with a micro-influencer than it is with a larger, more established one.

100 Fish Vs. 1 Whale

There is a lot of appeal when you see someone who has 300,000 Instagram followers or hundreds of shares on Facebook. Who wouldn’t want that kind of publicity? But realistically speaking, those huge influencers only have so much time and space to give.

So if your interested in having a reach that’s far and wide, try reaching out to a lot of micro-influencers. Not only can you reach similar goals by working with multiple, smaller influencers, you can actually improve optics by making it look as though your book is everywhere.

Grow Together

Micro-influencers don’t tend to be “micro” forever. At BookSparks, we’ve seen small book bloggers and start up bookstagrammers go from a few hundred engaged audience members to being some of the biggest in the industry.

When you’re just getting started and a micro-influencer is at their beginning as well, you have a common ground and get a lot more mutual benefit out of working together. As you grow as an author and they grow from a micro-influencer to a macro, your “early days” relationship will likely stand the test of time, propelling you both forward as the years go on.

Market for Free

Ideally, when you’re working with an influencer, you’re hoping to “borrow” their audience to promote your work. Authors are usually working on a strict marketing budget and don’t normally have thousands to throw at a single effort. With the big influencers, getting even just one social media mention can be very costly and doesn’t necessarily bring sales to compensate for that expense.

With micro-influencers, you’re much more likely to get free promotion with the offering of an Advanced Reader Copy or giveaway copy of your book.

There are a lot of fish in the influencer sea. Though it’s natural to be drawn to the big influencers, consider the long-term career benefit of working with a handful of micro-influencers. Here at BookSparks, we’ve found these relationships continue to be mutually beneficial year over year, where as some of the bigger influencer team ups can fizzle after a promotion.