An author pinning images on Pinterest boards to promote words? It sounds like a mismatch. Authors write. Pinterest deals in photographs, illustrations, recipes, fashion, homes and beautiful things arranged in beautiful ways.
Books don’t move. They don’t sparkle on a screen. Most novels are hundreds of pages of black text.
And yet, Pinterest once worked remarkably well for me.
“An author pinning images on Pinterest boards to promote their words? Sure. Let’s find success through this platform by sharing content-related images.”
I wrote those words when Pinterest was sending a substantial number of readers to my website. It wasn’t an overnight success. I had spent years building boards, collecting images and finding visual subjects connected—sometimes rather loosely—to my fiction.
The platform has changed since then. So has my website. More importantly, the return for the work has changed.
If you’re an author wondering whether Pinterest is worth your time, my answer is no longer the enthusiastic yes it once was. It is now a qualified maybe, followed by a rather important question:
How much work are you prepared to do for readers who may never become book readers?
How Pinterest Worked for Me
My Pinterest experiment began simply.
“The first pin I stuck up on a board was around ten years ago, and it was a simple JPEG of my book’s cover. I was so naive when I did it. I didn’t know what I was doing, and traffic was virtually non-existent afterwards.”
That first book-cover pin did almost nothing. A cover floating alone in a busy image stream had no reason to attract anyone who didn’t already know me or my books.
I persisted.
Instead of pinning only covers and advertisements, I began thinking about the visual world surrounding my fiction. My principal character is a photographer, so I collected images of cameras, lenses, film and darkrooms. Storms feature heavily in the SEETHINGS novels, so lightning, rain and threatening skies had a natural place. That relationship between the camera, the storm and my storytelling gave me far more material than a row of book covers ever could.
The books also gave me sailing, Moreton Bay, illicit relationships, isolation and noir.
My boards included Storms, Photography, Affairs, Sailing and Moreton Island. I created another called Noiresque for images with shadows, solitude or a dark psychological edge.
Every so often, I inserted one of my own images and linked it to a relevant post.
That was the method. I didn’t constantly shout, “Buy my book.” I built visual trails leading towards the kinds of stories I wrote.
It worked.
“One by one, visitors followed the tail and came to my site. I now have around 25,000 pins cycling around the Pinterest world, and I can attribute approximately 1,500 monthly visitors who follow those links to my home site.”
Those weren’t theoretical impressions. They were people arriving at my website.
Pinterest Is Still Useful—but Useful Isn’t the Same as Worthwhile
Pinterest still describes itself as a visual discovery platform. That distinction matters. A post on conventional social media is quickly pushed down by newer material. A Pinterest image can be searched, saved, rediscovered and circulated long after it was first pinned.
For an author, that sounds ideal. Books don’t expire after twenty-four hours, so why should their promotional images?
Pinterest also provides more business machinery than it once did. An author can claim a website, view analytics, study trends, examine individual Pin performance and automatically publish images from an RSS feed. Pinterest Trends can show when people search for particular subjects and whether interest is rising, falling or seasonal.
These tools can reduce some of the manual labour. They can tell you which images receive impressions, saves and outbound clicks.
They cannot make people care.
Nor do they guarantee that someone interested in a photograph of a thunderstorm wants to read a dark psychological novel containing one.
That was always Pinterest’s weakness. A person could adore my storm image, save it to a board and move on without learning who I was. Interest in the subject didn’t automatically become interest in the author.
Today’s Pinterest Appears More Commercial
Much of Pinterest’s current business language focuses on brands, products, catalogues, shopping and paid advertising. Its visual-search technology is impressive, but its commercial direction is obvious.
That may be excellent for someone selling homewares, fashion, recipes, wedding products or travel experiences. A beautiful photograph can show precisely what is being offered.
Fiction is harder.
A novel sells an experience that cannot be photographed. Its real product is an emotional response occurring inside a reader’s mind. Authors must first translate that invisible experience into an image, then persuade the viewer to leave Pinterest, visit a website, read something and perhaps buy or download a book.
That is a long chain with many places for the reader to disappear.
I already spend a great deal of time balancing creativity with promotion. Pinterest adds another production line: choose an image, crop it vertically, write a title, prepare a description, add a link, select a board, publish it and later inspect the statistics.
Do that once and it’s nothing.
Do it properly across hundreds of posts and it becomes a second occupation.
Some Authors Will Suit Pinterest Better Than Others
Pinterest may still be worthwhile when a writer’s subject is naturally visual.
Historical fiction can use architecture, clothing and locations. Fantasy has creatures, maps and imagined worlds. Romance has settings, couples and wedding imagery. Travel writers, food writers and photographers already possess the kind of material Pinterest understands.
My fiction has storms, cameras, sailing and Moreton Island. I even wrote a novel about sailing that wasn’t written only for sailors. Those subjects gave Pinterest something tangible to distribute.
An author with a strong archive of original images may be able to run a small Pinterest presence without allowing it to consume the writing day. Someone starting without that archive will have to create one.
That cost must be counted.
Time spent producing promotional images is time not spent writing, improving the author’s website or strengthening the path between a Google search and the book itself.
Content Restrictions Matter Too
My website includes dark fiction, relationships, desire and fine-art photography. Pinterest isn’t always comfortable with that mixture.
I’ve previously written about people reporting my mildly sexualised Pinterest images. Pinterest’s current guidelines allow it to remove or restrict nudity and sexualised material, including some content in which the people are clothed.
That creates a practical problem. An author may consider an image artistic, restrained and entirely appropriate for the story. A viewer—or an automated moderation system—may see it differently.
Connecting an entire website through an RSS feed could therefore send unsuitable featured images into Pinterest automatically. For a site like mine, selective pinning would be safer than allowing everything to flow through without supervision.
That safety requires more work.
Traffic Is Not the Only Measure
There was a time when 1,500 monthly visitors from Pinterest felt like an obvious success.
Today, I’d ask more questions.
How long did they stay? What did they read? Did they visit another page? Did they look at the novels? Were they genuinely interested in dark fiction, or did they arrive for one attractive image and immediately leave?
I’ve come to believe that writers don’t simply need more readers; they need better-matched ones.
A hundred visitors interested in lightning photography may make the traffic graph rise. Five readers who recognise the unease, moral ambiguity and psychological pressure in my fiction may be more valuable.
That doesn’t make the larger number false. It makes it incomplete.
“Yes, an image-based social site can attract many readers to a text-driven website.”
That sentence remains true. The question is whether it attracts the right readers at a reasonable cost.
Should a Writer Try Pinterest Now?
If you already produce strong original images, write in a visually rich genre and have a claimed website with clear destinations for readers, a limited test may be worthwhile.
Choose a small number of closely related boards. Pin only material that leads naturally to your books or strongest articles. Use Pinterest’s analytics to measure outbound clicks, not merely impressions. Give the test a fixed period and a fixed amount of your time.
Don’t build 25,000 pins merely because I once did.
And don’t mistake motion for progress. Pinning, saving and curating can feel productive while quietly taking you away from the work you own.
My website is my work’s permanent home. Social platforms can introduce people to it, but they can also change their algorithms, policies and commercial priorities whenever they like. That is why I now place more weight on promoting novels through channels I can control.
My Verdict
Pinterest once delivered real traffic to my site. I don’t dismiss that history or regret the experiment. It taught me that fiction has a visual world around it and that an indirect image can sometimes lead a reader to a book.
But I wouldn’t attempt to rebuild that enormous pinning machine today.
Pinterest still has useful tools. It still suits certain authors. It may still send visitors. None of that proves it deserves an author’s limited time.
“Any bit of help from readers is a big help for self-published authors.”
That remains true too.
But help must be measured against effort. For me, reconnecting Pinterest now looks like more work for too little payout. I would rather improve the writing, photography, and connections on my own site—and build connections with quality readers—the place where they can encounter the work without an algorithm placing something shinier beside it.
Pinterest can still be right for an author.
It is no longer automatically right for this one.
–Michael (Dark Fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)
Download eBook Now or Get Paperback Here
SEETHINGS II follows the return of the Storm Killer as a body on a secluded beach in Moreton Bay, igniting fear and denial. While police dismiss the link, the media doesn’t. Mitchell Felding forms a dangerous bond with a man who understands his darkest impulses. When Natasha enters his life, carrying love letters from her murdered mother, intimacy deepens, and truth closes in. Some futures are inherited. Some have escaped.
SEETHINGS (first in the series) is downloadable and free for a limited time here.
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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