One of the most intriguing announcements at Book Expo 2014 was about Goodreads’ new “Ask the Author” feature. If you’re signed up as an author on Goodreads, you can now host your own Q&A sessions, thus making new connections with your readers.
Goodreads beta-tested the program with 54 well-known authors, including James Patterson, Dan Brown, Margaret Atwood, Khaled Hosseini and Isabel Allende. Now they’re opening up the feature to all authors.
Patrick Brown, Goodreads Director of Author Marketing, offered suggestions on how to get the best out of this new feature. Among them:
• Set expectations early: Tell your readers which topics you’ll answer and when. Don’t feel as though you have to answer every question every day.
• Choose the questions you want to answer carefully, and post legitimate answers to them. You have control over which questions you want to show up on your page. Choose questions whose answers you’re happy to feature on your profile.
• Participate in the Goodreads reader community. Ask questions of other authors and review their books. You don’t have to give star ratings to every book you discuss. Just be thoughtful. Sometimes showing up with a thoughtful comment on another author’s page inspires interest in your own work.
Below is a terrific summary of practical things you can do to make your book more visible on Amazon.
It comes from the enewsletter of Smith Publicity, Inc. Kudos to Book Publicist Jennifer Tucker who put together the list. 1. Author Central Think of Author Central as your “main hub” in the wide world that is Amazon. Beyond creating an author page, which will educate customers about you and your book and display essential information about your biography, blog posts, etc., you can also use Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to set up your book for the Kindle if you own electronic rights. Also through Author Central, you can track book sales numbers across the U.S. for the past four weeks to identify sales trends, utilize the CreateSpace platform to publish your next book, and explore Kindle Direct Publishing Select, which will allow you to earn higher royalties. 2. Amazon Forums Amazon offers a variety of discussion forums for authors, which can help you to network with other authors and expose your book to a new audience interested in your genre. You can also learn just by reading other posters’ questions, advice, answers, tips and tools. Feel free to reach out to other authors (who are often avid readers themselves) to ask for feedback on your book, to position yourself as an expert in your field, and to just have fun! 3. Amazon Keyword Tags By using the tagging feature, you can make your book more searchable almost immediately, if done correctly. Check out tags on other books (especially top selling titles!) in your book’s genre and make your own tags accordingly. The more keywords you have tagged, the better readers will be able to find your book within a slew of other books. Fun tip — think like a reader: what keywords would you use to search your book? Also, changing tags each week or every few weeks gets your book in front of new audiences. 4. Amazon’s Listmania! Listmania! is another tool that authors can utilize to reach potential book buyers. Listmania positions your book among other books in your genre by adding your book to book lists, but word to the wise: for best results, make sure to be very selective and true to your book’s genre when choosing your lists. 5. Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” Just as book excerpts draw readers in, Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature allows readers to flip through some of your book, with the goal of making them want to read more. This feature also works to prevent negative comments because by previewing the book, the reader has a better understanding of your book’s content. Be sure to have your personal Amazon page set up before you move forward with this tool, as it can take time to be approved by Amazon. 6. Amazon Marketplace Amazon Marketplace serves as a third-party online storefront where you can sell your book alongside the array of other Amazon goods. While it’s a great tool and can offer you more freedom as an author (you can choose to give autographed copies of the book, for instance), authors must be willing to carry a book inventory and must have this inventory already on hand to be set up in the Marketplace. It also requires plenty of time and patience for authors to manage their own online book sales, though many authors enjoy the control that they have over the price of their book and fulfillment of book orders. 7. Amazon “So you’d like to…” Guide With the Amazon “So you’d like to…” guide, you can actually build a guide around your book topic, genre, or specialty, which will position you as the expert of your book or field. This free tool allows you to think outside the box when it comes to book promotion and gives you the option to include your book with other Amazon products, essentially creating a “bundle” of items relating to the “So you’d like to…” Guide topic. Authors can choose to write content about the subject and, within the content, mention that the book is for sale on Amazon.
Yesterday when I opened my iGoogle page, “today’s spotlight video” looked something like this.
Because I love both soul and gospel music, I clicked on it–and became an instant fan of an unknown singer who doesn’t even have an album out yet. (LaTosha Brown. Check her out. Fabulous!)
As LaTosha tells it, as of the day-before-yesterday, her video had been viewed 310 times. Today, that number is 496,642–an instant fan base! Her record company, PortoFranco Records, is scrambling to get this cut on iTunes so some of those fans can actually buy the single.
Books are not as accessible as music in this way, but there’s cause to believe that short pieces, priced low and marketed through social media, could become for authors what this single song is for a talented, upcoming musician: a way to develop an instant audience for their work.
Earlier this year, Amazon launched Kindle Singles, a division that is actively seeking articles, essays and stories of 5,000 to 30,000 words. These pieces, which are being reviewed and quality-controlled by editor David Blum, are being priced between $.99 and $4.99–impulse buyers’ pricepoints. Publishers Weekly recently reported that six of the 75+ published works on this platform have already reached bestseller status among all Kindle books.
Kindle Singles has terrific potential. It provides a new platform for long-form journalism and could revive the world of short stories. And most importantly, it could build audiences for those emerging voices who have been abandoned by traditional publishers.
I’ve yet to see a book trailer that makes me want to buy a book. I know they’re all the rage right now, but because they’re made by wordsmiths and not by filmmakers, they often look embarrassingly amateurish–especially when they promote novels.
Book people need to use ideas and words–the tools they know best–to promote their books. A good author interview–which can be distributed as an audiofile or a podcast–is a better sales tool all around.
One of the best ways to promote your nonfiction book is to position yourself as the expert in your field. How do you do that?
One simple way is through HARO— short for “Help A Reporter Out.” This ingeniously simple site connects journalists working on a story with people who can serve as experts for that story–all for free.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you’ve written a book about indie films. If you’re a subscriber to the daily HARO newsletter, you would have recently seen this post from a reporter doing a story for a national entertainment/lifestyle magazine:
What does the term “indie” film mean? Need expert to define, explain which films meet this criteria and what the term “indie film” means today–at the box office and to studios and to creative types in the industry.
You respond via an anonymous email address directly to that reporter. If your credentials are good and your ideas solid, you might get a follow-up interview. Ideally, you become the expert quoted in the article. Nice!
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I help serious writers publish their own books -- in hardcover, softcover, ebook, enhanced ebook or audiobook form.
For some writers, I also serve as a developmental editor.
Stanford Continuing Studies Online Course
How to Self-Publish a Book: A Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Writers
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I’ll be teaching a 5-week online course through Stanford Continuing Studies for writers who want a clear roadmap on how to self-publish–including all the decision points you encounter along the way. The class starts on January 25, 2021.
One of the most intriguing announcements at Book Expo 2014 was about Goodreads’ new “Ask the Author” feature. If you’re signed up as an author on Goodreads, you can now host your own Q&A sessions, thus making new connections with your readers.
