Motivate Your Audience to Talk About You: Book Reviews
“What I really like is an intelligent review. It doesn’t have to be positive. A review that has some kind of insight, and sometimes people say something that’s startling or is so poignant.”
—Patti Smith, singer, poet, author of Just Kids
THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY PUTS MUSCLE behind rock-star authors who promote their books, including Barbara Kingsolver and Dean Koontz. At the 2012 Book Expo America I attended a conversation starring two rock music stars who had crossed the line to become authors, Neil Young (Waging Heavy Peace) and Patti Smith (Just Kids). In fact, Just Kids won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2010. These two mega-musicians both clearly understood the power of promoting their books to their book audience. Here they were without guitars, sitting on a well-lit stage in two armchairs at a civilized Book Expo America book talk.
These rock stars also clearly understood the viral importance of the resulting book reviews to growing their reading audience.
It doesn’t matter what kind of writing you do as an author. From nonfiction to memoir to fiction, if your audience doesn’t know your author brand and book via your author platform, it will be tough to reach the next critical stage of your author platform: securing multiple positive book reviews.
Roger Stewart, a veteran in the publishing industry and Editorial Director at TAB/McGraw-Hill, calls book reviews “golden.” Roger asserts, “Now as publishers, we must turn to authors to promote their books as a reaction to the dramatically changed landscapes of both bookselling and media. The Internet has changed everything. Fewer people walk into brick-and-mortar bookstores to see in-store displays.” We chatted over lunch in San Francisco recently about the new rules inherent in the rise of the Internet that now apply. Roger notes “as browsing in the brick-and-mortar bookstores declines, readers learning about books online increases. Now the mega book review sites have grown, such as Goodreads and online versions of the New York Times, the Guardian. But that’s not all: Dozens, if not hundreds, of popular blogs and podcasts, with local and national radio shows live on the Internet, keeping podcasts online long after the broadcast is over. These reach thousands of potential customers, and the more they appeal to the specific niche the author’s book fits into, the better.”
Roger’s most important point: “There’s no review more important than the customer reviews next to the Buy button.” This means that an author’s pursuit of reviews on bookseller sites such as Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com can and does launch books into the limelight for purchase. In the view of publishers, these are more valuable than a review in a newspaper or magazine. Why? Location. What could be more powerful than an excellent review right at the point of sale?
The editors at the major publishing houses ask authors for contact information for bloggers, podcasters, magazine and newspaper reviewers, and even colleagues of theirs who would be willing to write a customer review on Amazon in order to get review copies into their hands. “Bloggers and podcasters who speak to a specialized or niche audience can reach more motivated customers than a review in a general-interest newspaper or magazine,” Stewart says. “A smart author who really knows his or her customer base can do far more than a busy publicist can to target the right reviewers and interviewers.”
Formerly, the print newspaper and magazine book reviews had a finite circulation number. Today book reviews are digitally available for the whole world to read, and they stay posted; reviews likely will stay with a book and author brand throughout the life of the Internet.
In keeping with the overall strategy of this book, this chapter shows ways to build up great, honest reviews at the right time and in the right place. Remember, no marketing post-publication of your book will substitute for the positive interactions with your audience and your colleagues in the months leading up to the publication of your book.
There is no doubt that good reviews strengthen sales of a book, or any other product, for that matter. In a nutshell, positive online and in-print reviews are springboards to the success of your books. The new rules in publishing success involve interacting with as large an audience as possible on an ongoing basis. As you follow the 14-step program outlined in this book, you’re already linked to your audience in multiple ways and engaging in a communication system that flows both ways. Think of reader reviews as an extension of your ongoing conversation with your audience. As your audience reviews your work favorably with thought and insight, their reviews spread through word of mouth to enlarge your community of readers even further. Encourage all review comments, from single one-line comments to full written paragraphs; you want to enable as many reviews and review comments as possible for a number of reasons:
People need to hear good things being said about your book. Consumer reviews and recommendations of friends drive most purchases.
People need to see a lot of people are paying attention to your book. Even if negative reviews turn up, and likely they will, lots of buzz that’s mostly positive with a few negative reviews mixed in outweighs no buzz at all.
Strong reviews propel search results for your book to the top of search engines, no matter which genre. As a reader, you’re going to look quite favorably on any title described as “a must-read” or “the definitive work on XYZ; you don’t need any other book on this subject.” Search engines behave in the same way.
How to Ensure Reviews: Build Your Audience in Advance
By creating a broad audience for your book before you publish it, with an ongoing conversation about it by the time your book comes out, reviews naturally follow. The more people who collaborate in the creation of your book and the buzz around it, the larger that conversation will be. Because building an audience takes time, it helps to already have an audience based on groups you interact with regularly, such as a customer base, client list, memberships in societies and clubs, and presence on social networks and forums. By now, we hope you’re already in direct dialogue with the audience that seeks what you’re offering, and that audience will help launch your book by discussing it virally. The wider the interested audience, the larger your book sales.
For decades the textbook publishing industry has understood and used the technique of audience collaboration. Textbook publishers ask teachers to review materials in textbooks as they are being written so that the material will fit better into their classroom. When instructional materials are well tailored to teachers’ curriculum, it is natural that they will adopt this title for their own classroom use and then recommend it to other teachers. Additionally, publishers like Cengage Learning have created a new opportunity for teachers to custom publish a textbook directly for the course they are teaching. In this case the publisher, author, and teacher collaborate to ensure the creation of a book product that fits audience needs. The teacher specifies the subject matter needed in the book that they will use as the textbook for their course, and then the publisher meets that need in the table of contents, and voilà, the teacher requires all students to buy it. The teacher’s name then appears on the title page of the custom print run. Talk about an ideal built-in book audience at your fingertips! Build your own audience by listening to and addressing their needs.
My first publishing job was as an on-campus sales representative for Prentice-Hall—that paved the way for their textbook sales. To this day, the Prentice-Hall training motto holds true: “First find the need—then do the presentation tailored to the need.”
As publishing reps we were trained next to let the audience know the book was coming and show how it met their needs so that they looked for it, bought it, and hopefully reviewed it favorably to influence others. You want an audience to be primed and asking, “When will your book be out?” Once built, your author platform becomes your tool. Use it to reach out to your audience for reviews by asking them what about your book helped them the most.
About Reciprocal Reviews
Using the strategies in this book, you already have connected with other authors and have written good book reviews for them. Take time to read, think about, and write intelligent reviews about others’ books. Reviews are like guiding lights that lead the rest of us to what is worth reading, forming the matches and compass left behind for us to find our way through the wilderness of traditionally published and self-published books.
Too often people are either careless or perfunctory in reviewing a book, which often hurts authors and book sales needlessly. If you write reviews, it’s far better to say something short and meaningful about a book rather than write a long essay that is not well thought out.
Motivating Readers to Talk About Your Book
Authors become the pivot point in motivating people to talk about their books, whether it’s a professional media reviewer or a single consumer of your book. Reviews are the “Consumer Reports” people use to determine what’s worth buying. Your positive book reviews form critical “social proof” or “informational social influence.” People depend on the opinions of others, assuming that the people surrounding them in numbers have knowledge and information beyond theirs. The need for social proof has been the genesis of suggestion websites like Yelp that “pre-digest” all of the choices so that we can find our best option.
For the months leading up to the publication of your book, your blog will be key to motivating conversation about you and your book. As your book’s publication date draws nearer, step up your blog, post thought-provoking questions, provide a teaser to your book, or give your blog readers a free chapter to download. Give a countdown to your book’s publication date, answer all comments, and also step up your activity on all your social networks. In Chapter 14, you’ll find a number of ways to increase your visibility in an Internet and media blitz during the month your book is published.
Strategy for Managing Negative Reviews
Once you release your book for the public to read, you’re inviting unsolicited online reviews, and with a good book that is well written and meaningful, you’ll hopefully receive a load of good reviews. However, brace yourself: Most authors receive some negative reviews. Following are optimum ways that our author clients deal with bad reviews:
Expect them. Grow a thick skin in advance because there are readers who love to blast authors and books. And there may be some people who genuinely do not like your book.
Prevent them. Use the techniques in this chapter to point out to reviewers that you would very much appreciate hearing from them in a direct message to you if there is a typo, error, or an unclear area so that you can fix it, and instead, ask that a public review only cover what you thought of the book as a whole.
Ask for ongoing thoughtful reviews. This has the effect of burying a negative review by relegating it to the back pages.
Remove the review. If a negative review is unfair or unreasonably scathing, say, on Amazon, you can ask to have the review removed by contacting the Amazon Community Help Department: [email protected].
Best Practices for Getting Reviews
You will want to solicit honest, thoughtful reviews, written by people who have read and show familiarity with your book. One way to ensure familiarity is to publish excerpts from your book early and send out free chapters of your book prior to publication. Here we show you the successful strategy of our top-selling author client David Busch to modify for your own use. This does not mean you want to solicit loads of empty 5-star reviews. Anyone can spot empty, suspiciously over-the-top reviews as bought or fake, which undermines the quality and reliability of your bank of reviews.
Your solicited positive reviews come in all shapes and sizes, from lengthy online book reviews to short endorsements left by fans in your social media channels, all of which can be repurposed in your book, on your author website, and in your publicity documents.
Just as you shouldn’t encourage friends and family to write the empty 5-star reviews noted above, don’t pay reviewers to write them either! Fake reviews do get exposed and will ruin your reputation and credibility and erode the trust your audience places in you.
You might be tempted by these review-for-money outfits who promise to sell you “honest” reviews, meaning there’s no guarantee that the reviews will be positive or negative. That’s a gamble just not worth taking and not necessary if you follow the steps in this book. Amazon works to detect and delete these reviews anyway (See “Giving Mom’s Book Five Stars? Amazon May Cull Your Review,” New York Times, December 22, 2012: nytimes.com/2012/12/23/technology/amazon-book-reviews-deleted-in-a-purge-aimed-at-manipulation.html). As suggested, readers have developed a healthy mistrust of reviews as they seek authentic ones, and they openly comment on reviews that look fake. Instead, keep true to your own author voice and share sincerely. Stay true to your passion—whatever it may be—and share it with the world, grow it, nurture it, and over time your audience will find you.
Publishers send out free copies of books as they come hot off the press to magazines, newspapers, websites, and other media for inclusion in their publications, along with asking for feedback, whether it’s an article-sized review or a short comment. Most media outlets receive too many books and requests to read all of them. Face it, most reviewers at major publications like the New York Times Book Review simply don’t have time to open your book, much less read it cover to cover.
Some of our author clients send out audio readings of their books instead of printed copies so that reviewers can listen to them during their commutes.
CONTACT EVERYONE WHO IS A POTENTIAL REVIEWER FOR YOUR BOOK
To find reviewers for your book, expand your contacts list to include reviewers. The time to start looking for potential comments and reviews about your book is right when you’ve finished your manuscript, as Jack Canfield did. In the Foreword to this book, Jack tells how he never ended his day without contacting multiple reviewers and buyers for his book, which ultimately led to the mega success of his series. Once your manuscript is done and on its way to publication, the fun begins: That’s your time to list every group and association you belong to and start a new list of those you can join. Make the long list and include these:
Your Interactive Author Platform Audience. This audience is built up through your author website, blog, social network, teachings, and speaking engagements as outlined in the 14 steps of this book. At this point, you are able to contact the people interested in your work and reach out to them for feedback. Be sure to document the help of these many people in your book’s Acknowledgments section. This appreciation not only encourages reciprocal acknowledgments down the road; your inclusion of their names in your book increases awareness about your book. When your audience is a part of the creation, it’s a point of pride for them to share the news with their friends and associates. When Mike commented on an early online version of Dan Gillmor’s 2006 book on citizen journalism, We the Media, he was acknowledged along with dozens of others. And yes, he shared that page with more than a few people.
Groups, Professional Organizations, and Schools. Try to contact students, clubs, and alumni groups from schools you’ve attended: all potential members of your buying/reviewing audience. Tap your social networks, especially LinkedIn, asking these groups if they’d like a free copy of your book in exchange for comments about your book.
When you ask for reviews, make it easy for your potential reviewers to target their comments by posing easy-to-answer, specific questions, such as for nonfiction, “How did this book help you?” or for fiction, “What did you enjoy most about this book?” Include a link to your book page on Amazon so that your reviewers have click-through information at their fingertips.
Customers, Staff, Clients. If you’re already represented by a literary agency like ours, then you are already in the company of authors who are likely to exchange reciprocal reviews with you, since all authors seek reviews. If you offer reviews to other authors, they will review your book, too. You can ask your agent to connect you with other authors he/she represents to make the initial connections. If you have a client base, you already have a personal relationship with people you can reach out to for reviews.
Forums/Colleagues/Subject Matter Experts. As you build your audience in advance of your publication, your memberships will be very important in developing your future audience for reviews and sales. Go to Meetup.com (noted in Chapter 7) to seek and join relevant groups of people. You can reach out to and exchange messages with other members on this site, and they are always looking for speakers, too. You can also search your subject matter area online to find other knowledgeable, interested people who share your passion for your subject matter and who might be willing to review your book online. Reach out to people who may want to review you and who may be in need of coauthors, chapter or article writers, or guest bloggers.
David Busch doesn’t rely on his publisher to send out all the review copies needed; instead, he increases his number of free titles to 50 so he can send out his own as well. David speaks at local photography forums of about 300 members each, which are his audience. He announces his next book and then asks his audience to sign up for a free copy. When the book is out, he sends a stock letter with his own personalized note and signature saying, “Here is your free copy, no strings attached. If you find a typo or mistake, please notify me privately so that I can correct that in the next edition. If you’re inclined to post a public review, here is the URL.” These are some of his successful techniques for soliciting reviews that keep his titles at the top of Amazon’s ranking system. David has an excellent response rate on accelerated rate of reviews once the book is posted as published and for sale on Amazon.
Amazon Top Reviewers. As an optional plus, you can contact some of the Amazon Top Reviewers. These are unpaid volunteers who review books because they love to do it. The more books they review, and the more that customers indicate that they find their reviews helpful, the higher their ranking at Amazon and the more credibility their reviews have with people looking to buy books. For an added boost, search for these Amazon’s Top Reviewers at amazon.com/review/top-reviewers. Search for Top Reviewers who review books in your subject area. Click on a reviewer’s name; from there you can look at their Amazon profile to find their website or blog. Amazon Top Reviewers denoted by a prestige badge are ranked higher on Amazon. Reach out and send a concise inquiry to see if one of these reviewers will agree to receive your book for free with no obligation, and you may be selected by one of these prestigious Amazon Top Reviewers.
Pre-publication reviews. If you receive a pre-publication book review from any of the major trade publications, Amazon will allow you or your publisher to post up to ten editorial reviews on your book detail page.
- Check with your publisher on who will post Editorial Reviews. Whoever posts to this section first owns the section. If you later find a review that hasn’t been posted, you have to ask Amazon to update the listing.
- If you’re going to be responsible for updating this section, go to your Author Central page (see Chapter 12).
- Click the Books tab.
- Click the title of your book.
- Go to the Editorial Review section and click Add (if there is no previous review on the site) or Edit.
- Fill out the form. You can post up to 600 words of the review on your page. Include the name of the reviewer and the publication or website the review appeared in.
- Click Preview to see what the review looks like.
- Click Save Changes when you’re done.
Timing Your First Amazon Reviews
Your first book reviews count the most by far, as Amazon selects three from the very first reviews that will stay on the site as beacon reviews. The timing is critical to ask for reviews from your associates and audience, as people can’t post reviews before the book is listed on the site for sale. Authors post on their blogs when the book is out to let motivated reviewers know when to post.
Other Online Book Review Sites
People have always gathered in various venues to explore the question “Read any good books lately?” so it’s no surprise that one of the most popular ways to spend time online in the digital era is to hang out with other people to have conversations about books. As an author, you owe it to yourself to spend some time hanging out in some of these places.
Beyond Amazon, here are some of the other top online book review sites, along with some strategies for how to use these sites to build your audience.
Several sites have tried to be the place for sharing book reviews and recommendations with friends and strangers. Goodreads, a site that essentially helps friends talk about books, has won that battle. Launched in 2007, Goodreads was acquired by Amazon in 2013, but it’s critical that you have a presence on both. Be sure to update your author page on Amazon and solicit reviews on the Amazon as well as the Goodreads site.
Goodreads users share what they are reading with others on the site and post progress reports as they read. When you add a new book, you can put the book on a “shelf.” Everyone has shelves based on whether they’ve read a book in the past, are currently reading the book, or want to read the book in the future. In addition, you can tag books based on their genre, subject, or anything else that helps you organize your collection.
Users can apply a star-rating to any book and write longer reviews as well. These reviews appear on the book’s Goodreads page. This is a place where your community of supporters is essential.
SIGNING UP FOR THE GOODREADS AUTHOR PROGRAM
Signing up as a reader on Goodreads is simple, and you can log into it via social media channels or set up a separate login.
If you haven’t published a book yet, you can post your original writing in the Stories section of the site for others to read and comment on. From your profile page, click My Writing. Goodreads encourages you to “add just about anything—short stories, poetry, chapters of a book, or even whole books!” This opportunity to share works in progress and the like can attract an audience. Readers, in turn, will visit your profile, driving traffic to your author site as well as getting to know you through Goodreads.
Click Add New Writing to start the posting process. Fiction is clearly the star here in terms of readership, but posting any original material where you hold the copyright and all other rights is permitted. Read over the guidelines in the right sidebar to confirm the rules regarding copyright, fan fiction posts, and general etiquette. Fan fiction includes stories based on other writers’ characters and settings (think Star Trek, Hogwarts, Middle Earth, and Twilight).
Fill out the form so readers can find your work on the site, then copy the text into the edit box provided. Readers can add reviews, so make sure your material is high quality.
If you have published a book, first search for your name on the site. Your title(s) should appear in the results. Click on your name to open the Author Profile page. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Click “Is this you?” to send a request to join the Author Program. Within a couple of days, Goodreads will update the database, and you’ll see the phrase “Goodreads Author” next to your name.
Once Goodreads has confirmed your author status, you’ll see your book cover on your home page every time you log into Goodreads. You’ll also see a few statistics about how Goodreads members have been reacting to your book. Click Visit your dashboard to manage your Goodreads presence.
Begin by editing your author profile. Every author with a book in the database gets a profile page, but most of them are prepared by site staff. As a member of the Goodreads Author Program, you can control what appears on your profile.
Your profile page form begins by asking the basic stuff: date and place of birth, and gender. You can safely ignore the date of death field. Share as much of this information as you feel comfortable with; none of it is mandatory. You can also define up to three genres that you write in. Also provide links to your website, Twitter page, and other social media platforms so people who discover you on Goodreads can find you elsewhere.
Most importantly, you can write your biography section in the text field of the form. This is where you can further define your niche and humanize yourself by sharing a little bit about yourself. If you’ve included an About page on your site, you can simply copy and paste some or all of that material here. Whether you repurpose your bio or write something new, just take care to keep your message consistent.
As with everything related to your online presence in social media, adding at least one professional photo of yourself serves to prove that you really exist in real life. In the new web environment, it’s important that your audience feels welcome to reach out and talk to you. Your first “profile photo” will appear on your book pages and whenever you are active on the site (posting in a group, updating your reading list, and the like). Ideally, this is a small version of your consistent author brand headshot. You can also add other photos of you or your books that will appear on your profile page, so if you post more, be sure that they have a consistent look and feel.
We strongly urge you to create a book trailer or at least a 60-second video of a simple reading from your book or excerpt from a verbal presentation. A video recording posted to one of the major video sites is powerful, and you can link to the video and display it here, too. The upload page has a good description of how to get the appropriate embed code pasted into this form. Be sure to use tags to aid findability for your videos; see Chapter 10 for more on tagging and Chapter 14 for additional information on creating promotional videos.
CONNECTING WITH YOUR WEBSITE AND BLOG
As with Amazon Author Central (see Chapter 12), Goodreads offers authors blog space on the site. You can also link to your existing blog’s RSS feed. The formatting can be a little strange, but linking saves you enormous amounts of time by displaying the complete content of your posts on Goodreads. Readers can Like and comment on your posts in Goodreads and share the Goodreads link on both Facebook and Twitter.
Goodreads also provides you with three different types of widgets to place on your website. These are configured on your author profile page (no, you don’t have to write the HTML text); copy the code, then paste it on your book site (or wherever you discuss the book on your author site). The widgets include:
- Reviews. This allows your website visitors to see reviews of your book from other Goodreads users, and then contribute their own review back to Goodreads.
- Add to My Books. Also for your book page, lets your visitors add the book to their shelf, see the overall ratings of your book on Goodreads, and (optionally) see which of their Goodreads friends have your book on their shelves.
- Show My Books. This widget just displays basic information about all of your books on the site. It includes the cover of each book with a link to its Goodreads page. The widget also displays the number of reviews the book has received and its rating. Great for a sidebar on all your site’s pages.
Goodreads started on the road to popularity as a Facebook app. It continues to promote the Facebook connection by including a Goodreads tab for your Facebook author Page, which you should enable. First, connect your Goodreads and Facebook accounts by installing the Goodreads Facebook app. Go to the Goodreads Facebook page (you’ll probably want to Like it while you’re there). Click the gear icon and select Add App to Page, at which point you’ll add the tab to your author Page.
Where the Goodreads social network really becomes social is in the large number and varied membership of Goodreads groups. Anyone, including you, can set up a group, but as an author, you first want to find existing groups containing your likely audience members. Joining public groups is easy: Find the group and click Join This Group. You’ll be asked to decide how often you want to get notified of group activity, and then you’re in!
The well-organized Groups page offers several ways to locate the right groups for you: Tags are selected by group owners to describe specific areas that their group discusses (such as paranormal romance, nonfiction, and music). Goodreads places groups in one of nine very general categories (Books & Literature being by far the largest), almost to the point of being useless. At the top of the Groups page, you can use the Find Groups search engine to locate pockets of audience members.
After finding kindred spirits in the genre/topic areas, check out the Goodreads Authors/Readers group, “dedicated to connecting readers with Goodreads authors,” per the group introduction. This large and active group is divided into genres and different areas to make it easier to find what’s of interest to you.
Don’t just join groups to lurk—participate! Your goal is to demonstrate your expertise (if you’re writing nonfiction) and your style (whatever you write). Don’t just promote yourself and your projects; contribute to the success of the group. Answer questions, and ask them, too. Be funny if you can. As you participate, other group members will become your fans and others may become your friends (online, and a few perhaps in real life).
As a Goodreads author, you’re encouraged to set up a Q&A group when you have a book to release and promote. With your active participation in other groups leading up to your Q&A, you should have quite an audience to discuss your project with—and you may come away with fans for life!
Work with your publisher to build word-of-mouth about your book, and set up a First Reads giveaway of a set number of physical books ahead of your book’s launch date. Go to goodreads.com/giveaway/new to define the terms of the giveaway: start and end dates, the ISBN, number of copies, and what countries the giveaway will ship to are the required fields. A description of the book, while not mandatory, is clearly an advantage in encouraging readers to enter the giveaway.
Goodreads promotes the giveaway and selects the winners. It’s your (or your publisher’s) job to ship the books to the winners.
Shelfari is mostly important because Amazon owns it. While it was once designed as a social network like Goodreads, Amazon now positions it as sort of a Wikipedia for books and literature. Nonetheless, the Community area with thousands of registered groups remains.
As with Goodreads (though using just one “shelf”), Shelfari users add books to a Reading Timeline, labeled Reading Now, I Plan to Read, and I’ve Read. It has the star-ranking system and also allows lengthier reviews. Shelfari doesn’t let you report your reading progress, but it encourages you to enter descriptions of characters, settings, favorite quotes, and other interesting material contained inside the book’s covers.
In Chapter 12, you learned how to sign up with Amazon Author Central. Becoming an Amazon Author on Shelfari involves connecting your Author Central account to your Shelfari account.
- In Author Central, click on the Books tab on your page.
- Pick one book.
- Click the Book Extras tab on the book page.
- Click Visit Shelfari.com.
- Log into Shelfari.
- A banner will appear, identifying you as an Amazon Author, and your profile photo will get a badge, too.
Anyone can edit your author page, but once you’ve been verified as an author, you have a little more credibility making changes to your own page. Amazon and its group of librarians post the material that already exists on your Amazon profile to identify your bibliography, so if you find any errors on your Shelfari page, check the Amazon page first to verify that the information there is correct. Return to Shelfari to fix the error(s) later.
You can create an Overview of your life and career if you choose. As with the other networks, feel free to paste your existing “about me” information in this section. In the Personal section of your author page, you can (optionally) enter your birthdate and place, nationality, gender, “official website,” and the genres in which you write. The latter is a simple edit field, so you can place as many tags there as you like to help readers find you in this field. If your area of expertise is pet adoption, use such tags as nonfiction, pets, pet adoption, dogs, and the like.
When looking at your author profile, visitors click the Books tab to see all of your books, with thumbnails of the covers and a brief summary of each. Both you and your visitors to the author page can initiate discussions about your work using the Discussions tab.
CONNECTING WITH YOUR WEBSITE AND OTHER NETWORKS
Shelfari doesn’t have any built-in integration with other social networks. Because Amazon allows authors to link to both blogs and general sites, having Shelfari links to these same venues is less important. As a reader, you can install a widget with the books on your Reading Timeline on your WordPress, Blogger, or TypePad blog.
PARTICIPATING IN GROUPS AND OTHER COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES
When you click on the Community tab in Shelfari, you’ll see several ways to find and connect with other Shelfari members. As an author, your best bet to find potential readers is in the Groups section. As with Goodreads, a multitude of groups exist, but finding really active groups in your area may be difficult.
Begin by reviewing the Most Active Groups tab. Here you can see the groups that added the most members, most books, and most posts in the last day, week, month, or “all time.” Click the Group Categories tab to see how Shelfari groups their groups. From the Browse Categories pages, the search bar will also help you find relevant groups.
As with Goodreads’ Author/Readers group, Shelfari has a Writing Readers group, not surprisingly the most popular in the Authors & Writing category.
LibraryThing started out as a place for people to catalog their own personal libraries. Later on, the site developed relationships with public libraries, so you can add books you got at the library, too. It’s still the most noncommercial of the sites we’re discussing. As a reader, you can catalog up to 200 books for free. For $25, you can catalog everything you’ve ever read. It’s a simply designed website that may look a little dated and awfully text-heavy, but there are no ads in sight.
For users, the experience of adding books is a little clunkier than it is on the other sites we’ve discussed. Click the Add Books tab to get a search engine; type a title, author, ISBN, or Library of Congress catalog number to find a book. By default, LibraryThing will search one of a variety of online library catalogs. Instead of “shelves,” LibraryThing lets you organize your books into “Collections.” The default Collections include the standard Read, Currently Reading, and To Read. You can add other collections. You can also use tags to further organize your books.
BECOMING A LIBRARYTHING AUTHOR
When you arrive at LibraryThing, search for your name. A list of books will come up. Click on your name, and your author page appears. At the top of the right sidebar column, you’ll see a box asking “Is this you? Become a LibraryThing Author.” Click the link, and you’ll be asked to select your title, and “add a message if you want.”
Once LibraryThing confirms your identity, you get a LibraryThing Author icon on your profile page.
CONNECTING WITH YOUR WEBSITE AND OTHER NETWORKS
You can add many types of links to your author page sidebar. Link to your website and Twitter account to start. Continue linking to any or all of these pages (called link types):
- Publisher author page
- Wikipedia author page
- Interviews with you
- Press items about you
- An academic site (once they start creating courses on your work)
- Fan site
- The “Other” category, where you can link to your other social sites
You must supply the URL for each site you link to and you can also provide a title, which is what will appear as the link title.
LibraryThing offers a Friend Finder tool to connect you with your Twitter followers and Facebook friends, but not much else in the way of direct integration with other social networks.
The default method of finding kindred spirits and potential fans on LibraryThing is perhaps less intuitive, but more fun than the other sites we’ve discussed so far. We’ll suggest that the groups here are also more lively than other sites as well, with the possible exception of Goodreads.
When you arrive at the Groups tab, you get a tag cloud indicating what’s hot in the groupsphere. Click on a tag link to see all the groups related to that area, sorted by activity level. The Groups home page also highlights groups that are Active This Week, new groups, official and standing committees, groups with the most members, and community projects (like “Name That Book,” a project where members can recall a book’s plot, but no longer remember the title). LibraryThing also will point you to Local Groups, based on the reasonable distance from your location (as you report it to the site).
As you build your collections on the site, a Group Suggestions area will try to connect you with other readers with similar book collections. One final aid is that some groups are identified as “dormant,” which gives you the opportunity to ignore or attempt to revive the group, depending on your level of interest.
Every month, the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program offers users a chance to pick up a free book with the voluntary condition that they provide a review on LibraryThing in the early days of publication. Publishers (including self-publishers) can offer some combination of physical copies, ebooks, or audiobooks for distribution. Usually, there are more than 100 titles offered each month.
“Where the writers are” is the tagline for this site, and many big names are displayed on the home page. This is a place for more established writers to deepen their relationships with their audience. The key difference between Red Room and the other networks discussed in this chapter is that Red Room offers some of its registered authors the ability to sell books directly through its own online retail outlet, the Red Room Bookstore. You must invest in a premium membership to sell books through the Red Room Royalties program, but you can earn the money back through a higher royalty rate on books sold through this channel. Red Room gives you 15% of the retail price of your book for every book sold on the site. When someone buys your book on Red Room, you will connect with the buyer on the site. This way you can build a list of buyers and communicate with them on a regular basis if you so choose.
Premium membership also relieves you of many of the decisions involved in creating a standalone website. They maintain the consistent design across the website, and you can just focus on creating content. You can also contribute content on Red Room without a premium membership —you just won’t be able to sell books.
When you join Red Room as a community member (for free), you get your blog space and a biographical area. You can contribute content in the form of essays, poems, and the like. When your book is published, you can link to it here, but Red Room does not consider you a “Red Room Author” until you’ve become a premium member and then filled out your application.
COMPLETING YOUR RED ROOM PROFILE
All members, paid or not, get access to a dashboard that allows them to add content and update their profiles. The dashboard also tells you how many visits you got on your pages on a daily basis. On the right side of the dashboard, you can update your account settings and build your profile.
Click About Me to display the My Profile page, where you can enter and edit your profile information. There’s up to five pages of information you can enter, but the only required material is your name and biographical information. You cannot add other content to the site without this. This is also the page to upload your profile picture to.
As you edit each page in your profile, be sure to click Save at the bottom.
In More About Me, you can identify your hometown, where you live now, date of birth, and similar information. There are big edit boxes where you can discuss your marriage, family, interests, and hobbies. You may also list up to five nonprofit organizations in the “Causes I Support” box.
Under Reading Interests, you can name your favorite books and authors, then tell people what you’re reading now. In Work and Education, you can tell readers where you work and went to school.
The last page, Custom Contact Message, gives you the opportunity to say something to readers who use the site’s contact form to reach you. You could use this message to refer visitors to your author site or invite them to subscribe to your newsletter or otherwise connect to your platform.
CONNECT WITH YOUR WEBSITE AND BLOG
When you fill out your profile, be sure to link to your author website in the Web Links at the bottom of the More About Me page.
CONNECT WITH FACEBOOK AND TWITTER
From your dashboard, click Connect to my Twitter account. Click Add account. Red Room will post your tweets on your public profile page.
While you’re there, click Facebook from the menu at the top. When you Enable Facebook, Red Room will also include your status updates on your public profile page.
CREATE AND MANAGE CONTENT ON RED ROOM
As noted earlier, when you have added your name and biographical information to your profile, you can include a variety of original material to your section of Red Room. You’ll see the Add Content pod on your dashboard. Original writing, including blog posts, articles, and book reviews, can help you gain page views and attract fans.
More promotional material, like press releases, book trailers, and interview transcripts, are also permitted on the site. Take advantage of these opportunities.
As you read books that you find genuinely helpful, be sure to make it a practice to review them favorably in public and, if possible, send your comments directly to the authors of the books you like. In this way, you build up an author network that will take the time to read and comment on your work, too. Often we forget to make a positive comment when we like something or someone’s work because we don’t have enough time, and this works both ways when you need others to comment on your work. It’s critical that as an author you constantly and publicly express your appreciation—through your writing, social media, and other interactions with your audience, as what goes around comes around.
5-star reviews for author client Alexander Besher’s novel Rim.
Incorporate Reviews Into Your Author Platform
Always put the pieces together by repurposing content to form your author platform. Include all reviews on your book and author site. Ask reviewers to link back to your website, and add a PDF of reviews for easy download on your press page.
Ramp up your outreach to potential reviewers the minute you deliver your final manuscript to your publisher.
Three months prior to publication, send out galley proofs to reviewers.
Send out free copies to potential reviewers as soon as your book is published.
Review others’ books positively and let the authors know you did.
Join or use all of your group memberships as support systems for reviews.
Ask audience and colleagues to post positive comments citing a specific way the book touched, moved, inspired, or helped.
Join review sites. Find book review blogs.
Connect all information together on your author website.
Success Spotlight: Waterside Client David Busch (facebook.com/DavidBuschGuides)
- 200 books
- 12 language translations, including Czech, Arabic, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, and Bulgarian
- 2,000,000 copies sold
- 72 hugely successful guidebooks for various digital camera models, including all-time #1 bestsellers for many of them
Beginnings: After graduating from Kent State University, Busch worked for more than 20 years in the public relations industry. He operated his own photo studio and was a principal in CCS/PR, Inc., one of the largest public relations firms based in San Diego, working on press conferences, press kits, media tours, and sponsored photo trade magazine articles. In addition to Kodak, CCS’s photography clients included Hewlett-Packard. He sold his interest in CCS in 1992 to become a full-time author, photographer, and reporter. Since then, Busch has become one of the leading photojournalist/authors in the United States.
As a writer, Busch has managed to stumble into a specific niche on five different occasions, moving on to the “next big thing” when each was just a thing, and not yet big. He says, “Each ‘career’ change took me into areas where I had a special love or expertise, a desire to learn more, and an eagerness to share what I learned with others.”
His underlying premise was that “I didn’t need to know everything about a topic. I just needed to know more than my readers and have the ability to explain it to them better than anyone else writing about that topic. The more deeply I explored any particular niche, the more I learned and the more I had to offer to a broader audience.”
Fan base: I worked to build a fan base that always asks for the David Busch guide because they know the style and kind of information in my books, so I asked my publisher to put a large photograph of me on the back cover. Readers see me as a friend to help them explore their cameras. I do sometimes work with coauthors selected for their particular expertise in a topic, but I write a great deal of the words that appear in each book with my name on it.
Radio: 21 different radio shows nationally and in major markets.
TV: He’s been a call-in guest for one Canadian television show, and appeared live on Breakfast Television in Toronto, the Today Show of the Great White North.
Facebook page, blog, speaker at forums: Per David, “I know my books and audience best, and my past life in public relations/advertising gives me the skills I need to promote my books. Tim O’Reilly once said, ‘Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy,’ and that’s never been more important than in our modern age of ebooks. So I distribute as many as 50 copies of each of my books to readers with a personal note asking them to post a favorable review if they like the book and to contact me directly with their concerns if they do not like it. I spend time each and every day answering their questions. Some percentage of content for each new book comes from direct contact with readers.”
David’s advice to authors: Yes, perhaps I have stumbled into a niche, but recognize that even a niche can be a moving target. Only by expanding and adapting an author platform is it possible to follow and grow along with them.