Digital Marketing

Social Media Best Practices for New Authors: Goodreads

Posted on by cassiemdrumm

Many authors know how important social media can be to their platforms, and in turn for reviews, buzz, and book sales for their new titles. In this new series of posts, I’ll be going over the best practices for social media by platform. To start off: Goodreads.

If you’re at all involved in the bookish community, you know how influential Goodreads can be. It’s a place where readers go to add books to their virtual shelves. They can add to the TBR lists as well as record and review the books that they have read. It’s also a place for authors to connect to readers through Q&As, giveaways, and one-to-one interactions. Social media specifically for book nerds!

First of all, if you’re not on Goodreads as an author yet, you should go ahead and make a profile. You can connect your account through Facebook and it will automatically sign you in and give you the option of adding any and all Facebook friends who are also on Goodreads. Below are some steps to building up your presence on Goodreads.

  • Add your favorite books and books that you want to read to your own shelves.
  • Make sure books related to your own genre of writing are included on your shelves.
  • Rate and review titles that you’ve read.
  • Join a few groups and get involved in discussions.
  • Interact with readers who may be interested in your books by replying to comments, reviews, and discussions.

If you’re published already:

  • Claim your profile for the Goodreads Author Program.
  • Update your author profile with correct photos, social links, and bio.
  • Check and make sure that all of your titles link to your profile and have the correct cover, description, and metadata.
  • Run a giveaway for new or upcoming titles (run this by your publisher to make sure that they aren’t already running one).
    • The best giveaways on Goodreads usually run for a week and involve 2 or 3 books (ARCs or finished copies) as the prizes. If you want to go the extra mile, make them signed!
  • Host an author Q&A through Ask the Author.
  • Take out a self-serve ad for your books (again, check with your publisher first to see if they’re already running ads on Goodreads).
  • Start an author blog on Goodreads or import your blog posts from an already existing site.
  • More Goodreads Author guidelines, straight from the source.

I will come back to this all the time, but social media is all about connecting with readers and building a trusting relationship. Goodreads does this by allowing you to interact with readers in many meaningful ways. Users come to the site specifically to talk about the books that they love, so make sure you’re communicating with them in a positive and supportive way! Once your loyal following is built, your followers on Goodreads can become amazing advocates for your work.

Do you have any tips for using Goodreads as an author? Add them in the comments!

What it Feels Like to Have a Post Go Viral

Posted on by cassiemdrumm

About a week ago I gave BuzzFeed content from one of my assigned books to put in an article. I’ve given BuzzFeed content before and the articles get a couple hundred or a couple thousand views. It might not do a whole lot for book sales, but it looks good to get a spot on a national website that will continue to generate interest. The post went up on BuzzFeed on a Wednesday evening. By the middle of Thursday, I got an email from the writer saying that the post went viral. At that point, there were about 500,000 views on the post, and it was trending in that day’s top articles. I started to get requests from other websites wanting to feature the same content and interview the author of the book. Emails started pouring in asking for images and quotes to use. As I continued to check the original article, it just got more and more popular. The sales rankings on Amazon and B&N went up into the top 100 (from a lowly spot somewhere in the 100,000s). Amazon went out of stock very early, probably because they were not anticipating such widespread sales.

I went home from work on Thursday and people were seeing the article on Facebook and other social media sites. When I would tell my friends about it, they would say that they had seen the article circulating already. Another publicist saw it all over Facebook before I told her about the viral post. On Friday morning, I got an email from the author saying that she didn’t sleep because she was up all night writing answers to interview questions. In another office, publishers were panicking because they would have to reprint the book quickly as our stock was dwindling. I read through the thousands of comments on the article and found that readers thought the post was hilarious (it was a humor book) and they would want to give the book to their friends. The post was continuing to gain speed and went up to 1.7 million views by the time I left work on Friday.

It was an incredibly exhilarating experience to have a post (originating from me) go viral. I’ve only experience something like it one other time, when a celebrity author retweeted a tweet from the company. The tweet gained a lot of traction and the page was gaining followers by the second. But that was nothing compared to this. Requests from major sites were pouring in, all trying to jump on the trend and get their readers to interact with their websites. The visible spike in sales was also very encouraging and actually just pretty amazing. Many times, when there is an article, blog post, or social media post about one of our books, it’s hard to tell whether it made a difference in sales. With this, we can say that it definitely made a difference. All this being said, I will definitely start to think differently about the importance of BuzzFeed articles from now on.