Author: Kelly

• Write up an engaging and suspenseful description of your book by using active voice. If you know how, use some html code to change the font attributes (color, bold, italics). This will help people to stay on your book page and read the description.
• Once your book is for sale, setup up an author page through Amazon Author Central. Enter a short bio and link your blog.
• In your Amazon profile (what people see when you write reviews) precede your name with “Author” and use your author name. In “About” include information about your book.
• Reviews on Amazon are what people use to determine if they will buy your book or not. Ask everyone who has read it for reviews! And don’t despair over those negative ones. Depending on your book content, they might actually strengthen it’s sale-ability.

A Facebook Author Page is free advertising! If you have a Facebook account it is easy to set one up. It is not possible for people to get to your personal Facebook page from your Author Page. Your author page will be public and available even to those who don’t have a Facebook account.

Since Facebook is constantly changing, I will not give specifics on how to set one up. However, you can simply do a search for “Facebook author page” and you will find lots of help.

A few tips:

• Pick out a name that is either your author name, the name of your book, or something that is relevant. Make it simple.
• Put a picture of your book right at the top and/or make it the profile picture.
• Create a post that will be pinned to the top that contains links your author web page, the Amazon page for your book, any other important links.
• Whenever you get a review on Amazon, take a screenshot of it and post it here.
• Keep an eye out for items in the news that is relevant to you book and post about it with a link to the news story.
• Stay away from politics, your kids & pets, and super personal stuff.

Notice I didn’t title this “Book Website.” That’s because many of today’s popular authors are putting out so many books that it makes sense to only have an author website that contains all their books. Readers are used to this, so it’s good to go with the flow on this.

Your website name (domain name) must be your author name. So Jimmy Joe Schmidt’s site would be www.jimmyjoeschmidt.com.

Put a picture of your book(s) on the home page (very first page a visitor sees). Then you can add other pages or scrolling that includes the following:

• Pictures from or associate with your book (make sure it is a picture you took or is in Creative Commons)
• Creatively formatted description
• Good reviews from Amazon or Good Reads
• Blog
• Links to buy your book (Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Just like Facebook, this is more free advertising!

Simply do a search on how to setup an author page in GoodReads.

Ask your friends to add your book to lists in GoodReads.

Although Amazon owns GoodReads, the reviews are not yet shared between the two platforms.

Doing a Google search for a popular author and one of their books will result in a separate box from the normal search results that shows:

• cover
• description
• excerpt
• links to buy (all but Amazon)
• link to Google Search of author
• search box for borrowing from libraries

This is great information to see from a simple Google search. It is accomplished through the Google Books Partner Program. Getting your book included in Google Books might not be easy. You might come across broken links or a long approval process. It might take months, but I encourage you to persevere.

Google Books requires you to upload a digital version of your book. Once approved, a Google search of your name and book title will show a separate box containing the information listed above. It will also be available for sale from Google Books.