Mondays Marketing Your Masterpiece: Authors' Essential Marketing, FREE Author Profile Sites
Now that your website is live it's time to get your profile on every FREE site for authors. Your name, brand and profile need to appear in all the places where writers and readers gather. The other important factor is that all of these important sites provide your site with a link back, from a high ranking book website. That is the basics of gaining high SEO ranking.
The following sites offer authors a FREE service, so take advantage. Get your name out there!
Amazon's Author Central: Amazon loves books, and books begin with authors. As an author, you are part of a special community at Amazon. At Author Central, you have the opportunity to share the most up-to-date information about yourself and your work with your readers -- you can view and edit your bibliography, add a photo and biography to a personal profile, and use a blog to connect with readers.
If you’re an author with a book listed in our catalog, you are eligible to join Author Central. You can use your Amazon.com customer account to get started (or create a new one if needed).
BookTour: Events in BookTour’s database are sent to online calendars and our partner book-friendly sites. Adding your events to BookTour is the quickest way to get them seen by thousands of potential new readers.
Filedby.com: Any author with a book published in the U.S. or Canada can join for free, manage and enhance their pages, promote their books, check for accuracy, provide corrections and much more. The company was started to provide every author with the tools to market successfully on the web.
Goodreads Author Program: Much like MySpace Bands pages, the Goodreads Authors program is a completely free feature designed to help authors reach their target audience — passionate readers. This is the perfect place for new and established authors to promote their books.
The Authors Program is designed for people with published books, or who are in the process of publishing a book. It's best if your work is on a bookseller's site like Amazon, but we will accept any author who has published a book. This includes authors from other countries as well as authors who are self-published (such as through Ebooks or services like Lulu). If your book is self-published and is not yet in the Goodreads database, you may manually add it.
If you are a writer but have not yet published a book, you may want to check out the writing section of your profile where you can post your writing for others to read and review.
Authors Den: The largest most vibrant free online literary community of authors and readers! Visited by 1,400,000+ readers/mo. Authors: participate and you will reach many readers. Share your bio, books, blog, events, stories, articles, poetry and drive traffic to your other websites.
Librarything: LibraryThing is a great place for authors to connect on a personal level with their readers. If you're also a LibraryThing member, then become an official LibraryThing Author, and showcase some of your personal books for interested readers.
Sign up to participate in an Author Chat.
Use LibraryThing Local to your advantage. Add readings and upcoming talks to the "Events" section on your author page, so readers know where to find you.
Linkedin: is an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world, representing 170 industries and 200 countries. You can find, be introduced to, and collaborate with qualified professionals that you need to work with to accomplish your goals.
I can't say enough about LinkedIn, here are several articles and posts explaining why authors should be here:
- http://michellerafter.wordpress.com/2007/12/07/how-writers-can-use-linkedin/
- http://www.fundsforwriters.com/linkedin.htm
- http://writeitdown.groupsite.com/
- http://www.authortechtips.com/2009/07/4-reasons-why-every-author-should-use-linkedin/
Shelfari: introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers (for now). Shelfari is a gathering place for authors, aspiring authors, publishers, and readers, and has many tools and features to help these groups connect with each other in a fun and engaging way. Our mission is to enhance the experience of reading by connecting readers in meaningful conversations about the published word.
Requires you create a "profile" and then request to link your profile with your author page you may have to request that your book be added to their datadase. Their Author Unbound Program allows any member to edit or add to the author's page.
Barnes & Noble: Meet the Writers: If you'd like to be considered for Meet the Writers, send an email to writers@book.com
A Directory of Authors on Twitter: Authors request their twitter account be added.
BookBuzzr: A portable author website in the form of an embeddable book-widget that's shareable across multiple social networks. And with book-pages that look and act like pages from a real book.This is a nifty, free widget to add more flair to your virtual presence.
Storycasting.com: is a site for members to "cast" their dream cast for their favorite books.
<- 25-30% of readers already do this casting thing in some way, and so all we're doing is web-enabling an existing casual hobby. Even if the author isn't one of these 'casual caster' types, they should know that a significant portion of their readers are, and so it's worth it, in terms of the reader/author connection, to post a cast of their own and send their fans. It's a hook, and if you don't use an available hook (especially when it's free), you're just missing out.
- It's a great source of information to blog about. They can blog about their cast, they can make a blog contest using Storycasting, they can later blog about all their fans' casts, etc.
- Storycasting.com is starting to engage with the publishers, by this winter you're going to see publishers using their publicity engine to send readers to the site as part of their launch and genre push.
- Storycasting should be on the list of things every fiction author and publisher does as part of their book promotion process.
Interested authors may email: Holly,author support intern, who will get them and their books set up on the site, and get them an author account so they can cast. Needed are: author, title, synopsis, and cover-art; Storycasting.com can get all that from their website, or from Amazon. If they don't have a website or aren't on Amazon, they need to send that directly (please limit synopsis to ~85 words). Either way, Storycasting.com will put the books in, with the links to Amazon, and a link to their website or blog.
If you learn of other places that authors can post for free please let us know. Spread the word.
Happy Marketing!
