First Five Things a Reader can do for an Author
I borrowed these ideas from Tracy Weber. She came up with a list of 50, but I decided to share only a few at a time, and pick the ones I liked best. So here goes:
Add your favorite author’s books to your Goodreads
bookshelves.
“Shelving” your favorite books gives them more visibility to other
readers. Goodreads even has a way to automatically add the books you
purchased on Amazon!
Write a short (1 – 2 sentences are great!) honest
review of your favorite author’s book(s) and post it on Amazon. Love Amazon or hate
them, they are a key player in book sales, and reviews help your favorite
authors rank higher in the search engines. Some promotional opportunities
are only available to authors if they have a certain number of reviews.
Tell them you love them! Most of the authors
I know make essentially no money on their writing. (Sad, but true!)
So why do we write? For our readers! Drop your favorite author a
line and tell them you appreciate their work. Facebook message, e-mail, a
tweet with their hashtag. Believe me, you will make their day!
Tell a librarian about their work! Librarians are in
the business of matching readers with work they will love, but they can’t read
everything. Tell them about your favorite author’s work and what you love
about it. Point out the cover if it’s already on the shelves. The more a
librarian knows about a book, the more likely they are to recommend it to
patrons that might enjoy it.
Sign up for their newsletter! Facebook is a lovely
community-builder, but it only shows a very small fraction of the posts written
on author pages (considerably less than 5%). So how can an author best
communicate with her most loyal fans? Via a newsletter! If you go
to your favorite author’s web page, they may have a link to their newsletter.
Join and be sure you don’t miss out on any of the fun! Tracy's newsletter is here: http://tracyweberauthor.com/newsletter.html
You can receive mine by emailing me, or signing up on this blog.
And of course, the primary thing you can do is purchase the author's book. My latest is:
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