Five Best Sites For Your Book Promotion On The Web

(Social Media for Book Promotion), Part II

Social networking sites grew by 60+ million users in the last 6 month period. There are dozens of very popular places an author could join, but unless you really want to miss your deadline and annoy your publisher, it is better to prioritize. To that end I recommend the following strategy. For each of these sites, when you set up an account, be sure to put a link to your website, a picture of your upcoming book, and a link to your blog, if you have one.

1. Start accounts on Facebook and Myspace, if you do not yet have them. Myspace is the third ranked website in the USA, only Yahoo and Google are more often visited, so swallow any of your reservations and begin there. One in fifty people worldwide have a Facebook account, can you afford not to? Later (or now, if you are already on top of these) you can turn your attention to sites that are specialized like librarything.com, or mycrimespace. In later articles I will go into more depth on all the sites discussed in this article.

2. Twitter. It’s quick and easy, and some day you may just get addicted. But you have to have it, to stay in rapid touch with fans, peers and others when you get your networking activities rolling. Get an account, and when you have your profile ready and a password, then go to summize and twellow. Twellow has a directory; you need to enter some basic information so others can find you.

3. Digg and Stumbleupon are your next stops. Digg is a social news site (later you will want to join at least one other such site) and Stumbleupon is similar, but its has  a focus on saving and sharing bookmarks of the sites you like the most.

OK, well there are a lot more to join, but for now its time to get familiar with the terrain. In the next series of articles, I will begin with a discussion of networking; helping you determine how to make friends and fans feel a part of it all.

After that, we will explore blogs and how writing blogs, or commenting in other author’s blogs, can help you become a welcome and contributing member of the growing internet community that will, if you are a good author, help your book rise to the surface and get noticed across the internet.

Then we will offer a series of “how to” articles that will take you a little more into what you don’t yet know about each of the sites mentioned in this article.

Finally, a series of more advanced offerings will discuss blog book tours, podcasting, how to find and make use of a niche in your social media efforts, a survey of book review sites, and ideas about where to go next.

Other Links in this Series:
Part I: Overview of Social Media: New Opportunities for Book Promotion
Part III: Friends or Fans? Social Networking Basics for Authors

Overview of Social Media: New Opportunities for Book Promotion

While many authors by now have discovered MySpace, most writers still glaze over when they hear about Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg, Facebook, De.li.cio.us. YouTube and Linked In.  In a series of articles over the next few months, I hope to put the reader on more friendly terms with this strange but wonderful new world.

 

Today I am going to explain why authors need to learn to use social media to promote their books and themselves. In later posts, we will spend a little time getting acquainted with some of these tools, and to introduce a few of the major opportunities for networking that can help you launch the next best seller.

 

Be realistic. Even with a top notch publicist pitching it, your best book ever, and a hot and catchy title, you still have virtually no chance of getting your book featured on Oprah’s Book of the Month.  The number of newspapers and magazines that still review  books has been scaled back dramatically–  for example Sara Pearce, book editor at the Cincinnati Enquirer has left and is not being replaced. Traditional means of promoting your book to the media have been evaporating for some time. But all is not lost, a new champion is riding to the rescue, on the white horse known as social media.

 

Social media is a phrase that describes interactive social communities like MySpace and Facebook.  It also includes blogs (at least when they are actively networking, and social news sites like Digg and Stumbleupon, that ideally allow the average web surfer to decide (literally vote) who on the internet gets the headlines and all the traffic. And it consists of strange forms of communication like  YouTube, or Twitter, an instant messaging mini-blogging tool. All of these and more have converged to create a whole new media face that is rapidly replacing the traditional print, TV, and radio media stallworts. Social media is faster, more creative, more personal, more connected, and typically much more knowledgeable than old fashioned TV, magazines, and newpapers.

 

To authors who hope to promote their  books, with social media it is much easier to rise to the top, if you are funny, talented or interesting.  If your book is good, or your voice one that grabs the ear, you have a better chance of being “found” because your peers- your old and new readers, your fellow authors, book store owners, librarians and the next door neighbor all will have a say in this new media. Because people are getting connected, the reach of web sites, blogs,  and various social media is now limitted only by how much interest your book can stir.

 

In coming articles in this series I will describe more fully the various ways an energetic and talented author can promote a book on the internet with social media, and I will point out some of the pitfalls to avoid. I will also help you, if you are new to all this, to decide which doors you want to open first. Next in the series?

Part II: Five Best Tools For Your Book Promotion on the Web
Part III: Friends or Fans Social Networking Basics for Authors

Groupthink and What’s Wrong With Social Networking

Ever wonder why the herd mentality is holding back social networking? Consider if you will the lens of Groupthink.

Groupthink is a social psychology concept, that might well be a useful concept to apply to social networking. I was reminded of this by a recent post by Klezak’s social marketing blog on applicatons of Group Theory. Groupthink happens when a committee or group does not live up to its potential and instead stifles thought that is outside the mainstream. Analysts credit Kennedy’s mistakes during the Bay of Pigs fiasco to groupthink. He put the best minds of his country in charge, and they blew it because no one spoke up.

This could explain the tension between groupthink reactions like pimping your profile on Myspace and spammers on digg and related sites, on the one hand, and innovative uses of facebook like Help a Reporter Out and other creative ways to wag the tail.

So what does this suggest about how social networks can be improved? Well we need to find a way to encourage as many people as possible to use the current socail networks in an innovative way, and to find ways to voice their new or different thoughts. It doesn’t matter if most users put glitter on their myspace pages, or shout a gazilion marketing sites on Digg. But what does matter is that we find a way of standing out with good ideas. At the moment, to break away from the pack you either need to know how to right a catchy title to your StumbleUpon post or name for your facebook group.

But what if someone developed a ranking system for blogs, or websites, that awarded “authority” better? Can someone out there come up with a way in which to reward to creative ideas (and posts)? I know many of you will say that web 3.0 will solve the problems of web 2.0 with some organic solution, but I think we need to promulgate a means for real skill, expertise and creativity to be nurtured rather than submerged.