Thursday, August 16, 2012

How to support your favourite authors

An interesting blog post by Philippa Ballantine talks about five ways to support your favourite authors so that they can keep writing.

Here are the suggestions in no particular order

  1. Amazon. Click the Like button under the title of the books you love. The Amazon folk use this in their magic algorithm, and it helps the book show up higher on a list.
  2. Amazon. Scroll down and click on the tags that the book has. Or make new ones yourself. This will also help people find your friendly author.
  3. Amazon/Barnes and Noble/Smashwords/Kobo/Goodreads/any other social network. Leave a review. It doesn’t have to be long. Apparently the least it can be is twenty words—but that is not too much. In the end the reviews all add up.
  4. Blog or Facebook. If you have a blog and can write a paragraph or two, then spread the word. Also imbed images or video files so that it can be pinned on Pinterest.
  5. Tell a friend. Honestly, Fifty Shades of Grey didn’t become popular because of marketing, it became popular because all the mums in the world talked about it at the playground. Unlikely anyone will be able to replicate that success, but still word-of-mouth does really help.

What do you think? What are your best ways for helping out your favourite authors?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Sue,

Everytime I finish a book I bring it in to work and it gets passed around the office, once we've all read it, it goes onto our bookshelf for our members to read! By doing this we read books we may necessarily not have bought but after enjoying it we will start buying the authors next book, or buy previous ones.

Shafia x

Sue Hepworth said...

It sounds like a great system, Shafia.