How big is your digital footprint?
If you want people to discover your books, you should do everything you can to make yourself easy to find online. I frequently receive emails from authors who are despondent over poor book sales, but when I look to see what kind of a digital footprint the authors have, all too often I find nothing, not even an Amazon Author Page.
I understand that not everyone has the resources to hire a designer for a fancy website, but here are several things all authors can do that cost nothing more than time and energy:
1) Complete your Amazon Author Page. If you have a book on Amazon, you have an author page, which appears via a hyperlink to your name under the title of your book on the book’s detail page. If you don’t fill the page in with your bio, headshot, contact information, etc., visitors will see only a list of your work. To edit your Author Page, create an account in Amazon’s Author Central by clicking on this link. (Here’s my Amazon Author Page.)
2) Set up a Facebook author page. (Here’s my Facebook author page.)
3) Set up a Twitter account. (Here’s mine.)
4) Set up a Goodreads page. (Here’s mine.)
5) Set up a LinkedIn account. (Here’s mine.)
If you look at the links I’ve shared here, you’ll see my profile/bio/tagline in each one is essentially the same. It shouldn’t take hours to set up these accounts. The key is to prepare your basic materials first, then insert them as necessary across various channels.
You never know which potential readers might be looking for you, or where they might inadvertently stumble across you. But if your digital footprint is nowhere to be found, the chance of anyone’s finding you is zero, and zero is not a good number for sales.
-Maria
This blog post originally appeared on CreateSpace.com. Reprinted with permission. 2018 CreateSpace, a DBA of On-Demand Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved.