Julie Broad from Book Launchers walks through why authors should use Goodreads and five ways to promote there: add quotable excerpts, run paid giveaways, use PPC ads, answer reader questions, and create Listopia lists. She warns that Amazon owns Goodreads and recommends using a separate email to protect review integrity.
Questions this video answers
85 million members (as of March 29).
$200 (giveaway fee).
June 14, 2019.
Chapters
I'm kind of embarrassed that I've filmed more than a hundred videos for you and this is the first time I'm telling you this, but my lack of emphasis is not an indicator of level importance. You need a Goodreads account as an author and if you don't know what that is or why you need it, this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers, your professional self publishing team that will help you write, publish and promote a money making impact creating nonfiction book. We've helped some amazing authors write, publish and promote their books to achieve their goals and help their readers. Here are just a few of the fantastic books we've worked on recently. So good. Check those books out. One of the things we do behind the scenes for each of our clients is to get them to set up an account on Goodreads. So what is Goodreads? Oh, I know what is Goodreads. My diary. Well, let me show you. Here is their website. It's kind of like a social media site for power readers. You know, people who consume a lot of books and like to tell others about what they're reading. It also offers a really great platform for you, the author seeking hungry readers. It's a really great opportunity for you to showcase your book, tell those hungry readers more about you and your book, collect reviews and catch the attention of more readers. As of March 29, they have 85 million members. Yeah, that's a lot of readers. Now let's take a look at one of our authors, Gillian Gertzen and her book the Elephant in the Gym. Now I picked her as an example because she's doing a good job of communicating with her reviewers, not just letting everything happen for her and her book. So you can see there's a space for images, there's links to buy the book. You have a Q and A section with the author if you want to use it. And there's more things you can do if you want. But mostly I just want you to see that you the people are reviewing the book, marking it as want to read and rating the book. You can also run Goodreads giveaways if you want to drive more attention to your book for a fee. This can add value in getting more reviews and getting a whole lot of potential readers to put you on their want to read list. But before you do any of this, let me talk about something super important. Super important. Do you know who owns Goodreads? If you said Amazon, you're right. You've probably already Seen my video on how to protect your Amazon reviews from being removed? But here's the punchline again. When you create your Goodreads account and connect it to your Amazon account, do not connect via Facebook or Twitter. Also, if it's possible, and it might not be possible because you have to tie it back to your Amazon account to select the books that are yours, set it up with a different email address than you use for those social media accounts. There have been multiple reports that this connection is what allows Amazon to see who you are friends with on Facebook and therefore make quick connection regarding reviews by friends and family. Let's face it, Amazon already has way more information about us than most of our closest relatives have, maybe even our significant others. But any little step you can take to keep things separate can help you with keeping any reviews that you do get. Bottom line, get in there, create your Goodreads account, claim your books, put up a nice 400 by 400 pixel headshot of yourself. See this video on getting a great author headshot and voila. Now you're ready to use your Goodreads account for the greater good of your book promotion. All that aside, let's quickly hit on the five ways to use that Goodreads account that you've now created. Number one, Become a quoted author. This is my favorite idea and I have to give Dave Chessen of kdp, Rocket and Kindlepreneur full credit because I never thought of it until I saw it on his blog. But goodreads.com has a depository of quotes, so as long as you have a direct quote from your book, you can add quotes. Oh, I love this idea so much. I'm actually thinking I'm going to hire someone onto my Book Launchers team to do this for our authors. I I'm not even kidding because it's super cool. Number two Run a Goodreads Giveaway Once upon a time, Goodreads giveaways were free and I did them for my books, but you had to mail physical copies out, so that kind of sucked. But it did get your book on a lot of want to read lists and many, many free book hungry readers. You can run Goodreads giveaways now for a fee of $200, but you can also run them on ebooks, so at least you don't have to handle the manual input of addresses, shipping, and then printing costs for your winners. You can just email them. So are Goodreads giveaways worth doing? Well, that's a discussion for another day, but the short answer is yes, if you have the right genre of your books. But if you have a limited budget and you're a nonfiction author, I'd probably spend my money on a netgalley promotion to get high quality reviews from the right readers versus Goodreads. But again, this does depend. Number three, Promote your book with paid ads. This runs very similar to most other PPC type ad platforms. My guess is that if you write fiction and have a first in a series and you want to get a whale reader to read your book, you know, those folks who read 10 books a month, then PPC on Goodreads is probably a great place to do this. The reality for nonfiction authors is that your ideal reader probably isn't spending a ton of time on Goodreads. But again, your genre and your topic and your ideal reader are really what you need to think about and do your research on before you decide. Side note, there's a study on who the active readers are on Goodreads and they don't like hockey. What that means there's no Canadians on Goodreads and they're more likely to be women than than men and under the age of 35. But before you pay to advertise, look into that specifically to see if it's a fit so you can check out a link below to help you with that. Number four do an author Q and A. When I showed you Jillian's page, I showed you where the author Q and A could go. That's a fun place to interact with your potential readers and fans. Number five Use Goodreads lists. This will require an entire video unto itself, but essentially Goodreads has lists and you can add your book to lists or create a list of like books and share it on Listopia. You probably should do both, but just know that your book will get up and down votes on the those lists. So it needs to be relevant and readers will be looking for their next read on Goodreads. So I think you should be there whether you spend a lot of time there. Well, I think that depends on whether your ideal reader is likely to be hanging out there or not. Again, Goodreads is a huge subject and I wanted to give you a quick crash course, but we'll get into it more in the future. But first tell me, are you on Goodreads and do you use it? Tell me more below in the comments and if you have a question, let me know and I just might shoot a video to answer it for you. If you like this video, smash that thumbs up button. Go ahead, try it it feels so good. And while you're here, make sure you subscribe to the channel so you know when the next video is coming out. Except for in the summer when we take a break, new videos come out every Tuesday and Friday and if you comment the day a video is released, you will be entered to win some sweet book launcher swag with the hashtag noboringbooks. Here is a really fabulous video you should watch Next. But if you have already seen that one, then check this one out. What are you waiting for? I'm waiting for you on the next video, so go ahead and click it.
