I was pleased to learn today that my book, The Alexandria Project, was chosen as a September Book of the Month by the GoodReads “A Good Thriller” group, which currently has 1,262 readers. Many thanks to those GoodReads members who voted for it, and I hope that those that give it a try enjoy it.
If you’ve read my book already and would like to join in the discussion, you can find the page here. And if you haven’t read it yet, perhaps this might tempt you to give it a try – after all, a large group of avid thriller fans picked it from quite a competitive list of alternatives.
If you’re an author and you’re not active to some degree at GoodReads already, I’d suggest you give it another look. It’s certainly not a magic bullet for promotional purposes, but it does have several things going for it that have persuaded me that it should be towards the top of any author’s promotional platform list. Those advantages include:
- Everyone that’s there is there solely because they’re interested in books – not just reading them, but in many cases reviewing them, discussing them, and recommending them to others. That immediately distinguishes it from other platforms, such as Twitter and FaceBook, where at best your efforts are competing with everything else that’s going on.
- In March of 2013, when Amazon acquired the site, GoodReads had 30 million members. I wouldn’t even try to guess the number of other reader sites there are out there, many of which are very good in their own right. But none of them has a even meaningful fraction of that number of members.
- While GoodReads isn’t in every respect the most intuitive site to use and navigate (and in a few respects, it’s just plain strange), it offers a variety of tools to authors, and in general it’s easy to set up your presence there. Here’s what my book page looks like, and here’s my author page. It took me less than half an hour to set up both.
- You can advertise your books at GoodReads at a very modest cost. More importantly, you will be displaying those ads only to people that thinking about books when they see them. Compare that to a FaceBook ad, running next to totally different content, at the time that someone is catching up with their friends.
- You can target your ads as broadly (e.g., “fiction”) or as narrowly (“thrillers”) as you’d like.
- Best of all, you only pay for clicks (when someone actually decides to take a look at your book sales page), and not for ad impressions (every time a reader sees the ad). That means that you can build your brand for free, and only pay when someone is sufficiently intrigued to actually consider buying your book.
- You can run book giveaways (some of which will result in reviews). Overlapping a giveaway with an advertising campaign can be particularly effective, since it will increase your visibility. Mine resulted in over 1200 GoodReads members adding The Alexandria Project to their “To Read” shelves, and eventually in several reviews (I gave away ten soft cover books).
- GoodReads has an internal email system, so you can get to know folks there, including those that have read your book. That means, for example, that if someone posts a review of your book at GoodReads, you can thank them, and also ask whether they’d be willing to take a few moments to cut and paste their review into your Amazon page as well. Almost invariably they’re happy to do so.
Will doing all of the above unleash a torrent of demand for you book? Sadly, no (or at least not for me). But I do believe that including GoodReads in your overall program of promotional efforts can make good sense, and is likely to be a better investment of your time than any other comparable platform. And especially so if you enjoy using it as a reader as well as an author.
I’ll report back in October on how beneficial (or not) being picked as a Book of the Month proves to be.
Have you discovered The Alexandria Project?
I’m still very much planning on reading it Andrew, really! 🙂 It’s actually crept up within site now on my to-read list; looking fwd to it (smiles).
No worries, Felipe – and thanks
Have actually bumped it up and am beginning it tonight. Usually have one or simultaneously, plus my own work, but..it had begun! (smiles).
Just finished Matthew Iden’s The Wicked Flee, and concurrent with yours right now is Michael Crichton’s A Case of Need and For Your Damned Love by Linton Robinson.
Read your prolog, very interesting & well done, could as well been Chapter One. I notice too, Kindle Edition, there’s no TOC. Did you intend that?
Thanks, Andrew. 🙂
Thanks for taking the plunge, Felipe – I hope you continue to enjoy it. Yes, leaving out a table of contents was deliberate for a few reasons. First, you rarely see them in print editions of fiction, and (relatedly) I don’t think they really furnish much of a purpose in fiction, as compared to non-fiction. The last reason is that I think that tables of contents don’t look good in eBooks, and I try and take presentation very seriously.
The reason that they look jarring, by the way, is because they are an entire page of links, and hence in bold. I suppose it might be possible to deal with that in some way (e.g., by using a different font for the table of contents).
Best,
Andy
Hi Andrew,
What would your advice be re joining Goodreads as an author, with respect to timing? Early adopter best? No point until you’ve got a book ready to sell?
I’m struggling to see much value in joining as a kind of pre-emptive strike (I’m not aiming to publish my crime novel for another six months or so even though it’s ready in my eyes). Maybe it’s worth just showing my face for six months, writing a few reviews, that sort of thing. However, you seem to suggest that the big play in marketing/sales terms is likely to be promotional giveaways once you’ve got something (cyber-)concrete to sell to people?
I stumbled upon your site after searching WP sites tagged ‘goodreads’ but I can see a lot of your other posts look interesting so I’ll no doubt be mining them for more sound advice. I’ll have a nose at the sample chapters on here too.
cheers
Sean Mac
Sean, that’s a good question. I think that I’d spend at least some amount of time at GoodReads before your book launch for a few reasons:
– to get the hang of how things work, so that you can use GoodReads to your better advantage when it’s time to do so. Not everything is intuitive or as clearly displayed as you might expect, so you may find that you’re still stumbling on a few features awhile after you become active.
– to avoid looking like a “carpetbagger” when you do start wanting to spread the news about your book. By and large, GoodReads reader-members are very tolerant of promotion by author-members, but only so long as you observe reasonable rules of etiquette. A good way to begin is to start sharing some of your own reading habits by posting some books you’ve read, writing some reviews and ranking those you’ve enjoyed.
– to discover those areas where promotion is permitted (there are quite a few discussion groups and threads where authors are invited to share news about their books, look for reviewers, let people know about special sales, and so on). Besides identifying them, you can see how people are using them, and also see if there are any behaviors that aren’t meeting with approval so you can avoid them.
– to check out any groups that might be worth becoming part of. For example, not long after I started visiting GoodReads, someone started a thriller group, which has now grown to 1500 members. I expect there’s probably one for crime novels as well, and if so, it would be an excellent idea to start becoming an active member of that discussion group. That way, when your book is available, there will be people that you’ve already established a relationship with, and some may be willing to read, review and otherwise help spread the news about your book.
It’s important to not expect too much from GoodReads. For example, my book was chosen as one of two books of the month for the thriller group, but as far as I can tell, only a few copies were purchased, and no discussion followed. But I continue to feel that including GoodReads in your overall promotional strategy does make sense as a way to get the word out. And if you are successful in establishing a following at GoodReads, that will certainly be useful going forward.
Either way, best of luck with your book, and if you check out my sample chapters, I hope you enjoy them.
Best,
Andy
That’s a really considered answer in a world of like-button brevity, thanks a lot.
By nature I am probably not anywhere near pushy enough, so not wanting to appear a carpetbagger would normally be a natural priority of mine, but I need to start trying to market my stuff – not a born salesman, me – while retaining good manners, which as a Brit comes easily (we get sent up chimneys as children to consider the errors of our ways).
I might ‘see’ you in the thriller group then. I guess my novel could be classified as such. I’m just too polite to assume that it might thrill anyone who cares to read it. ‘Crime’ is a safer category, I think. I can justify it.
I read the sample chapter, and your bio, and I can see the reader is in good hands. You clearly know, and ought to know, this fictional world like the back of your hand. I think the reader can settle back and put his or her feet up in the knowledge that they’re going to be guided through it and it’s going to feel real.
I share some of your coolness toward Kawasaki as an author [commented on my site]. I’m sure much of the info in APE is sound, but telling people they should write on an Apple Mac, come on, do Apple really need the plug? I get the sense he’s getting paid for the name-checks.
Interesting surname, by the way. Looks like anglicised Dutch maybe? Like it might have been ‘op de Groef’ or something like that? Don’t mean to pry. I just find name origins, indeed etymology itself, fascinating.
Thanks for your own detailed response (and your kind words). And my hats off to your etymological skills. You not only got the origins on the dot, but the original almost. The clan departed from Krefeld – today, Germany, but at times in the past, Dutch, and the original was Op den Graef. The most frequent current derivatives include variants like Updegraff, Updegrove, Opdengraff, and others.
I’m not unhappy with my first book, but I’m still on the learning curve on the fiction front. I’ve written to date based on what flows naturally from a life time of reading (almost entirely non-fiction for the last 30 years) and a career of careful work-related writing (and rewriting). More recently, I’ve tried to improve on that by reading a variety of sources on writing, as well as by paying greater and more critical attention to the fictional work of others.
An aspiring, and realistic, writer’s experience should certainly be more about the journey rather than a destination. Which is also a useful thing to keep in mind when checking in on one’s Amazon ranking.
Best,
Andy