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Did you know that the main driver of e-book purchases is “referral by a friend”. Number two was Media (including Social Media) and number three of the answers was Goodreads – the world’s largest reader community – as well as the Goodreads Choice Awards.
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Equally important for authors should be the follow-up question in this survey: “What do you want to do once you get to the end of a book?”
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83% wanted to see what else the author had written.
75% wanted to find more books similar to what they just read
69% wanted to discuss the book with friends
35% read other people’s reviews
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Why not give readers exactly what they are looking for?
How can you achieve this? Add a highly visible link to your upcoming e-book – and a link to your author page on Amazon, B&N, Kobo or wherever you sell your book, plus one to your website and your Goodreads page at the end of your first e-book!
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Equally important: link to your mailing list.
To be successful, you need to have a list of people who have signed up to hear about your new releases. You will benefit from more initial sales, which will boost your rank and push you higher on new releases lists, plus other genre lists on Amazon and in other retailers ranking.
To make sure, even people who browse only and read the “look inside” feature of the Amazon website, add these links at the beginning of your book as well.
Every time you publish a new e-book, update these front and back pages of your previous books, as well as your Author Central page on Amazon, and make sure that it is updated with every book.
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“What’s Going On With Readers Today?”
It was the title of the poll, which was introduced at the “Tools of Change Conference 2013” in New York last month. Interesting fact in these statistics: readers are about two times more likely to learn about a book on Goodreads, than on Amazon!
As you can see, this is exactly what Goodreads’ site offers to their 15 million book lovers / members:
- browsing all the books of the author they read
- finding similar books to what they liked
- seeing what their friends read
- reading other member’s reviews
- deciding what to read next
- discussing books in their numerous communities
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The best course of action for every author – if not already done – should be:
- Join Goodreads and invite / add as many friends as possible, which is very easy, just read a former blog post where we described it.
. - Don’t forget to add the “Top Readers” and the “Top Reviewers” on Goodreads to add as friends. Only friends can recommend your book to others, you can’t do it!
. - Fill your book shelves on Goodreads with lots of books from your friends, read, review and recommend these books to others (and let your friends know about it : ) Most likely they will return the favor.
. - Learn about and use the many free features on Goodreads, such as “events” for your book signings and KDP free days, join one or more of their book communities in your genre, create Listopia lists, participate in “creative writing”, just to name a few fun activities on this site.
. - Make sure that each of your books is listed on Amazon, even upcoming ones are mentioned and that your author page is updated. Don’t forget all these other communities you might have joined, and update the list of your books there, e.g. in Amazon communities.
. - Add links for your next and all your already published books: on the first and the last page of your e-book, to send readers to your author sales pages of all online retailers your books are listed with, to your website / blog and to your Goodreads author page.
. - Try to get as many reviews on Goodreads as possible, do frequent giveaways, garnering reviews and recommendations.
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What an easy and totally free way of advertising! Yet, many authors are not using this small trick … Have you prepared your digital books already with links to your other books?
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