Five Quick Ways to Support Your Favorite Authors! And a Reward for Doing So!
by Dorothy Wiley
Storyteller of Love and Heroes on the American Frontier
There are numerous ways you can show your support for your favorite authors and in today’s highly competitive publishing environment, your help means a great deal to each of us. Each of these suggestions are safe and helpful to authors and with all the terrible piracy of books going on, I wanted to share some of the websites that are the most beneficial to us. Of course, buying an author's books is the most obvious way to help (we all like to eat and pay bills), but there are other important ways as well. These suggestions may seem like a lot, but it only takes a few seconds or minutes to complete each one.
1) First, and foremost, rate and write a review of the author's book(s) for the book’s page on Amazon. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This helps the author, by helping to increase the book's ranking, and it helps readers find good books. Your review doesn’t have to be long—a couple of sentences is sufficient. While you’re there, read some of the reviews for the book, and just beneath each review, click on “Yes” if the review was helpful to you. You can find the book's Amazon page by entering either the title or author's name in the search box.
Also, follow the author on Amazon. Just click "Follow" under their photo on their Author Page. For example, here's my Author Page.
2) Join BookBub.com a free service that helps millions of readers discover books they'll love while providing publishers and authors with a way to drive sales and find new fans.
3) Join Goodreads a great site for book lovers, more than 1 million now, and it’s free!
Once you find your author, you can write reviews of their books. (Tip: you can copy your Amazon review and paste it on the book's Goodreads page.) There's lots of good information on Goodreads and some authors, like me, have a blog there as well.
4) If the author has a YouTube Channel, first, “subscribe” to their channel (it’s free). The Subscribe button is right under their name. That way you’ll know when they upload new book trailers. Second, view their trailers on YouTube and give them a thumbs up.
5) Follow the author on your favorite social media, like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can like, but more importantly, SHARE the author’s posts. The SHARE arrow lets you share the author’s posts with others and increases its visibility. On Twitter, the most important thing you can do is tap the RETWEET button. On Facebook, many authors have both a personal page and an author page. Mine are Dorothy M. Wiley and Dorothy Wiley Author. On my personal page, I'll share family and political posts but on my author page, it is strictly book stuff.
If you've done any of these for any of the authors you follow in this group, I know they are grateful!!! So, as a thank you, here's one of my favorite Fall recipes. It smells great while cooking and makes a quick and easy breakfast in the Fall.
All Great ways of helping out an author. Thank you, Dorothy!
ReplyDeleteI do all of this
ReplyDeleteGreat tips, Dorothy, to help an author. I'm an author as well as a reader and try to help any way I can by posting and sharing. I go by the old saying, you rub my back and I'll rub yours.
ReplyDelete