The Liking Project

Over at the national Sisters in Crime Yahoo group, we’ve been undertaking a great project to help promote each other’s writing and publicity efforts.

Many of us know about the Like button on fan/author pages on Facebook. It’s the only way to gather followers on such pages. There also seems to be a tendency for people to be more willing to Friend people than to Like pages. The discussion continues on that front.

One Sister in Crime recently came up with a piece of news to the effect that if one’s Amazon Author page had a certain number of Likes, that helped that author’s book rankings. There is a like button on the Author page as well as the book’s individual page. Apparently the more Likes you have on the Author page, the more it moves you up in the “You might like this too” ranking.

Lots of the Sisters and Brothers in Crime started posting the URL to their Amazon author pages. So many message were flying around the list with requests to Like here and there that one Sister created a database, with slots for the Amazon URL, the Facebook URL, and the twitter handle for each author.

It’s been very productive. I personally had exactly zero Likes on either my Edith Maxwell author page (http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001HQ0XU8) or Tace Baker’s, my pseudonym’s Author page (http://www.amazon.com/Tace-Baker/e/B007YT2ZVC). And now I have several dozen in each place. Mind you, my first book doesn’t come out until September, but this gives me a head start. I also gained a few more Likes on the two facebook author pages and several new twitter followers.

But one of the biggest benefits was going to each member’s page, seeing their picture, and reading about what their books are about. If you participate in any Yahoo group listserve, you know you can interact with others without getting a sense of who they are in the real world. It was truly lovely and illuminating to see all the authors and interesting mystery series that are part of the Sisters in Crime community.

If you’re a sister or brother and don’t participate in the listserve, I highly recommend it. It’s moderated, so you don’t get junk or endless messages of congratulations. And you can add your own info to the database and participate in the community. You can always sign up for the Digest form if you’re worried about getting too many emails. And you might end up with benefits you never even dreamed of.

Have you been there? Do you have other tips for gently persuading people to click a Like button? [Note: that button on the right is a screenshot, not a clickable button!]

Advertisements

About Edith Maxwell

Agatha- and Macavity-nominated and national bestsetlling author Edith Maxwell writes the Local Foods Mystery series (Kensington Publishing) and the historical Quaker Midwife Mysteries (Midnight Ink). As Maddie Day she writes the Country Store Mysteries series and the new Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries (both from Kensington Publishing). Edith has also published award-winning short crime fiction. She lives north of Boston in an antique house with her beau and three cats.
This entry was posted in Book promotion, Marketing, Members, Uncategorized, Writing and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

9 Responses to The Liking Project

  1. Thank you so much for posting this info. The whole liking business can be a little uncomfortable, but it is important and apparently makes a difference in the Amazon algorithm and in perception on facebook. Two years ago i was able to migrate my friends to Likes so i have a fair number of likes on facebook – but not many on Amazon. And i didn’t even realize one could like an Author’s page in addition to the individual books.
    So how did you encourage the Likes, just by adding the url to your sig line?

  2. edithmaxwell says:

    Thanks, Rosemary. Within the SINC listserve, we just roamed around and Liked each other’s Amazon Author pages, and also made sure our info was in the database in the Yahoo group. I guess I’ll add it to my sig line (which is getting a little crowded, operating under two names!) – good idea.

  3. Nancy Gardner says:

    Very cool, Edith!

  4. Sally Carpenter says:

    Thanks for posting your URL–I “liked” both of your sites. I took part in the SinC liking project and it’s been fun. Great to see how fellow writers support one another. Many SinC members don’t post often on the listserve, so it’s been nice getting to know them through their author pages.
    Sally Carpenter.

  5. barbaraross says:

    Edith, thanks for posting this. I’ve seen the messages flying around in digest form, but hadn’t taken the time to decifer them. This is very helpful.

    Barb

  6. barbaraross says:

    Oh–and where do you find this database?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s
https://sincne.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/the-liking-project/
sincne.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-47
88468
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PGA66Z4OG4NFGIKS7Z3N25NTVUXOUAUU
<urn:uuid:c63c414d-51c5-4f88-85d8-cfcb79d4bafd>
2017-11-19T08:38:30Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:T5C7W32FW7DFXIQ57KFG3GTHOEPW6UHQ
<urn:uuid:07e9a6ea-bbc1-47cb-ba23-57d90a217991>
https://sincne.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/the-liking-project/
length
response
<urn:uuid:2a7b03e1-d146-4446-b42d-4a2a2c6a117a>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-164-5-214.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-47
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf