How to Get a Book Club to Pick You!

Untitled design In the digital age of Kindles and other e-readers, you might think that book clubs have gone the way of any other non-virtual interaction.  I can personally assure you that you are wrong…Pistils was selected by at least two book clubs (that I know of) as a featured read.  Considering it was our first venture into the world of indie publishing, I’m grateful and humbled by their faith in us.  I’ve already been approached by one of those book clubs to read Sub Rosa as well, so I’d like to share with you how you can gain entrance into this fairly tough nut to crack.

First off, let’s split book clubs into two categories: local and online.  We’ll define local book clubs as those that physically meet up, maybe at a coffee shop, bookstore, etc.  Online book clubs are those that share their thoughts virtually, something that can include readers from across the world.

Merging Your Goodreads Accounts

Goodreads iconWhen I first joined Goodreads back in 2011, I joined as a reader since I was not yet an author. I did and still do love Goodreads as a reader; the sense of community and (what I feel are) more honest reviews than Amazon’s were a better-fitting home for my reading/reviewing style.

Fast forward to 2014 to when Britt and I published Pistils…I was now faced with the dilemma of whether or not to add my “author self” to my personal page.  I wasn’t at all comfortable doing so…my page was linked to my personal Facebook account, and even if I wasn’t an intensely private person by nature, every piece of authorly advice you’ll ever read screams DON’T USE YOUR PERSONAL FACEBOOK PAGE FOR YOUR BOOK/S!

T-Minus 36 Hours on Sub Rosa

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA Friday is Publication Day for Sub Rosa!  YAY!  As soon as I have notification that Amazon has made the buy-now links available, I’ll be posting here first.  Links will also be available on Facebook on Friday.

Snippets are piling up over on Bublish, so check them out and follow me for an automatic notification when a new one goes live…including snippets for the next book(s).  There’s one more snippet before everyone has access to the Sub Rosa, so check them out while they’re still exclusive!

Time for Online Book Launch Parties!

andrew-neel-237802

If you’re on Facebook, there’s a very good chance you have attended or at least been invited to an Event by friends or family, or you may have hosted one yourself.  It’s a great way to keep track of who is attending while also allowing them to share the invitation, even if they can’t attend themselves.  From a promotional standpoint, it’s an incredibly valuable way to spread the word about an event beyond which you could have necessarily done alone.

I’ve “attended” an online party or two (I think the last one was for Jamberry), and it offered a remarkably wide array of ways for the host to interact with the attendees.  With that in mind, how can this be applied to your book launch?
https://twintypebooks.com/
twintypebooks.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-09
105560
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5FXAAXBYVEPE5OXLFW43FMYSTXN4XD2U
<urn:uuid:0a68fc40-74cb-46b9-b249-e9675f7f58dd>
2018-02-20T21:30:05Z
192.0.78.25
text/html
sha1:RYWZ723UBM7G3JRRTV4MMUXRLDRNVAI6
<urn:uuid:f0e99146-9e55-428a-a76e-81a9aaf35ce3>
https://twintypebooks.com/
length
response
<urn:uuid:19ba09a4-879a-4911-b4ae-89b7d4ad6a8c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-204-196.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-09
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf