I discovered something else about Goodreads today while I was updating a book. So, authors, you may find this useful.

Some books I noticed did not have a book cover, and I thought maybe the author had never done it before. It was while I was doing this  I also discovered you can upload a book teaser too, or any graphic that relates to it, although it mustn’t be a second cover..

1. Go to your author dashboard and scroll down to your books.

2. Select the one you wish to add the cover and teaser to.

3.  In small grey letters on the bottom right you will see edit details. Click on that.

4. This will bring up your book. Where the title is showing on mine, I needed to add the words An Electric Eclectic book. You are required to add a note for the Librarians to explain why you have changed it.

Because all my books have covers, I can’t show you a blank one. Where my cover shows it will say upload cover. 

5.  It was here that I noticed it also said add additional images. Be sure to click the appropriate boxes – there are two that say you have the right to use the photo and it is not a cover.

If I discover anything else, I’ll be sure to pass it on!

Occasionally, an author may want to send a book directly to your kindle, or you would like to send yourself something. The only thing holding your back, is that you don’t know how.

Follow my a step by step guide to help you make the most of using your device.

1. Log into Amazon and go to your account.

2. You will see on the bottom left, Digital Content and Devices. Click on here.

3. Along the top you will see three tab. Your Content – where all you books are stores; Your Devices – a list of what you own and Settings, which is where we are going to investigate.

4. Click on Personal Document Settings.

5.  Here you will see your Kindle’s email address. Make a note of it. You will also note at the end it says edit. This mean you can personalise it to make it easier for you to remember. I changed mine. When you have your address, make a note of it.

6. Now scroll further down and you will see Approved Personal Document E-mail List. Your own email address should be here and if you look at the blue writing underneath it says add a new approved email address.  Click on it and add the one you have been given. If it is a @gmail.com account, you only need to add the last bit as shown. This authorises all holders of gmail and saves you having to do it again. No one can send you anything unless your give them your Kindle address, so you don’t need to worry about add the generic one.

My email ends in gmail.com. So if you have followed these instructions and would like to receive a free book. Contact me here letting me know your kindle address, and I’ll send one over.

I hope you have found this useful and I encourage you to explore your account on Amazon, its amazing what you find.

As part of Buzz Promotions, I was chatting to a friend about his book’s presence on Amazon. He’d had no sales, no reviews and the book wasn’t doing anything. So I said I would look it over.

The first thing I noticed was his description. It was very wordy and just looked like a block of text. He was told this was the right way to do it.

As a reader, I don’t want to read huge amounts of text; I’m looking for words that will grab me, and make me curious enough to want to buy.

I rewrote his description taking some key words and broke it down into three paragraphs. He like what I had done and changed the wording to suit his book and reposted. It now looks so much better.

The other thing I noticed was there were no tag words and nothing telling me what genre the book was. It is important to include these as readers still search for the type of the book they want to read.

The author was surprised; he said he had already done this. So do check your book on Amazon to make sure each one shows what genre it is.

I’d recently come across another author whose description on Amazon was in a sorry state. Again, there were no paragraphs, sentences that started with a lower case letter, commas in the wrong place and overall too wordy. In order to have a good description it needs to be straight to the point. It should grab the reader straight off. Plus, a bad description, no search criteria and a poor cover makes it look unprofessional and your book deserves to be the best it can be.

If you need another eye casting over yours, please contact me and we’ll discuss what I can do for you.

Recently as part of Buzz Promotions I was talking to someone about their book and was told I was mentioned on their Facebook author page. I asked for the link so I could go over and see. I was surprised to find that I had already liked the page. I scrolled down, saw the post, and noticed there were many more posts on this page that I had never seen. None of them had shown up in my feed.

Another author posted on her personal profile that she tries not to think about the ‘reach’ that shows on her author page. She said her last post only reached 9 of the 100s that had liked her page. I immediately thought, what about mine? Am I talking to myself? Are we all talking to ourselves come to that?

On the menu of your Facebook profile page, there is a list and under Explore, I selected Pages.

Clicking on it brought up all the Pages I manage.

The menu on the top gave me several options. (See above) I chose Liked Pages. I had read that I could see all my page feeds here, and assumed it would be like my newsfeed. It isn’t. If I want to see my page feeds I would have to visit everyone individually. That isn’t feasible.

By the same token, how many friends do you have on your profile? It would be impossible to see every one of those status updates, so Facebook kindly select which ones they think you should see. How else would it give you that choice? There are only so many ways to display it. If I were to see every one of my friends, I would be on Facebook far to long to hold my interest. So that isn’t feasible either.

Because many of us have had our Facebook profiles for many years, we feel we own them. After all, the content is personal to us. Think of it as renting a stall at the local market, except we pay no rent. We get it for free and can show what we like to any passing trade.

Pages, are shop fronts for our businesses and just like a regular a shop in town. People don’t visit it unless they are invited or come browsing.

Authors, me included, have created our Facebook pages for our ‘business’ and expect it to run like our newsfeed. We fill it with content that nobody sees. What criteria Facebook uses to bring in the occasional customer, I don’t know, but it gives a false impression. Why isn’t everyone else seeing it, we ask. Well, because you haven’t told them what you have inside.

Facebook will suggest you take up advert to bring in more customers and it’s easy to forget this is their business. Like any business they are in it to make money and they have given us a shop space for free. They’ve even given us a personal space for free, too. So no wonder, they don’t like us plying our trade outside the shop and setting it up a retail store in the street that is our newfeed.

So in essence, we have to change the way we work, or rather try and use Facebook in the way they intended.

What can you do? Here are some key points to think about:

• Whatever we do in our ‘shop’ no one will see it unless we invite him or her inside.
• We need to advertise what is in there and we can’t do it on our personal profile because that’s against the rules.
• You can’t blatantly sell, but you can advertise your page. So with a bit of expertise you have to invite them in for every post.
• This means every post you do, has to be worth their while or they won’t stop by to browse.
• You can advertise your shop on other Social Media platforms drawing them into your Facebook page.
• You could stock your shop with links to your website where you have more freedom to show off your ware.
• Or you could close your Page altogether and relocate to somewhere else. Invite people from you Facebook profile, but be careful not to ‘sell’ to them.

Business can be stressful as we try to sell our ware, try to keep it interesting, and try to find the right people who are interested in what we do. Adding to that the stress of making Facebook do what its not designed to do, is not what you need. Use it to your advantage and don’t fight against it. Put your energy into your business instead.

Another way to spread the word about your books is to use me at Buzz Promotions. Big businesses spend vast amounts of money on their advertising and as Indie Authors we wish we were earning enough to do that. So being an author myself, I know how difficult it is being in that catch 22 situation. So I’ve come up with a small outlay for a lot of advertising. These are the details.

Please feel free to comment, as I would love to hear your thoughts about this.