Tips for Authors

Tips for public readings:

The following tips have been written as a service to CBU Press authors, but we hope that they will be useful to authors everywhere.

As an author, your online presence is important. It can really help promote your book and make it easy for friends and fans to find information about you and your book(s). A few major and simple ways to be present online are outlined below. Please read through them. If you’ve already done some or all of these things, way to go! You’re ahead of us. If you have found other ways that have been effective for you, please let us know. Finally, if, in your searches, you find that information is wrong or missing (such as the cover image), let us know and we will do our best to remedy it.

Amazon

[If] your books are on Amazon, waiting to be rated and reviewed, have your friends create an account on Amazon if they don’t have one already and review your book. The more reviews, the better.

Indigo

Just like Amazon, if your books are here, at http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/home/, again, have your friends create an account, rate your book and write a review!

Goodreads

This one’s a bit more complicated. Goodreads is an excellent and very popular website that lets you tell others what you’re reading, make recommendations and review books. More about it here: http://www.goodreads.com/about/us.

Goodreads has what they call the “Author Program,” which basically lets you and your readers communicate with one another. Every time someone searches for your book, they will see that you are a goodreads author, and they will then be able to click on your name and find out more. Goodreads has really helpful instructions for how to take advantage of the Author Program here: http://www.goodreads.com/author/program.

After signing up for Goodreads yourself, encourage your friends to sign up. Tell them to write reviews of and rate your books. It’s best if they rate and write reviews for more than just your book because the more a person writes reviews, the more that person gains credibility and the more likely it is that those reviews will be read and heeded.

Go ahead! If you haven’t already, look for your book on Goodreads. We also try to write reviews of your books.

Other ways to be present online

Create a twitter account. Twitter can be stressful because it’s noisy and you have to be pretty dedicated to stay on top of things. However, it is also an easy and very fast way to make connections between publishers, authors and readers. Any time you tweet about your book, we retweet; anytime we tweet about your book, you retweet; any time anyone else tweets about your book, we all retweet.

Create a facebook page. It’s an easy way to let people know about news, reviews and events relating to your book. See (and like!) our author Hugh R. MacDonald’s facebook page for an example.

Create a website. A website is a good way to centralize information. You can link your website to your facebook and twitter accounts so that people will be able to find your website through multiple channels. Our author Philip Roy has a great website to look at as an example: http://philiproy.ca/. Of course, making a website isn’t easy, but consider using tools like blogger or wordpress. Use your site to post about upcoming events and readings, post photos of past events and readings, direct people to where they can buy your book (online, in bookstores, from CBUP directly – you could link to our website), write a little bit about yourself (what you like to read, what current projects you’re working on, where you live, who are your influences, etc.) and link to or summarize other writing you’ve done.

Good luck and please let us know if you have any questions – we are here and are happy to help!

Sincerely,

Laura for CBU Press

laura_bast@cbu.ca