We receive hundreds of new book submissions and author interviews every month and though most of them are quite good when they arrive, here are five helpful guidelines for how to have the best possible post you can on our site:
Antique Books by Peter Häger
Correct Spelling on Book Title and Author Name
You would be shocked, absolutely shocked how many times in a week I make corrections to book titles and author’s names. Be sure that you double check your submissions to any site, especially if you are working off a cut and paste document. Your name and book title are really important!
Correct and Working Links
We want to send people to buy your books! Whether you’re submitting a link to Amazon, Smashwords, or even your own site, check the link to ensure it is correct and not broken. Search urls will not work (they have a very short lifespan, even ones from Amazon) and we remove all shortlinks like tinyurl, books2read, and bit.ly. Amazon links should look something like this:
(I’m partial to this one…I have a recipe in it!) We want potential readers to have the best experience possible on our site, so all incorrectly formatted links have to be removed. This can be rather time consuming and while we want to be able to accommodate all posts, as this site and others like it grow, manually fixing them becomes a burden. Don’t get your post deleted. Check your links.
Book Covers
Like it or not, a book is judged by its cover! I probably see nearly a dozen books posted every day that did NOT include their book cover image even though they do have the cover posted on Amazon. This used to be just a handful a day, but it has been steadily growing. Submitting a cover not only snags a reader’s attention…it also gets you an additional link to your book in a post. Creating a book cover can also be a time consuming and frustrating process for someone without graphics experience. There are many affordable options these days when it comes to book cover design and while you could do it yourself, your time is also worth money and a quality design is worth it in the long run.
Well Written Description
When potential readers browse for a book in a store, the cover catches their eye, but it’s that back book cover that makes them choose to purchase a book. If a description is very short or poorly written, it’s likely to cast some doubt onto an author’s writing capability. Conversely, a description that rivals the length of War and Peace, gives away the plot, or focuses on minutia of subplots has a similar chilling effect. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle…not too long, but lengthy enough to capture a reader’s attention and compelling enough to make them want to discover what happens next. Read your description aloud to yourself, share it with friends and family, and ask for feedback. You may discover that with some minor changes, your readership will grow substantially.
Social Media
While it can be a bit of a hassle to have to put all those additional links into a post, readers love to interact with authors. Social media is perfect for this sort of ongoing conversation and offers you even more ways to market your books. If you have them, don’t skimp…share them! There are great guides available online to make your social media pages look great, so be certain to take advantage of the design capabilities available to you. And if you find that keeping on top of your social media conversations is cumbersome or complex, there are great programs out there that make managing multiple social channels very easy. BookGoodies posts are also sent out on our own social media Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts to garner even more readers and if we can gain you more followers as well, that’s great.
While omitting or making an error on one of these won’t necessarily cause us to delete your post here on BookGoodies, there are sites that won’t even bother with corrections, so it’s definitely in your best interest to make your submission as perfect as possible from the start. Finally, if you are submitting a book to many sites, or paying someone do it for you, ensure that your submission is appropriate for that site, especially if it is a genre specific site. You certainly wouldn’t want your children’s book submitted on a romance novel site or vice versa!
I love reading all the submissions, so please keep them coming and be sure to submit an author interview (https://bookgoodies.com/contact-us/author-self-serve-interview/) so you can have an author profile page on BookGoodies!
