On New Years Eve I was writing, and tweeting, and watching a movie because my four-year-old niece was asleep downstairs and everyone else in the house had racked off to see the midnight fireworks. In my cherry-bourbon celebrations I came up with a list of eight things you can do to help your favourite author in 2014. And here they are:
- Leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads: There are SO many books released every year via traditional press, small press and self-publishing that it's not only hard for authors to get to readers, but for readers to find reads they are going to fall in love with. A lot of people therefore rely on the reviews left on Goodreads and Amazon to help them determine if a book is worth reading. They will never know that you loved that book if you don't rate it and leave a review (even if it's a small one). It's a way to promote your favourite authors with a few mouse clicks and a couple of sentences.
- Recommend your favourite reads to family and friends: Word of mouth is one of the best ways to share your love of a book. If you have friends and family who you know enjoy a certain genre/category that is the same as your favourite authors.
- Buy books by your favourite authors as presents: If you're confident your friends/family will love a book as much as you do, buy it for them as a present. You're also giving the author a present too - a sale.
- Retweet your favourite author's tweets: You don't have to retweet the fact that they've gone away without underwear (winks at Wendy) but you can retweet their bookish news to your followers such as release dates, launches, sales, competitions, buy links and anything that is promoting their awesomeness.
- Share or comment on your favourite authors' bookish Facebook updates: Did you know that sharing and commenting on Facebook has a bigger impact than liking? The more attention their posts get via comments and sharing, the more news feeds it will appear in. Sharing takes a couple of clicks and commenting not much more than that.
- Like your favourite authors' bookish Facebook updates: You can still give your favourite authors some like love. It shows them that you are all for their latest news.
- Tell them how much you love their writing: Not in a creepy stalker way by hovering outside their window and whispering it in the night. Go through appropriate channels like tweeting it, writing it on their Facebook wall or emailing their official author contact. But don't direct message them on Twitter or Facebook… that's boarding on window whispering creepy.
- Nominate/vote for your favourite authors in competitions: All year round there are competition polls for best book, best author, best MC, best cover and much more. Nominating your favourite author not only makes them squee when they see someone's loved their writing enough to nominate them, but it also promotes them to everyone else viewing the poll.
Authors love fans, and this is a way you can give back to them because writing a book is a lot harder than reading one.
Let me know if there's any other ways you know of to help authors and I'll add it to the list.
And what's been your favourite author response to when you've done one of the above?
