The Organised Author #3

Today I am sharing some more challenges from the Organised Author event created by my esteemed indie author colleague, Cindy Tomamichel, as part of our Sparkly Badgers Unite indie author writing group on Facebook. The challenges were designed to help you focus on becoming more organised as an author and also act as a handy guide to make sure you haven't forgotten anything crucial to your marketing efforts.

Last time we covered Amazon Author Pages, graphics, Facebook Author Page and Facebook extras. If you missed that post, you can catch up here.

Today I'll be sharing tips on the following:

1. Book Shortlinks
2. Twitter
3. Tweets
4. Google+


Book Shortlinks

The aim of the game is to look professional and great long URLs don't look all that professional. Sure you can bitly your links and make them shorter but you can also create specific book shortlinks. Not only do these look more professional, they can also be set up to take your potential reader to the correct Amazon i.e. UK if they are UK, US if they are the US and so forth. I use Booklinker to create my personalised URLs.

mybook.to/gaiaeffect
mybook.to/suburbia
mybook.to/rosethief


Twitter

Not on Twitter yet? It's worth a look. There is a large indie author community on Twitter and lots of hashtag events you can get involved with. For example, #authorconfessions is run by two indie authors and they pose a daily question getting you to share details about you and your current work-in-progress. This leads to additional followers, similar authors & readers and on occasion, book sales. It does tend to be more of a social site rather than a sales site. The news feed turnover is very fast so it's a good idea to use hashtags to help others see your posts.

I co-host a hashtag event, #sparklybadgersunite, on Monday's at 9pm UK time. We talk about what we're writing, reading and motivate each other for the week ahead. Not sure how to get involved? Read this handy blog post telling you how to join in. 

Another feature Twitter offers is the chance to pin a tweet to the top of your profile so you can continually promote a book, share a book trailer or run a competition. Here is my Twitter account with personalised header (made in Canva) and current pinned post - @grasshopper2407

Here is a useful article on regular hashtags used by authors. These are some of the ones I use:

#mondaymotivation
#tuespoet
#wednesdaywisdom
#tbt
#fridayreads
#writerslife
#amwriting
#amreading


Tweets

Once you've set your profile up on Twitter, you've got to start tweeting. It is possible to track your Twitter analytics. Click on your profile photo to access the menu, then choose analytics. Now you can see your most popular tweets. It's worth keeping a list of those so you can reuse them in the future, cutting down the amount of time you spend on social media.

Some standard scheduled tweet topics can be blogs, book adverts, review links, interviews, and your contacts like facebook shop, website or Zon page. Having these listed in a word document means they can be easily grabbed and retweeted.


Google+

An attempt by Google to have a similar platform to Facebook and whilst it doesn't have the same user-friendly interface, it does have lots of groups so you can share your stuff with like-minded individuals and posting your blog on here improves it's search engine results meaning more potential readers can find you. You can friend others and share posts, gaining more exposure for yourself which is what it's all about. As always, here is my Google+ account so you can connect with me.

There's plenty more to cover so if you have any questions on what I've mentioned so far, don't hesitate to get in touch and I'll be back with the next instalment soon.