What is Sharing and why do you need to encourage it?

KIT CARSON: ‘GREAT AMERICAN HERO’ or ... They Don’t Drive Pickups in New York

What is Sharing and why do you need to encourage it?

I’m pleased to have literary promotion experts Babs Hightower and Barb Drozdowich with me today to give a little insight into the world of social media.

Babs Hightower

Babs has been helping authors since 2000 with her book review blog, Babs Book Bistro. As well as the beginning of helping authors promote themselves, it proved to be her start in PR. In 2012, she commenced working for Entangled Publishing and is now Publicity Director for the Scandalous Imprint. She is also publicist for World Castle Publishing. When not helping others, she writes historical romance under the pen name of Morgan Kincaid. She has published 2 books to help authors understand more of what goes on in publishing and Goodreads.

Social media and WordPress Consultant Barb Drozdowich has taught at colleges

Barb Drozdowich

and universities, trained technical personnel in the banking industry and, most recently, used her expertise to help dozens of authors develop the social media platform needed to succeed in today’s fast evolving publishing world. She owns Bakerview Consulting and manages the popular Romance Book blog, Sugarbeat’s Books. Barb has published 4 books specifically to help authors understand some of the technical issues that they come across when promoting their books.

I’m happy to have them share some of their knowledge with you.

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Authors love to get comments on their blog posts – don’t we all? Comments are lovely! We often see comments encouraged in blog tours that are posted on our blog as well as others. In the big scheme of things, however, comments are not very important. Sharing is hugely important. Sharing buttons are those little icons that sit at the top or bottom of post or maybe float along the side. Ideally, they have icons for every social media platform known to man.

It’s your job to create great content that your readers want to share with their friends and followers. We don’t care if you don’t have a Stumbleupon account. Maybe your readers do and that’s where they want to share. You just need to make the content interesting and easy to share. You want your readers to share your post on Twitter, on Facebook, on Stumbleupon and on whatever other social media accounts they favor.

Easy, right?

So why do we think that sharing is more important than comments? Because Google thinks that sharing is more important than comments. Although readers will find your blog from many sources, some will find you from a Google search. You want to do everything that you can to make your blog rank as high as possible in a Google search. Think about it – most people will only look through the first few pages of a Google search. So, you want to be on one of those first few pages.

Understanding some of the technical aspects to promoting your books is challenging for many authors. Authors write beautiful stories – that’s what they do really well! You wouldn’t hesitate to take a writing course or go to a workshop. Likewise, don’t waste your valuable writing time wrestling with technical issues; ask for help.

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Babs and Barb have kindly decided to give away copies of any one of their several books to two lucky people leaving a comment or question. Winners will be announced evening of March 3rd.