Goodreads Author Q&A
By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
I ran across something a few days ago that I thought I’d share here—although I’m probably the last person on the block to find out about this. It’s the Goodreads Author Q&A.
I’m trying to do better about visiting Goodreads. The truth is that Goodreads can be a scary environment for writers. Reviews are especially harsh there and there have been incidents involving author bullying in the past. To be fair, there have also been authors who have behaved poorly on the site.
When I’m on a site like Goodreads, I make it a point to keep a low profile. Otherwise, it’s almost like author intrusion when authors butt into reader conversations.
That being said…when I was recently asked how I’ve been able to garner reviews right out of the gate…it’s been those Goodreads giveaways. And the site is popular with avid readers.
So…maybe engaging in Goodreads on our own patch might be a good idea. I recently read a mention of an author Q&A feature there that I haven’t activated or used. (The post that mentioned the feature was “Five Ways to Use Goodreads to Your Best Author Advantage” by Shari Stauch on Where Writers Win and the whole thing is worth a read.)
I set out to investigate. First, to locate my author dashboard. :) I admit that I don’t find Goodreads user friendly at all. When I login to the site, I’m automatically on a reader-ish dashboard that I don’t want to be on. The link to the author dashboard (if you’ve got one set up there) is https://www.goodreads.com/author/dashboard.
If you scroll down the page, there is a section where you can enable Author Q&A.
When you enable it, Goodreads prompts you to customize a message to readers. They suggest that we set expectations as to how often or quickly we might be checking in with the feature. I used the space to give readers my email address. Maybe they’d rather ask me one-to-one instead of on a public forum, you know? Although my email address is scattered here and yonder, I took the opportunity to share it again there.
Then Goodreads gives us some questions to get us started….for a second, I almost had a heart attack and thought I had 6 q’s in the queue that had been rotting there for months. But no, it was just some standard questions Goodreads automatically sends out.
Since the last thing I wanted was for readers to ask questions only for me to completely ignore them, I checked in on my email notification settings. Good thing I did, because I’d set it up to get no notifications after getting a few too many emails from the site in the past. Here’s the link for you to check your settings: https://www.goodreads.com/user/edit?tab=emails.
More about the feature from the Goodreads site (which is heavily reader-centric, but at least gives us an idea of how it all works).
This is actually the way I prefer interacting with readers—if they want to ask me something, tell me something, praise or complain about something…they just ask me. I’m not in their faces in their Facebook stream or Twitter stream talking about my most recent release. But I’m accessible.
Do you use Goodreads much? The Q&A feature? Giveaways? What are your thoughts on this reader site?
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