Using MySpace as an Author Promotional Tool

By Rick Reed

Authors are getting on the bandwagon musicians and filmmakers have already discovered to promote their work: the phenomenon that is MySpace. MySpace is rapidly becoming one of the most popular sites on the web (with a reported billion page views per day) and authors have unlimited potential for connecting with readers on a very interactive level. Personally, since starting my MySpace page, I have found many new readers for my work, which have translated into sales I wouldn’t otherwise have. I’ve also found MySpace to be a great tool for networking with magazine and book publishers, film production companies, and editors. As a result of MySpace, I have been interviewed and asked to write for other writers’ websites.

Getting started on MySpace is easy…and free. All you need to do to begin is set up a page for yourself. MySpace provides forms for you to fill out which allow you to describe yourself and your work, who you’re looking to meet, and to catalog favorite books, movies, and music (a great way to find connections with other like-minded individuals). The MySpace page that results is less than glamorous but there are free sites galore in cyberspace that will allow you to change the entire look of your page with the simple copying and pasting of some HTML code.

And that’s another great thing about MySpace. All of the subject areas accept HTML code, so you can customize not only your page with book covers and links for where to purchase (for example, I have the covers for all my current books in print on my page; clicking on each one takes you to their Amazon page), you can also use HTML code to create comments that you can leave on other’s pages. These comments can also include books covers and links to sites like Amazon or your own website. Plus, leaving comments is a great way to lead others to your space.

Once you have your page set up, it’s time to begin finding an audience. Establishing a MySpace page is kind of like creating a website, you need to promote it to get noticed. MySpace makes that easy through “add a friend.” But how do you start adding friends and building a targeted audience for your work? The first thing you need to ask yourself is: who is the audience for my work? For me, the answer was people who enjoy reading horror (so I always check on a potential friend’s page the section on books…if they list Stephen King or some other horror writer, I send a friend request; if they ask what books are, I move on). But going through individual profiles takes a lot of time. To speed up the process, access the groups feature of MySpace. I found many groups for fans of horror (both movies and books). I can go through their membership, click on members, and send friend requests, thus building up an audience of targeted readers. I’ve also found the browse feature useful for targeting people in specific geographical regions, such as my current home town and other places I’ve lived. You can do searches on your high school or college to yield friends who you attended school with…these people may very well have an interest in your writing. Once you begin adding friends who have an interest in your genre or books, your profile and comments may appear on their MySpace pages, allowing others to see you and what you’re about. Once you begin adding friends to your base, you will begin getting requests yourself. It’s kind of like a viral thing: once you have made many friends, it’s easy to get more…they start coming to you.

But once you build an audience, you have to keep them coming back to your page, so you can clue them on new releases and the like. You do this through blogs and bulletins. Bulletins (which also allow HTML and flash codes) appear on each and every one of your friend’s pages. Lots of people use this feature, so your bulletin will be buried relatively quickly. I’ve found blogs to be a very effective way to keep people coming back to my MySpace page. In my blogs, I can do things like show a new cover design for an upcoming book, announce when I have a free story up on my website, or release of anthology that features my work. One very effective thing I’ve found with blogs is the quick and easy ability to invite subscribers (once someone subscribes to your blog, MySpace will send them a notification e-mail when you post new content). To invite someone, just click on the link on their blog page that says, “Invite to my blog.” MySpace does the rest. You’ll be surprised how quickly you can build up a subscriber base.

One word of caution, though: the tag line for MySpace is “a place for friends.” Keep that in mind as you write messages, leave comments and bulletins, and post blogs. If all you do is talk about yourself and give people a hard sell for your work, you’re going to turn them off.

Which leads me to my final, and most important, point about promoting your writing on MySpace: don’t promote too hard. Be a friend. Answer messages quickly and as a friend. Take an interest in other people’s lives, even beyond their reading taste or interest in you as an author. When you post a blog, make sure it’s not always about your work…use the time in the spotlight to show how well you can write and talk about a topic people can relate to. By showing that you’re there for more than beating the promotional drum, you’ll actually have more people take an interest in your work.

Rick R. Reed is the author of the horror novels Obsessed, Penance, A Face Without a Heart and the short story collection, Twisted: Tales of Obsession and Terror. In 2007, IM, In the Blood, and Deadly Vision: Book One of the Cassandra Chronicles will be published. Read sample chapters and find out more about Rick at http://www.rickrreed.com.

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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

Are book readers moving from MySpace to Facebook?

It seems the conventional wisdom these days is that MySpace is tanking, and Facebook is the place to be.

U.S. MySpace visitors under 18 dropped 30 percent over the past year, while Facebook’s nearly tripled.” It was inevitable that Facebook’s strategy of open enrollment would appeal to high school kids. After all, Facebook began as a college student-only site, and was something that high school students would have to wait for (to the extent that high school students were aware of Facebook at all).

I think it's inevitable that the growth of MySpace has slowed, while Facebook has gained steam since they opened membership to non-students.

However, there's a fascinating discussion underway about the "class divisions" being exposed on MySpace. The argument is that younger, less affluent, less educated people are staying with MySpace, while the upwardly mobile crowd is flocking to Facebook.

MySpace remains a valuable network for authors who understand how to use it. And I suspect that Facebook can provide a valuable platform too.

Here's more from Forbes Magazine.
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Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

Q&A: Can authors really build an audience on MySpace?

QUESTION: I'm getting sick and tired of all the junk that I see on MySpace. I'm there to market my book. But it's devolved into a place to say, "happy birthday," "good morning," or "have a great weekend."

Pleeeze! I am very protective of MySpace. My purpose in being there is to exchange information about the written word. And if I get a request to add a friend, I go to that person's profile and check out their friends. If I see a naked body or a person with a limited vocabulary (can't get above 4 letter words), I deny their request.

Authors on MySpace should remember, we need to market to our base -- our particular readers. I try to stay as close to literary work as possible. I don't market to urban lit, chick lit, and don't buy into the fad-du-jour. Yes, I'm a snob, I can't afford trash.

ANSWER: There's no denying it, there's a lot of frivolity on social networks, especially MySpace. Like you, I go through my friend invitations and try to screen out the ones that are clearly inappropriate. It takes time, but considering how many readers MySpace has brought me, it's well worth it.

Plugging your book on social networks is a chore, and no matter how you try to manage it, it's still going to be a chore. For example, after I'd been using MySpace several weeks, I grew tired of the several friend requests I got every day from bands and musicians. These weren't legitimate friend requests in my opinion. There was no interest in my writings on MySpace, these were bulk invites. So I changed my MySpace preferences to block invites from MySpace Music accounts.

But this brought me a new problem. Almost immediately, I got a message from a songwriter/author who was very irritated that I had blocked her invitation. So I changed my preferences back to the default. I didn't want to snub people with MySpace music accounts who were truly interested in my work -- I'm trying to make friends, not enemies.

So I agree, whether you're writing a blog or networking on MySpace, you need to walk a fine line. Inundate your audience with too much fluff, and they will delete you, unsubscribe, stop paying attention.

One big improvement I've noticed recently on MySpace: A dramatic reduction in the amount of spam friend invitations that are advertisements for pornography. These had been getting more prevalent throughout the spring, to the point where I was receiving one or two dozen a day. But thanks to a new option in the in-box allowing members to flag incoming invites as "spam," these porn spammers have been nearly eradicated.

Now, back to our original question of where we draw the lines between purposefulness vs. frivolity, and commercial use versus pure education ... I'm afraid it's simply a matter of taste. Choose your friends wisely. And don't forget to visit my profile here and add me as a friend.

Steve Weber is author of Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors

Q&A: Can I post an Amazon Associates link on MySpace?

QUESTION: How can I post an Amazon Associates link for my book on MySpace? Whenever I try it, only the code appears, not my book cover.

ANSWER: MySpace doesn't allow the Javascript used with the enhanced Amazon Associates links, and that's why your usual method for posting an affiliate link doesn't work.

But you'll notice that my profile at MySpace has a big, fat Amazon Associates link in my "about me" section.

How did I do it? By using plain old HTML. Instead of using Amazon's Javascript, I posted an image of an Amazon Associates link embedded with an affiliate text link.

Here's the code, select and copy it in case there are some obscured characters:

<a target="popup" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/YOUR-ISBN/YOUR-ID/ref=nosim"><img
src="http://www.yourdomain.com/picture.jpg" border="0" /></a><p>

You'll just need to replace three pieces of my sample code:

• Replace "Your-ISBN" with your book's ISBN.

• Replace "YOUR-ID" with your Amazon Associates ID.

• Replace "yourdomain.com/picture.jpg" with the address of an image of an Amazon Associates link for your book.
  

If you don't have an Amazon Associates ID yet, you can apply here does make it easy for you to post an enhanced Amazon link to your book from within your . In the meantime, MySpaceMySpace blog. At the bottom of the "Post a new Blog Entry" form, there's an option to "Tell us what you're reading..." and you can input your ISBN there. But with this method, MySpace is using its own affiliate ID, so you won't receive any commissions from the sales.

MySpace Top 40: The more friends, the merrier

There was no announcement, but MySpace now enables members to show a "Top 40 friends" list, doubling the previous limit.

The default had been a Top 8 friends list, with a maximum of 20 friends if you tweaked your profile.

I wasted no time in picking out an additional 20 author friends for my list, and you can take a peek at my posse on the right.

Does this feature help authors publicizing their book? You bet it does. Take a look at my No. 1 friend, author Marcy Dermansky. She creatively used her MySpace Top 8 to help promote her debut novel Twins.

Drawing from her 3,000 MySpace friends, Marcy found several with names matching the character names in her book -- like Lauren, Chloe and Smita. She moved them to her Top 8. For the more unusual names in the book, like Jürgen and Yumiko, she searched for new friends using MySpace’s search engine. She sent them MySpace friends invitations, and many of them were so intrigued they bought a copy of the book simply to read about namesake characters. Marcy says this fueled word of mouth for her book (which has received rave reviews).

You can see the Top Friends list for any MySpace member midway down the right column of their profile page, under the About Me section. By default, your Top Friends list includes the first eight friends added to your account.

So if you're trying to get publicity for your book, it never hurts to engage in some name-dropping. And you can do the same thing with your MySpace Top Friends list. Take your most influential or well-known friends and move them to the front by scrolling down to the box labeled My Friend Space and clicking Change my Top Friends.

If you're trying to be popular on MySpace, don't limit yourself to just eight a Top Eight. Click Change my Top Friends, and on the top left corner of the screen you’ll see a drop-down menu where you can increase the number of Top Friends displayed on your main page to as many as 40. If you’d rather display fewer Top Friends, you can reduce it to four.

Seek out more authors or experts in your field, and request they add you as a friend. Move them into your Top 8, too. This is a valuable cross-promotion tool because it boosts your exposure among readers in your target audience.

Q&A: Should I market my book on MySpace or a blog?

QUESTION: I've written a book about music, and I want to start promoting it on the Internet. The amount of time I can spend is limited. Where should I focus my effort -- writing a blog, or promoting my book on MySpace?

ANSWER: There's no reason you can't promote your book on MySpace and your own blog, even if you only have a few hours a week.

So first, sign up for MySpace and find the low-hanging fruit there. Find the MySpace members who are in your niche -- those who already belong to a Group that pertains to your book, or people who are friends of authors in your genre or topic area. This is your likely audience, and you can find them without too much digging. If you're unfamiliar, get specific instructions for marketing your book on MySpace here.

After a month or two of generating buzz on MySpace, you can shift your focus to your own blog at your domain. You can recycle some of your content you used at your MySpace blog. As you begin slacking off at MySpace, you can start generating original work on your own blog.

Why focus on MySpace first? MySpace has already cultivated a community that you can mine for readers. There are tons of MySpace members who are passionate about books and music. You're not inventing the wheel; people who are your likely audience are already there, looking for great content. It's free, and you can make it easy for these folks to find you. And once you get the ball rolling on MySpace and you have a base of friends, you'll start getting invitations from their friends, and you'll have momentum.

Attracting people to your own blog is more difficult; you're starting from scratch. Compared to MySpace, it's a much harder and longer process to get traction with your own blog. It can take a long time to see results -- much longer than on MySpace.

Even though it's a bigger challenge, there are strategic reasons for developing your own blog at your own domain. You have total control and flexibility. Someday you might decide MySpace doesn't fit your image. Or perhaps next week MySpace will begin charging fees you think are unreasonable. They could begin censoring content, or they could drop your favorite feature.

So use MySpace to help build your readership and get some easy initial sales. Try to convert your MySpace friends into visitors for your book blog. You can link to your blog from your MySpace profile page. Here's a tactic for driving traffic from MySpace to your own blog: Post the first three paragraphs of your blog posts on your MySpace blog, with a link to your own site. If your content is good enough, they'll come.

I am more bullish than ever about using social networks like MySpace for book publicity. In fact, as far as I can tell, most of the initial sales for my title Plug Your Book have been to people who found me on MySpace. As they say, the best advertising is free advertising.

Finding readers on MySpace is like shooting fish in a barrel. But be careful not to let it monopolize your time. You need to balance it with the control of publishing on your own domain.

My advice on this might be different six months from now because marketing books on social networks is a rapidly evolving scene. MySpace is still the 800-pound gorilla, and it makes sense to start there. But keep your eye open for other opportunities. For example, I just starting getting involved with Gather.com, which skews toward an older audience and, I believe, a more bookish member base. I think it could develop into a strong community for authors and readers. My sense is that Gather's center of gravity is its Books section, while MySpace's core remains music.

If Gather is successful at growing their membership base to, say, a quarter of the size of MySpace, it could become a no-brainer for book marketing. But who knows, in the meantime another site could pop up tomorrow and become "the" thing. Remember, although MySpace has more than a million accounts, it gained critical mass just a few years ago.

Tips for using MySpace to plug your book

Many up-and-coming authors are using MySpace to promote their books. Here are several rules of thumb for using MySpace as a publicity tool:

• Try to keep your MySpace pages streamlined and clutter-free. Make sure that anyone who sees it can easily discover your book and, if interested, buy it quickly. Put “buy this book” links so they’ll appear on each page.

• Keep your name in front of people by posting frequently to your MySpace blog and by sending a bulletin of the blog entry to all your Friends. But don’t abuse the privilege – if you post too frequently without something of value, your Friends will quickly decide to ignore you – or delete you from their list of Friends.

• Ignore folks on MySpace who try to sell you something you’re uninterested in, or those who try to hook up for a date. Unless you’re interested in this, it’s best to focus on the Friends who find value in your ideas and books. When you set up your MySpace page, it’s easy to make clear you’re not there for dat-ing – that way you’ll eliminate a lot of spam from unwanted “Friends.”

• Don’t feel obligated to accept every Friend who zaps an invitation your way. It’s best to concentrate on having 50 friends who truly connect with, rather than having thousands of Friends you quickly forget about.

• To leverage MySpace as a professional asset, it must look professional. Your potential Friends will check out your existing Friends, so your MySpace utility will be undermined by having too many friends who have no connection to your niche. It’s find to have some oddballs in there, but be certain you have a clear connection with your Top 8 Friends.

• To keep the hits coming, you’ve got to maintain MySpace. Throwing together a page and never visiting or tweaking it will do little good.

• Don’t promote your MySpace profile at the expense of your own domain. MySpace is a great networking tool, but you don’t want to depend on it exclusively. Perhaps someday MySpace will go out of business, or begin charging high fees, or you may decide it no longer fits the image you want to project. Even if MySpace is currently your primary online tool, you can purchase an important in-surance policy for only $9 a year by registering your own domain name—www.MyName.com or www.MyBookTitle.com and pointing the traffic to your MySpace URL (your domain registrar can handle this for you). You can always point the traffic elsewhere if you quit using MySpace. This way, you won’t have to start over.

Q&A: How can I change my Top 8 MySpace friends?

QUESTION: I've noticed that some author pages on MySpace have a a long list of featured friends, while most have only eight. How can I change my Top 8 on MySpace?

ANSWER: Under each member’s “About Me” section are pictures of eight friends, then a link to all the other friends of that member. By default, the eight pictures are the first eight Friends added by that member, known in MySpace parlance as Top 8.

You're absolutely right, youi can customize your Top 8 to add zing to your profile page. Take your most influential or well-known Friends and move them to your Top 8, by scrolling down to the box labeled “My Friend Space” and clicking Change my Top Friends.

Seek out more top authors or experts in your field, and request they add you as a Friend. Then move them into your Top 8. This is a valuable cross-promotion tool because it will boost your exposure among readers who are in your target audience.

If you’re really popular on MySpace, there’s no need to limit yourself to eight top friends. After clicking Change my Top Friends, on the top left corner of the screen you’ll see a drop-down menu where you can change the number of Top Friends to as many as 24, or as few as four.

How authors can network on MySpace

MySpace is a great way for authors and publishers to network. There are several ways to find people on MySpace who might be in your target audience: by searching for murder mysteries, historical romance, self-improvement, organic food, or whatever niche you’re writing in or wherever else your interests lie.

Perhaps there’s a famous writer whose style you emulate. Once you’ve found potential friends, you can send a request for them to “add” you as a friend. The invitee can accept, decline, or ignore your request, though most people accept.
Once you’re friends with someone on MySpace, you can post comments on each other’s profiles and see each other’s full circle of friends, exposing more people to your book.

Here’s how to find friends and potential readership on MySpace:

-- Browse the Friends list of similar authors. Find the MySpace profiles of authors with similar books, writing style, and similar target audience as yours. On the right side, scroll down a bit to the link See All of [Name]’s Friends. Start sending invitations, and you’ll get many potential readers this way. For example, memoirist Josh Kilmer-Purcell invites fans of David Sedaris and Augustine Burroughs, who have similar writing styles—and every time he makes his MySpace rounds, he sees his Amazon sales rank spike for days afterward. Another tactic you can use is sending a Friend invitation to the other author and, when accepted, post a comment, which will appear on the bottom right of their MySpace page, giving you added exposure.

-- Search. Click on Search on the top toolbar on the MySpace home page. You can limit your search to certain areas such as Books Interest, Blogs, Music Interest, or others. Let’s imagine your looking for MySpace members interested in organic food. Click on Search, Book Interest, and enter into the box “organic food.” You’ll receive list of the MySpace members who’ve used the words “organic food” in their profile. Click through to read the context on their profile. You can use the same searching technique to search for subjects, genres, and author names. Also, use the “Affiliations for Networking” search tool a bit farther down the page. You can search the fields “Marketing” or “Publishing” using your keywords to find potential MySpace friends who could share book-marketing resources and tips.

-- Browsing for Friends. If you have a travel book or title of regional interest, it might be useful to browse for potential MySpace friends by geographic area. On the home page, click Browse and the “Advanced” tab. You’ll be able to view member profiles within a specified distance of Postal Service zip codes, as well as other criteria such as age, gender, religion, and income. Many MySpace members use this function to scout for potential dates, but it can be useful for publishers as well.

-- Browse comments on other authors’ profiles. Short comments are posted by Friends on the bottom right of member profiles. The most recent comments appear at the top, accompanied by the member’s profile photo. Members who leave these comments tend to be the most active and vocal MySpace users, and make good friends. In particular, seek out people who’ve posted thoughtful comments, like “Enjoyed seeing your profile and can’t wait to read the next book.” Skip the people who write, “You ROCK, Man!!!”

Using MySpace for book promotion and author publicity

MySpace is the Internet-age answer to a promotion tactic used by many first-time authors: selling books from the trunk of your car. It requires legwork, it’s time-consuming, and you might not see a results tomorrow or next week. But if you’re sincere, people will notice.

Here’s just a few examples of the types of friends you’ll be able to find and network with on MySpace:

-- Readers. People who read similar kinds of books—on the same topics, genres, or by authors with similar books or styles. You can search for these potential readers using dozens of possible keywords related to your themes and books.

-- Other authors. These can be great people to network with—creative types in the same boat as you, trying to find new readers. You’ll find many valuable ways to share resources and cross-promote with authors you meet on MySpace.

-- Agents and publishers. Book publishers want to find authors who already have a following, a platform that can be turned into readership and book buyers. One of the easiest ways to be seen is to be on MySpace.

Although most members use if in other ways, MySpace is a foolproof self-promotion tool. Any author, even those without computer skills, can easily upload photos along with artwork and sample text from their books. You can include links to buy your book from online retailers, publish a MySpace blog, and send bulletins about your public appearances and publication dates.

Big book publishers have also noticed the publicity value of MySpace, and sometimes slap together author profiles using canned marketing materials. Authors who actually get involved on MySpace tend to get much more mileage. You can’t fake participation and authenticity online.

In addition to its networking opportunities, MySpace is a wickedly good research tool for authors. It’s simple, for example, to find how many members say “Malcolm Gladwell” is their favorite author, and to find those members. Or you could quickly locate members in your Zip Code who are science fiction buffs. And MySpace is a great way for authors to find out what books their own friends and fans are currently reading.