David Alastair Hayden

This post was orig­i­nally com­posed by Lind­say Buro­ker.

As authors, we spend a lot of time try­ing to pro­mote our books. Our biggest obsta­cle is obscu­rity because there are a lot of books out there. No, really. A lot.

We like to think that good sto­ries are all it takes to make it (in author terms “make it” usu­ally means “become well known enough and sell enough books that I can quit my day job and write for a liv­ing”), but you can doubtlessly think of mediocre books that are sell­ing bazil­lions of copies and authors you love who never make it out of the “mid-list” category.

Some­times it’s just the author (or pub­lish­ing house) with the biggest mar­ket­ing bud­get who wins, but you, as a reader, have amaz­ing power. Don’t believe for a sec­ond that you don’t have any­thing to do with whether an author makes it, because you do. A lot. No, really. A lot.

Why does this mat­ter to you? Well, authors who get to quit their day jobs can write faster and put more books out for you!

The fol­low­ing are some lit­tle things you can do that can make a big dif­fer­ence. Some of them only take a few sec­onds. Your favorite authors will appre­ci­ate the effort. Trust me.

Help­ing out on Amazon

Ama­zon is the big kahuna of book sell­ers, espe­cially when it comes to ebooks, so help­ing an author “get found” on there can give them a big boost. You can cer­tainly do these things on other book­store sites as well (noth­ing against copy­ing and past­ing a review, for exam­ple), but Ama­zon tends to have more cool fea­tures to help an author get found.

Here’s the list (any one of these things can help):

• If you do noth­ing else, con­sider writ­ing a review on Ama­zon, even if the book already has quite a few and/or you’ve reviewed it else­where. There’s evi­dence that rat­ings and reviews fac­tor into the Ama­zon algo­rithms that decide which books are pro­moted on the site (i.e. cer­tain books are rec­om­mended to cus­tomers who bought books in sim­i­lar gen­res). If review­ing isn’t your bag, don’t worry about writ­ing paragraphs-long in-depth stud­ies of the book; maybe you could just pen a few sen­tences with a cou­ple of specifics about why you liked the book.

• “Tag” the book with genre-appropriate labels (i.e. thriller, steam­punk, para­nor­mal romance). You don’t have to leave a review to do this; you just need an account at Ama­zon. A com­bi­na­tion of the right tags and a good sales rank­ing can make a book come up when cus­tomers search for that type of story on Amazon.

• Give the book a thumb’s up. This takes less than a sec­ond and prob­a­bly doesn’t do much, but it may play into Amazon’s algo­rithms to a lesser extent than reviews/ratings.

• Make a “List­ma­nia” List and add your favorite authors’ books to it. This cre­ates another avenue for new read­ers to find books. It’s bet­ter to cre­ate lists around sim­i­lar types of books (i.e. gen­res or sub-genres) than to do a smor­gas­bord, and con­sider titling it some­thing descrip­tion so folks will be more inclined to check it out, ie. “Fun heroic fan­tasy ebooks for $5 or less”

• If you have a Kin­dle, high­light some wise or fun quo­ta­tions from the book and share them pub­licly (if enough peo­ple share their high­lights, they’ll show up at the bot­tom of a book’s page).

Help­ing out with Social Media

If you’re involved with Twit­ter, Face­book, Digg, Stum­ble­Upon, etc., you can give your favorite authors a shout-out when they release new books. If they blog, you can fol­low their site (through Google Reader or other RSS read­ers) and share the link when they post some­thing that may be inter­est­ing to your friends. If they’re on Twit­ter, you can fol­low them and retweet their links now and then.

Authors don’t expect you to fol­low them 24/7 and repeat every­thing they say (that might actu­ally alarm some folks…), but a lit­tle pro­mo­tional help now and then is greatly appreciated.

If you like to be social about books, you can join sites such as Goodreads, Shel­fari, or Library­Thing. You can help your favorite authors by post­ing reviews and talk­ing about their books on those sites, or you can just use those places to find online read­ing bud­dies with com­mon interests.

Help­ing out with Your Blog

Do you ever talk about books or what you’re read­ing on your blog? You might con­sider review­ing your favorite authors on your site (you could even make a few dol­lars if you signed up as an Ama­zon affil­i­ate).

Also, if most of your favorites main­tain web­sites, you could add an “author blogroll” list in your menu with links to those sites.

And Lastly…

These days, most authors have web­sites and con­tact forms so you can get in touch. If you enjoyed their work, con­sider send­ing them a short note to let them know. While it won’t help them sell more books, it’ll make their day.

Thanks for read­ing (this post and books in general!).

This post was orig­i­nally com­posed by Lind­say Buro­ker and is shared with permission.