Following links isn't anything new for me. When I see one that might lead to advertising or to a new place to sell my books I check the site out. One of the words I look for in these links is the word free. I like keeping my costs down. Makes me more profit as an independent author selling her own books. Sometimes, Google search picks up me in the link. It always amazes me how many pages are about my books when I Google search. This has happened because of the sites I have linked myself. Hopefully, people interested in the genre of books I write stumble across these same links. Just doing a Google search brings up a link I can check that might lead to a book advertising or sale.
One of the web sites I'm a member of is Merchant Circle. As a bookstore business, I advertise and blog on that site. Sometimes, I'm alerted by email to questions customers have. Recently, the questions were about how to find books. When I read through answers already given I didn't see anything I could add, but the answers about links to do book searches to find different books to buy interested me. One site was book finder. I like searching for books I've written to see where they end up. One of the searches led to two listings for my Amish book on ebay. One site was mine, but I was surprised to see someone else selling my book at twice the price. I clicked the link which led to an Australian bookstore, The Nile. I found the website for the bookstore in goggle search and checked. The store has two of my Amish books. Since there was a contact us email, I emailed the bookstore that there was another book in that series if their buyers would be interested.
While I was looking through the posts that came up from my search, I found a link to a website that has an advertising directory with a free and not free advertising. It was in UK. I need more advertising in that country since my books and ebooks are in Amazon UK. I filled out the form to advertise my bookstore and that lead to filling out one in the United States.
Thanks to a tip from Rob Williams on MyEntre.Net, I read Chris Brogan's Bigger Ear Marketing for authors advice. I post on Twitter about my books, my blog and every day things when I don't have an announcement to make. So I tried the search for and came up with other twitter users I thought might be interested in my books or my ebooks. Right away I had an email from someone who is now following me. Mr. Brogan commented that the method he suggested was time consuming, and he was right. This procedure is one of those things that you want to try when you have some time to spare. It took some time for Twitter to search out the a large list of people for me. I got the message that the search had hiccuped or was slow. I decided Twitter had both problems.
I've found when I do a blog post, Google search picks me up and some of the places I blog have a Twitter and Face book button that link me to alert about my blog post. From Twitter, I get from two to 4 people following me each week. I always links from the emails back to their site and leave a message to thank them which gives me the opportunity to mention my books and website. It just seems faster to let the followers come to me.
I suspect others are doing the same Twitter searches which leads to me. Because of my varied interests mentioned in my bio, I get a variety of followers - fishermen, gardeners, flower lovers, bloggers and boaters. I thought about changing my bio to just writing books since the bio might be leading away from my books. Then I decided all my followers with different interests read books so why not advertise to them. If my genres aren't to their liking maybe they will think to mentioned me to someone else. Word of mouth is a great way to sell books.
Now back to work. I'm just about ready to download the two books I've worked on all winter. One day the first of March, lambs and baby goats will be showing up in the barn. That means I'll be outside for periods of time therefore away from the computer. That makes me want to finish up with the books before the babies come. When I reminisce to myself later on about this winter and how I spent it may my memory remind me to never do this again. As a friend said, she couldn't figure out how I kept from putting Amish buggies in my mother-in-law's story and pie supper dates in the Amish book. On second thought, maybe I better proof read each book one more time just to make sure I didn't.
