How to Stop Your Grownup from Making Bad Decisions by Judy Balan

You can target people based on genre preference, author preference and lists they follow, apart from the standard stuff like location, age and gender. If you have a budget for ads (and I recommend you do), targeting on Goodreads is a joy. And that won’t make you look desperate, promise. Then there are ratings and reviews that make a huge difference to a book’s popularity, so you might want to gently nudge the people who’ve read your book to leave a review. The people who’ve read your book and loved it, will take care of that. Now if you’re too shy to recommend your own book to people, fret not. That’s how book recommendations work! You want to know what your friends are reading and decide if you want to pick up the book for yourself.īut if that’s not enough, there is a ‘Recommend a book’ option as well.

When people notice their friends adding a book to their shelf or to their ‘to-read’ list, they do the same. What’s more, Goodreads allows you to host 'Giveaways', which gets the word about your book out and to the right circles even before your book is officially released.

Get your butt on Goodreads: Since this is a social network for self-confessed bookworms and authors, you would be expected to talk about your work and just that. Without, you know, causing anyone to un-friend you.ġ. 'Two Fates: The Story of My Divorce' and 'Sophie Says: Memoirs of a Breakup Coach'Īnd given my natural conflict (between the need to be visible to my audience and the need to completely disappear from the face of the earth after saying anything on social media that sounds remotely self-promotional), I’ve come up with some sly ways in which you can promote your work and yourself as an author online. So after a long spell of Oh-I-must-be-a-terrible-writer-nobody-loves-me-I-must-stop-writing-and-just-surrender-to-this-urge-to-consume-everything-that’s-in-the-fridge-and-DIE, I decided to pull myself together and came up with a promo plan for my third novel for tweens, teens and overgrown teens – How to Stop Your Grownup From Making Bad Decisions - that should be out in stores this week. It also helped that he was India’s highest-selling author.

'Two Fates' sold itself because it was the parody of a book whose author was extremely visible, always interacting with his audience on Twitter and almost always in the news. When my debut novel – 'Two Fates: The Story of My Divorce' – showed all the signs of becoming a bestseller even before its release (one retailer ordered our entire first print run), I smugly told myself: See? You don’t have to shamelessly scream for attention in order to sell.īut the reality check came in bits and pieces when my second novel – 'Sophie Says' - was out. Which means, I only know too well, that it doesn’t matter how fantastic your product is if people don’t know it exists. Except, I also come from an advertising background.

How to Stop Your Grownup from Making Bad Decisions by Judy Balan