Tag: tips for authors

Tutorial: NovelRank

Do you often wonder how many books you are actually selling? Of course, you’ll get your report from Amazon each month and maybe even a report from your publisher once a year or quarter, but what if you could find out how many sales you were making on a daily basis, or even on an hourly basis? Even better, what if you could spy on your rivals and see how their books are selling? Well, gather round everyone, you can!

Now, don’t spread this about, but I am going to give away a secret I have hung onto all year. It’s allowed me to check out other authors’ books and compare my sales then go off and cry in a dark room. I discovered a site that can tell you what sales you have made. It’s called NovelRank. Here’s all you need to know. Continue reading “Tutorial: NovelRank”

Author Tools: AddThis/ShareThis

Some people are really good at using nifty little plug-ins and widgets and what-have-you. I’m not one of those people. I do know, however, that making things easy and convenient is important. So when I saw that people couldn’t easily share my website with the click of a mouse, I decided to do something about it.

AddThis (www.addthis.com) is the “largest sharing and social data platform” per their website. They offer way more tools and data tracking information than I will ever look at. Why? Because a) I’m lazy; and 2) I just don’t care. Some people love to know how many people are sharing their web information. AddThis can tell you that. And other stuff.

So, I went and got me one of them thar AddThis accounts and started messing around. It was really easy (and actually kind of fun) to customize the sharing buttons so they’re non-invasive, yet still present for sharing. For my website, I made them teeny tiny and put them down in the left-hand corner of each page. Continue reading “Author Tools: AddThis/ShareThis”

Tuesday Tutorial: That “Thing” – LibraryThing

What IS LibraryThing? From their website: LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth.

So, yes, it’s like a Goodreads or a Shelfari, and the now-defunct BookArmy. You can do author give-aways, or chats, and more.

Welcome to LibraryThing!
Welcome to LibraryThing! (Figure 1.)

The first thing you need to do is sign up for a free account and then become a LibraryThing author. Currently there are just over 8400 authors on LibraryThing making it a worthwhile investment in your time – consider how many authors are on Amazon.com! Information about becoming a LibraryThing author can be found here. Once you’ve gotten your account established, sign in. From your home page, click on Profile in the bar of tabs across the top (Figure 1.). Continue reading “Tuesday Tutorial: That “Thing” – LibraryThing”