If you are an author and looking for new ways to connect with readers and market your book, Goodreads is a great platform for you.

We’ve been using Goodreads with authors and are excited about the potential connections we can help our authors make with readers.

If you haven’t used Goodreads or aren’t sure how to use it to market books,  I’m going to share 3 ways you can get started.

Three Ways to Get Started as an Author with Goodreads

If you don’t have an account, set one up. (This is not one of the three ways.)

  1. Set up your profile and connect with friends. Once you have an account on Goodreads and have done the preliminary work of adding your profile and selecting genres of books that interest you, take the time to connect with friends from Twitter and Facebook and add a few titles to your book shelves: books you’ve read, books you’re reading, and books you want to read. I read A LOT of books, and I don’t record them all on Goodreads. As a start, I recommend adding at least ten books, and if you take the time to review the books, that’s even better.
  2. Join the author program. I’m not going to recap the steps since Goodreads offers such clear and helpful instructions. Instead, I’ll show you some cool author pages on Goodreads of our clients: Chip Bell, Bill Treasurer, Steven Snyder. What I love about the author pages is that you can add videos, include the RSS feed of your blog, and connect all your books.
  3. Set up a giveawayWe recently concluded several Goodreads giveaways with our authors. During the course of the giveaways, we saw our authors’ titles added to many “to read” shelves. Hundreds of people entered — all potential buyers, readers, and reviewers of the books. We are now setting up giveaways for books prior to their launches to build buzz, but you can also do giveaways any time after your book is launched, as long as you are willing to provide (and ship) the books.

I’m excited to learn even more about the benefits participating with Goodreads brings for authors.

Tell me something! How have you used Goodreads to generate interest in your books? Or, if you are a reader who uses Goodreads, how do you discover new authors/titles?