Goodreads 101 - Part 1: Seting up your profile

I know a lot of authors would like to make the most out of goodreads...and for good reason. This is the perfect social networking site as it has exactly what you are looking for...readers. But it is also a potential mine field so in today's post I'm going to clue you in on some of the most important aspects of goodreads.

1. Many authors abuse the readers on this forum and so they are 'wary' you need to be very delicate in how you go about your interactions.
   
   
2. The "bigger you are" the more anxious people are to hear from you.
   
   
3. There are many different ways to interact.
   
   
4. You should optimize your goodreads external appearance

I'd actually like to focus on #4 because you have to first get your house in order than worry about inviting people to visit. So let's start here.

ARE ALL YOUR BOOKS LISTED?
First and foremost you should make sure that all your books (and only your books) are associated with your author's profile page. Follow these steps:

• Login (make sure this is the login associated with the author page)
  
• Click on Visit your Dashboard
  
• Just below your "Stats" you'll find a My Books Section
• If one or more of your books is not showing up...then check to see if it is "found" on Goodreads at all - do this by performing a search. If the book is not there - you can addi t by using the "manual add" feature (Click on My Books >> add books >> manually add book) and fill out the form.

REMOVING BOOKS
Sometimes (especially if you have a popular name) you might find books that are not yours. For instance there is more than one Michael J. Sullivan and in many sites this person's book Necessary Heartbreak is attributed to my Michael even though he did not write it. If you find this to be the case then go to GoodReads Librarian group and tell them what the problem is and they can get it fixed up.

COMBINING BOOKS
One of the things I'm always on the lookout for is multiple copies of the same book. Goodreads does a nice job of being able to group related books such that they share stats. It doesn't make sense to have 2 reviews for your hardcover, 5 reviews for your paperback, and 30 reviews for your ebook all spread around - instead you want 37 reviews all in one place - right?

Multiple copies come from different venues adding books to Goodreads. For instance in Michael's case his upcoming Theft of Swords as the following versions:

• US Paperback
• Kindle Edition
• UK Paperback
• ebook

I'm a librarian on goodreads so I have the ability to "combine" books. You can send me an email at robin(dot)sullivan(dot)dc(at)gmail.com with the URL's of both books and I'll combine them for you .... or make a posting to the GoodReads Librarian group and they'll fix you up.

BASIC PROFILE INFORMATION
Make sure that your profile has the URL to your website/blog (you want to make it easy for people to find you yes?). Also mention what genres you write in, and who your work is influenced by. Then make sure you're using your best "long form bio". I did a post awhile back on writing bios - refer to that if you haven't gone through the exercise already. Here is an example of the bio on Michael's Good reads Page:

After finding a manual typewriter in the basement of a friend's house, Michael J. Sullivan inserted a blank piece of paper and typed: It was a dark and stormy night, and a shot rang out. He was just eight. Still, the desire to fill the blank page and see where the keys would take him next wouldn't let go. For ten years Michael developed his writing craft by studying authors such as Stephen King, Ayn Rand, and John Steinbeck, to name a few. He wrote thirteen novels, and after finding no traction in publishing he quit, vowing to never write creatively again.

His hiatus from writing lasted nearly ten years. The itch returned when he decided to write books for his then thirteen-year-old daughter, who was struggling because of dyslexia. Intrigued by the idea of a series with an overarching story line told through individual, self-contained episodes, he created the Riyria Revelations. He wrote the series with no intention of publishing and presented his book in manuscript form to his daughter. An inability to read large amounts of text in that format prompted her to ask for a "real" book, bound and formatted.

So began his second adventure on the road to publication that included drafting his wife to be his business manager, signing with a small independent press, and creating his own publishing company. He sold more than sixty thousand books as a self-published author and leveraged this success to achieve mainstream publication though Orbit (the fantasy imprint of Hachette Book Group) as well as foreign translation rights for France, Germany, Spain, Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Michael presently lives in Fairfax, Virginia, with his wife and three children and continues to fill the blank pages with three projects under development: a modern fantasy novel, a literary fiction piece, and a prequel to his best-selling Riyria Revelations.

AWARDS
2010 Fantasy Book Critic's Top 25 (Wintertide & The Emerald Storm)
2010 Iceberg Ink Review's Best Fantasy Novel (The Crown Conspiracy)
2010 Fantasy Book Critic Top Independent Novels (The Emerald Storm & Wintertide)
2010 Bookworm Blues Best Overall Read (Avempartha)
2010 Top 15 Goodreads Choice Nominee for Fantasy (The Emerald Storm)
2009 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist (Avempartha)
2009 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist (Nyphron Rising)
2009 Bookspot Central Tournament of Books Winner (Avempartha)
2009 Dark Wolf Award Top 10 Fantasy Books (Crown, Avempartha, Nyphron)
2009 National Indie Book Award Finalist (Crown Conspiracy)
2008 ReaderViews Annual Literary Award Finalist (Crown Consiracy)
2007 Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Finalist (Crown Conspiracy)

BOOKS OF THE RIYRIA REVELATIONS
Orbit Versions
Theft of Swords (Novmeber 2011)
Rise of Empire (December 2011)
Heir of Novron (January 2012)

Ridan Versions (out of print)
The Crown Conspiracy (October 2008)
Avempartha (April 2009)
Nyphron Rising (October 2009)
The Emerald Storm (April 2010)
Wintertide (October 2010)
Percepliquis* (January 2012)

*Will be released simultaneously with Heir of Novron

CONTACTING MICHAEL
Michael's Website | Michael's Blog | Michael's twitter | Michael's publisher
Michael's Email: michael.sullivan.dc@gmail.com

Notice a few things about this.

1. A bio that gives you insight into Michael and his love for writing (little story about when he was a boy)
2. A list of awards (which I notice is out of date - sigh need to update that)
3. A list of his books (also out of date - shame on me)
4. Contact information (I've recently added a newsletter and facebook page - so I need to update that.
   

As you can see, even someone who is very active can let things slip. It's difficult to remember all the places you should be updating information. I think I've given you enough to do for today so I'll pick this up tomorrow.

Measuring your goodreads results

As regular people to this site already know, I try to give you tools to help you be successful as writers. The most difficult task for people is marketing. For me, it is something that comes like second nature, but for others, it's as big a mystery as the origin of the universe.

In my prior life (i.e. before spending full time activities in publishing) I was a Software Engineer, a Product Manager, and yes a Marketing Manager, among other things. When I came into new organizations I was amazed at how they would make decisions "from their gut" rather than from "data". Well I'm a data kind of gal so I've always paid particular attention to numbers and you should to.

If you don't track your results, how do you know what is working and what isn't? The good news is that there are many ways to track even for those that don't have access to sales data except during royalty statement time. I'm going to discuss social networking stats (tweets, klout scores, face book likes, etc) as well as Amazon tracking...and cover that another day. Instead I'm going to focus on a site that has been very good for Michael and other Ridan authors...Goodreads.

First and foremost if you are an author and not a member of Goodreads...go sign up now. I'll wait...done? Good. Now did you sign up as just a member or did you claim your author author profile? No? Well it's pretty simple - follow the directions here.

Okay now when you login, in the upper right of the screen you'll see a link to the "author dashboard". While there is a lot on this page, the thing we're going to concentrate on is the stats which can be found right at the top left. Here is what Michael's stats look like:

You should open a spread sheet and record this data. I do it by having the following columns: date, num books, total add, total rating, total reviews, on shelf, unique, fans, friends.

From looking at Michael's data you can see we've focused on getting books on the shelves, and ratings/reviews and really haven't spent much time collecting friends or fans. We'll discuss how you effect these numbers (i.e. make them grow) but for now let's focus on data measurement so that once we start doing things, we can decide if our activities were successful.

Now, at some regular interval (daily, weekly, monthly) you should add a new row to your spreadsheet. I've been off goodreads for many many moons, and recently I've pushed Michael to spend a bit of his day interacting with people on this site (because he has a new release coming out in November) so I've resumed my tracking to see how well he's doing. I try to collect the data daily but sometimes there will be a few days between data captures so I always "normalize my data" by looking at the information on a per day basis. Let's use some of Michael's data to help illustrate this.

Date	Books on Shel	Days	Change	Per Day
09/9/26/2011	5,475	1	13	13
09/9/28/2011	5,496	2	21	10.5
09/9/29/2011	5,525	1	29	29
09/9/30/2011	5,552	1	27	27

The "change" column if found by subtracting the data from this row with the previous row. Then the Per Day is Change divided by number of days. You could of course eliminate the change column and just do a single calculation by using a formula such as: =(D24-D23)/M24 but I don't want to turn this into a spreadsheet tutorial.

Okay...So let's look at the data I've been collecting for Michael from 8/11/2011 to 10/7/2011 for Books that are on the shelves.

• From 1 - 12 we had no new promotions, and Michael hadn't yet started back up participating on goodreads so we get about 3 - 15 (avg 8.4) adds per day if we aren't doing anything.
  
  
• Starting at 13 Michael started participating a bit each day on Goodreads and low and behold the number of book adds increased.
  
  
• At point 18 we released a free short story so we got a spike that day of 24 new books added
  
  
• At point 21 we added a "free giveaway" and not surprisingly we got a huge jump, but not as big as I would have liked...so guess what...I'm going to be working that a bit more in the future.
  
  
• Past 21 the only "different thing" we've done is allocate a bit of Michael's day to go out on goodreads and interact (again I'll show you what that interaction looks like in a future post) but the books added per day went up to 11 - 51 with an average of 23.8) which is a 277% increase. But of course we are also seeing results of the short story and free giveaway, but still, I think that I can determine the following from this data.

1. There is more potential to exploit in the free giveaway and I'll do some promotion to that end.
2. Not enough people know about the free giveaway so I'll need to promote that more
3. Being more active on the site (and 1 & 2) have produced results but there is still more potential.
   

Once you have the data, you can start doing initiatives to see how each one effects your baseline. and the ideal situation is that the baseline (the level when you are doing nothing) increases on it's own even without promotion (via word of mouth etc). But without tracking data of this kind you'll have no clue as to where you are and how to get you to where you want to go.

I want to make something perfectly clear...

Hello blogosphere, I'm sorry if I sound a little grumpy today but I just got back from a trip to New York (good trip but traveling always takes a lot out of me) and I visited a post I shouldn't have that got me a bit upset. One of the things mentioned on this post was:

One thing I've always found peculiar is that Robin, owner of a small press, spends all her time on the Internet gushing about the glories of self-publishing. That would certainly cross Ridan off my list if I wrote SF/F. I would want a publisher who was giddy about the glories of going with a small press, not one who seemed to feel I was foolish for not going it on my own.

Because of this attitude, I've always had the impression that Ridan was all about Michael Sullivan's work, not about publishing SF/F books in general. If the other authors' sales are as great as claimed, that's wonderful, but I take Robin's assertions with a great deal of salt.

While I doubt the person writing that post reads my blog, and of course being banned from the site in question makes it impossible to respond there. I thought I would at least talk about it here as there may be others that are curious or think similarly.

I thought I've said this numerous times before, and therefore my feelings on the subject were well known, but it appears that this may not be the case so let me try once again to explain how I feel.

There are three very legitimate paths to publishing: self, small press, big-six. None is "better" than the other. They all have their positive aspects and their challenges. Each author must align themselves with the path that is "right for them" and what is right for them may change as their goals and the market change.

Do I gush about the benefits of self-publishing? Yes, and why shouldn't I? I want authors...all authors...to earn a living doing what they love to do. And unlike 2 years ago (when there were very few people making good money self-publishing) I know many who are making five and six digit incomes. This is worth celebrating. It's worth letting others know that it can be done. why should I NOT?

Am I giddy about the glories of going with a small press? Well that depends on what small press we are talking about, doesn't it? There are many who are doing an excellent job. I recently wrote a post on Bell Bridge Books and another publisher who I like what I see is Dark Quest Books. The bottom line is that the new model of print-on-demand and ebooks is making small press publishing a viable business model. But not every small press is a good choice. Someone recently sent me a link to a contract from a small press they were considering and I told this particular author to run as fast as they can because the contract would have allowed the publisher to do some things with the author's work that the author did not intend. I'm pleased that with so many small presses who can now make money, that provides more opportunities for authors. So yes I'm giddy about the glories of going with a "good" small press, I just ask that you do your research before signing on the dotted line.

As for the statement that I imply people are "foolish for not going on their own" see my above statement about there being 3 legitimate paths and you need to align with what is best for you.

As to what books Ridan "pushes" like any publisher the most "visible" attention is paid to new releases and hot sellers and at one time that was Michael's books (he averaged 10,000 books a month for Nov 2011 - Feb 2012) but his sales have subsequently been dwarfed by stats such as:

• Joe Haldeman selling 1,000 copies of Forever War in just 4 1/2 days
• Nathan Lowell selling 3,600 copies of Full Share in 1 week
• Leslie Ann Moore selling 5,500 copies in a single month across 2 titles
• Marshall Thomas selling 9,500 books one month followed by 19,500 the following month across 6 titles

These kinds of numbers don't happen by "accident" it is because Ridan selects outstanding books by talented authors and we work hard to get the word out to help them find an audience. A tremendous amount of work goes into every title we produce and I don't "get" how we not about selling SF/F "in general".

I don't know how else to interpret the last statement about "my claims" and "grain of salt" other than to conclude that this person says that I'm a liar. I believe in sharing sales numbers like above as it helps authors to know what is possible and my Amazon rankings when I post the numbers will provide proof as to whether they are real or not.

I work very hard to try to be a resource for the writing community as a whole and provide the best information that I can. It takes a great deal of time, and in general is very rewarding work but today I feel beaten and bruised and wondering why I should even bother.

Sorry if I'm not my usual upbeat self but I'm batter, bruised, and well just plain bummed.

Another Indie breaks the glass ceiling

Many of my followers know that I watch the Amazon Top 100 pretty religiously. For the past few days I've been watching Rick Mercer's third book, Emerald Moon, flirt with the top 100 and today he's become the second indie author to break the Top 100 with a book priced higher than $2.99.

Emerald Moon is the third in the Manny William's Thriller series and is selling for $3.49. The only other person I've seen do this with a fiction book (John Locke did it with his non-fiction book)was J.R. Rain who hit top 100 with her third book in the American Vampire series. I'll have to look at my records but I believe she was priced at $3.99.

This just goes to show that writing multiple books really is a key to making a career with writing. Some people may recall that I interviewed Rick for this blog a few weeks ago when he first hit the scene and I'm glad to see he is still doing so well.

Congratulations Rick!