Facebook and Goodreads and Social Media, Oh My

Every author should have a Facebook Author Page. It’s a way to interact with fans without letting them see the high school pictures of you that Aunt Thelma posts and discussions with your nephews. The best way to migrate people to the Author Page is to make merchandise and content available to readers that is not available on the friend page.

There are a number of add-ons and tabs that can be added to the author page in Facebook. They are boxes that will show up as part of your newsfeed for the page or they are additional tabs that show up at the top of the page as well. One of these that is easy to use is GoodReads. GoodReads.com is a site that catalogues your library as well as what you’re reading now. You can review books, tell others what you are reading and discuss books in general.

GoodReads also has a wonderful giveaway program. You can run contests from the site and specify how many copies you want to give away and how long you want the contest to run. GoodReads does maintain control of the information of their participants, so you can’t add all of these people to your mailing list when you’re done, but you can encourage them to go to your site and join. The program is limited to paper books at the moment, but there is some talk of opening it to e-books as well.

They also include a widget that can be shown on your website or other pages that is a click-through to the giveaway as well. This gets the word out to more people about the contest. It’s a very easy way to have someone else manage giveaways for you.

Since I write biographies as well, I use GoodReads to tell my readers what particular book by the subject I’m reading now. When I recently wrote my biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, all of my readers could see which book I was reading by Gardner and towards the end, I had a contest where the person who guessed when I would finish all the books won some books by Gardner and by me.

Jeffrey Marks is a long-time mystery fan and freelancer.  After numerous mystery author profiles, he chose to chronicle the short but full life of mystery writer Craig Rice. 

That biography (Who Was That Lady?) encouraged him to write mystery fiction. His works include Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s/1950s, and a biography of mystery author and critic Anthony Boucher entitled Anthony Boucher. It was nominated for an Agatha and fittingly, won an Anthony.  

He is the long-time moderator of MurderMustAdvertise, an on-line discussion group dedicated to book marketing and public relations. He is the author of Intent to Sell: Marketing the Genre Novel, the only how-to book for promoting genre fiction.

His work has won a number of awards including the Barnes and Noble Prize and he was nominated for a Maxwell award (DWAA), an Edgar (MWA), three Agathas (Malice Domestic), two Macavity awards, and three Anthony awards (Bouchercon). Today, he writes from his home in Cincinnati, which he shares with his partner and two dogs.

Virtual Tour The Third Rose Jean Hart Stewart.

Welcome to Jean Hart Stewart on her Virtual Tour for her latest book.
She found him in the library, as she’d expected. His tousled hair was in his hands as he leaned dejectedly on his desk. She fought back the urge to nestle his beautiful head against her breasts and comfort him. Men were not supposed to be beautiful, but Josh was. None of the paintings or statues she’d ever seen compared to Josh. He’d taken off his coat, and his shirt seemed very white against the black hair showing on his chest.


She wanted to feel none of these emotions. Right now life loomed as much too confusing. Why would she long to touch and run her fingers through those dark hairs she could only glimpse? Why did she long to comfort the man who she’d set out to physically destroy? Comfort him by taking him in her arms? One look at him and she forgot everything but the heat suffusing her. She didn’t want to be romantically attracted to any man.

He looked up, his eyes bleak. “I feel like the veriest dolt. I’ve tried everything I can think of, and yet I come up with nothing. I fear this message is beyond me. Yet it haunts me. I know deep in my bones it’s vitally important I break the code, and soon.”

It took effort for her not to go to him and comfort him. But that would not help him, nor indeed, her. She thought if she once laid her hands on him, she’d forget about the code and the message calling to be deciphered. She didn’t understand much of anything lately. Certainly not her own ridiculous self.

“How did you manage to break the last code?” she asked. Perhaps if they talked about it, one of them would get an idea.

“As I told you, I used the word ‘enemy’, but I didn’t get the word out of the air. Each message so far has contained a clue hinting of the key to the next message. There were no clues in the last message except the words you know, ‘the third rose in the library’. You found the rose in the library. And I’ve worked every combination of those words I can dream up. Nothing. Simply nothing.”

Bio:

I feel I’m very much a Californian although I was born in Ohio. California has been home for a good many years. Life changed drastically when I was six and my father died, incredibly from an errant golf ball. A dishonest insurance agent left us with little income and forced my sheltered mother to seek work, and she became a teacher. Her hours required me to be alone in the house most of the afternoon, and since I was forbidden to leave till my mother got home, I became an avid reader. The local library supplied most of the books and I fell in love with both Jane Austen and King Arthur.
Reading is still one of my favorite activities, although I often have to push it aside to make room for my compelling love of writing. My journalism degree wasn’t much use to me until recently. Marriage and raising two children pleasantly got in the way. After twenty years of being a real estate broker and with the kids raised I could finally devote my time to writing, my first love.

Few things in my life have been so satisfying, especially when all my books have a happy ending. Wonderful to make that happen. It only gets more interesting when a secondary character demands his very own book. Sometimes a new character is so noisy I just have to give in. Shouting inside my head gets my attention, believe me, and those guys usually turn out to be fun to write about.