Last time I suggested that having an author website, webpage, or blog was the single most important aspect of promoting a book after it is published. This was also the consensus of the “Promote Your Book” panel I was on during the recent Writer’s Digest conference in New York. This next suggestion is admittedly further along the “promotion tactic timeline” but is worth mentioning now for a number of reasons. For one, this is also a suggestion I made while at the conference, albeit to the attendees of the other panel I was on, involving social networking. And secondly, we just recently performed this enhancement to our site at Outskirts Press.
In fact, as you surf the Internet, you may notice this specific functionality cropping up more and more, on a wide variety of sites, both informational and commercial in nature. What functionality am I talking about? The Facebook “Like” button. By adding a Facebook “Like” button to your own web presence you give your visitors an opportunity to interact with your site in a “fun” easy way that they are already accustomed to. Additionally, their act of “liking” your site is reported on their Facebook account to their friends, which theoretically helps increase your exposure.
We recently added “Like” buttons on our site for all our products and services. We haven’t yet invited our Facebook community to visit our site and tell us which services or products they like, but that is a recommended course of action once you add the “Like” functionality. After all, the benefit of adding this functionality is so that people recognize that a large number of other people “like” what you have to offer. And, of course, when you first add the functionality, the number of “Likes” is zero. So you want to take steps to increase that number.
The good news is that Facebook makes adding this functionality very easy. They offer a variety of “plug-ins” that are easy to add to your site. Just go to developers.facebook.com and see if any of their plug-ins will help you. Of course, gettting a large and growing number of people to “like” what you offer is a different challenge entirely. If only Facebook offered a plug-in for that…
President of Outskirts Press 