I’ve spent a lot of posts talking about the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year awards over the past few months and even though we announced the winner on the Self Publishing News blog, I realized I hadn’t mentioned the winner here. This gives a good opportunity to also discuss another way Outskirts Press is using Pinterest, as a way of further promoting our Best Book of the Year winners and finalists with their own board. We “pin” the three finalists and then the winning author’s photo is also pinned, along with some biographical information. You can see our self publishing finalists and the winners from 2010, 2011, and 2012 on Pinterest by clicking here. And in doing so, you’ll learn the recently crowned winner of the Outskirts Press Best Book of the Year for 2012.
The Pinterest board that focuses on our winners and finalists is different from many of our other boards in that it continues to grow and evolve, with four new pins added every year. In reality, this is how most Pinterest boards should be (albeit, perhaps “pinned” more frequently). Highly successful Pinterest Boards (from a social media perspective) should categorize “pins” and then constantly add new pins within that category. These are the boards that receive the most followers and activity. Most of our boards are static, in that they announce a specific collection of books at a specific period of time (self publishing bestsellers in a particular month, for example), and as a result, those boards never change. That is admittedly defeating much of the advantages of Pinterest, because why would someone bother to “follow” a board that never changed or expanded?
On the other hand, our monthly self publishing bestseller boards do allow us to collect a diverse collection of books that all share one trait (best selling status), and that makes it easier to point to them as a collection when discussing them on other sites or blogs. For example, if I want to mention our top 10 bestsellers from the month of May, I can simply say “Click here to see them” rather than having to generate 10 different clicks with 10 different images. Pinterest has already done that work for me.
Ultimately, both static boards and dynamic boards have their place on Pinterest.
President of Outskirts Press 