Christian Readers discussion

Just starting to get familiar with Goodreads and joining Groups!

Welcome!

Welcome - I'm fairly new to the group too.

Hi Anna - I created a group on Facebook called BookDreamers. It's a new group just starting out, and thought you might want to consider supporting. The group is for New Authors or Author-to-be, and a safe place where they can be a sounding board for each other and inspiration sharing best practices, lessons learned, etc.

As a relatively new author yourself, we could benefit from someone that has written a couple more books. Did you self-publish or get lucky enough to get picked up?

If you want to check it out, here's the link:
www.facebook.com/groups/bookdreamers

Hope to hear back from you!
Sharon

Sorry, Sharon, I'm not on Facebook. I've had to sacrifice some social media in order to have time to write.

I self-published through Amazon and I doubt I'd touch a trad publisher with a barge pole now. Being an Indie allows me to write as and when I can without a publisher breathing down my neck to get something finished. I can also write what I'd like to write and not what a publisher thinks will sell and make them the most money. I feel strongly about that.

Good luck with your group, Sharon, discussion for newbies is useful.

Thanks

Anna can I ask how do you market without social media? What worse for you? I've self published also and finding it marketing challenging

Marketing is definitely challenging. I have friends who tweet and FB for me but there is very little response via those. Most people say this as well.

I see you have joined a number of Goodreads groups and the one which helps most with marketing is the Support for Indie Authors group. Scroll down the threads and you will see chatter about what works and what doesn't.

Most groups have a thread where you can advertise your books - I use those threads!

All the hard work has been put in by others in these groups and you will probably find them very useful.

My books are intended for the whosoever and so I will chase opportunities wherever I can.

I'll go and look for a useful thread for you and add it below.

Here's a whole section devoted to marketing:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group...

I imagine a Facebook group would be useful for sharing ideas of all sorts, but you need to be very focused on marketing to achieve sales. If, like me, you have a message or a theme you want others to consider, then you'll probably need to set aside a couple of hours a week to do this.

Please forgive me if you already know all this! I saw that you have not made many comments on Goodreads yet, so I hope you'll find this useful and not something you already have found out.

Thank you very much! Very useful and no I'm just getting into goodreads. I did join a bunch of groups but I need time to really check them out now. Thanks for the tip and link. I'm appreciative of any other suggestions you might have!

Thanks again

It's so refreshing to see somebody NOT recommend Facebook as the end-all solution for marketing. I've been told, time and again, that if I just put myself on Facebook all my problems would be solved. It's getting old.

Thanks for the different perspective.

You're welcome, Alfred. Some of us see things differently...