Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business & Authors

 

 GUEST POST!

 5 Ways Authors Can Expand Their Audience On Pinterest

By Karen Leland

Excerpted from the new book

Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business

As every author knows, a good deal of our time is spent in a room by ourselves, hunched over a keyboard, typing away like a crazy person.

Pinterest can be an invaluable way for writers to break out of the natural isolation of the profession and connect with their fellow scribes and readers.

From the new book “Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business,” here are a few not overly promotional ways to get word out about your books to a bigger audience.

1. Go Beyond Promotion to Educational Value

Most writers are also big readers, and they are always looking for tips and techniques on how to be better at their profession. While writing is an art, breaking into getting published is just as much a science. Boards that help your fellow writers (and would-be writers) understand the business of writing are always popular, and can garner you a new audience who also wants to read your books.

For example, Writer’s Relief (http://pinterest.com/writersrelief/) is an author’s submission service that states their mission as “helping creative writers get published by targeting their poems, essays, short stories and books to the best-suited literary journals and agencies.”

Their Pinterest boards offer advice on all aspects of writing and publishing, including a board on “Submission Strategies, Tips, And Etiquette.”

If you want to find fellow writers, click on the “followers” tab on the Writer’s Relief Pinterest page and a whole page of their fans will pop up. Do some research, and pick and choose who you might want to reach out and connect with.

2. Ask for Help to Get over a Hump  

 

Stuck on finding a visual metaphor you need for your story, a name for your main character, or a tidy title for your new novel? Pose a pin for discussion, asking fellow pinners to pin their solutions and suggestions to a guest board you have created for just that purpose.

By involving the community in your writing process, you not only create greater engagement but expand your reach to a whole new potential group of readers.

3. Storyboard Your Book

If you’ve got a case of writer’s block and are feeling stuck in your story, fiction or nonfiction, surf the site and see what visuals inspire you. Then create a brainstorming board as a placeholder for ideas to develop and draw on, including:

• The physical look for your story’s characters: hair, fashion, makeup.

• The interior and exterior surroundings where your characters live.

• Studies, statistics and other data for your nonfiction book.

• Experts you may want to interview for your nonfiction book.

4. Create FAQ and SAQ Boards

You know the types of questions your readers are always asking…and you know the ones they should be asking—the SAQs. Create a board for each type, and use them as a place to create curiosity about your books and send curious readers for answers.

5. Get Your Publisher On Board

In an era of small presses and self-publishing, Pinterest provides a great opportunity for small, independent publishers to promote new authors. If your publisher hasn’t joined, reach out and ask them to consider it.

A strong presence on Pinterest can help a relatively unknown writer compete with the big boys. For example: XinXii (http://pinterest.com/xinxii_en/xinxii-ebook-bestsellers/), sellers of eBooks based out of Europe, features book cover eye candy on their boards. By featuring your book on a publisher’s Pinterest, you can garner a whole new set of eyes for your work.

Karen Leland is the bestselling author of eight business books, including the recently released “Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business,” which can be purchased at http://bit.ly/Amazonbook. She is the president of Sterling Marketing Group, where she works with small businesses and Fortune 500 companies on building stronger personal and team brands. She writes the Modern Marketing Blog at www.karenleland.com.

 Karen Leland is the bestselling author of 8 business books including the recently released Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest For Business, which can be purchased at http://bit.ly/Amazonbook. She is the president of Sterling Marketing Group, where she works with small businesses and Fortune 500 on building stronger personal and team brands. She writes the Modern Marketing Blog at www.karenleland.com.

Pinterest is a social bookmarking site that allows users to create a visual, online pinboard with images they love organized around topics of their choice by category. It’s the fastest growing social media site in history, the third-largest network after Facebook and Twitter and has over 25 million members and 10 million unique visitors a month.

The most recent studies indicate that nearly 20 percent of women using the Internet are on Pinterest, 72 percent of Pinterest users are female, and 66 percent of those are age 35 or older, and the average amount of time visitors spend surfing the Pinterest site is an hour.

Karen Leland, author of the new book “Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business,” has created a comprehensive and easy-to-use guide to hitting the road running and quickly making Pinterest into a valuable source of prospects, promotion and profits.

“Great business brands are about telling compelling, congruent stories, and Pinterest is at its core about storytelling in pictures,” says Leland. “Pinterest has tapped into this visceral lover of visuals, and no small business, entrepreneur or corporation can afford to miss the boat on bringing what they offer beyond words and into images.”