Maximizing Myspace for Author and Book Promotion

When I met my publisher, Tina Gerow, for the first time, she told me to get a Myspace page.

My response was a quizzical look and the question "But isn't Myspace just for kids?"

Tina explained otherwise.

As soon as I got home that day, I signed up for a Myspace page and started working on it. I looked at other author sites to determine what I liked and didn't like. Trial and error along with a steep learning curve kept me busy but it turned out to be quite user friendly. It also turned out to be quite the promotional toolbox!

Time is money but most authors just starting out have less money than time. I've found that if I spend about an hour a day putting all of the Myspace features to work for me, I reap some great results at the end of the day.

Pimping Your Space

There are plenty of ways to pimp out your Myspace page. Before you get carried away with the bling-bling, here are a few things to consider:

Make sure the layout reflects your brand. I write espionage so I feel the handguns in my Myspace background are appropriate (http://www.myspace.com/lisampietsch).

Make sure your layout isn't too busy. A flashy, brightly colored background may be pretty but it can distract from what you really want your visitors to do - read about you and your books.

Make sure the layout you choose is simple enough to load quickly. Too much bling and flash will make your page take a long time to load and people don't like to wait around.

Click on your url often while building your Myspace page to be sure your visitors are seeing the kind of page you want them to.

Profile

Take the time to fill out your profile completely. When people search Myspace for people to friend, they base their search on specific interests. For example: two of my favorite television shows are Burn Notice and MI-5. They are spy shows and people who like them may very well enjoy my books.

Be sure to add all your schools and the companies you've worked for. If you've spent time in the military, be sure to list your bases too! You never know who might be looking for you.

Photos

Load all of your cover art in as photos. Use your professional photo (that represents your brand) until you have a cover. Once you have a cover for a current release, use that as your primary profile photo. Don't load photos of the hubby, the kids or your pet hamster unless they tie into your brand. This site is meant to be magic. Everything should feed into your brand and create the picture you want people to see of the author, not the regular gal (unless "Regular Gal" is your brand.

Friends

Authors, readers and anybody in a business related to books needs to go to http://suspensebytina.blogspot.com/ and start adding Myspace friends. There are currently 1100 easy ones just waiting for you there. More Myspace friends means more people reading your bulletins (only your friends get your bulletins and not everybody reads them). More Myspace friends also means more people you can invite to subscribe to your blog.

Making Friends Fast

You can buy software to do this for you but it isn't reliable, won't get the kind of friends you want and will get you kicked off Myspace. Don't do it.

Friending takes some time, but if you go at it systematically you can really build up your friend list quickly. I use Firefox for a browser and open multiple tabs at the same time.

If you click on somebody's friend list, they'll come up in pages of forty. Open all forty in separate tabs. Then, when they've all loaded, go through the forty tabs from the beginning and click on the "friend" button for each.

Then start back at the first tab again and add a note like "We share a common friend in (whoever's friend list you got them from)", copy that text and then click the send button.

Move on to the next tab and paste the text into the note, then send it.

Go through the rest of the tabs and do the same.

Then go through the tabs and close all the completed friend requests.

A note on friending from other people's friend lists. Don't duplicate your efforts by going to people whose friends are likely to be the same as yours. Get creative. Do a search for your favorite TV show and friend those people. Favorite books and authors and so on. I'm a big fan of The Secret so I'm friending all of Bob Proctor's friends. He's got over 10,000 and they're a great bunch of positive, life affirming networkers. I usually make it my goal to send 80-120 friend requests a day. That's two to three pages of friends. It goes fairly quickly when I use the system.

Friends & Multiple Personalities

If you have more than one Myspace page, don't expect people to know it and friend both of you. Invite friends from each to be friends with both of you. Every time you make a new friend on one identity, friend them as the other identity as well. You shouldn't be working against yourself with two identities.

Groups

Join the groups that are appropriate to your brand. Join the groups that you have something in common with.

For example: I am a former USAF Security Forces member, so is my main character in "The Path to Freedom". Joining the Myspace group Security Forces United just made sense. Not only do my character and I have something in common with these people but they are also part of my target audience.

Once you've joined a group, make friends with all the members. This will build your friend list quickly with people who have similar interests.

Blog

I didn't start blogging on Myspace until about a month ago and I've had over 1500 reads. For an unknown author, that isn't bad at all.

I find nobody really wants to read about writing. They do want the kooky stuff so that's what I usually give them. Crazy, fun blogs keep people coming back for more.

I did a guest blog at The Butterscotch Martini Girls website (http://www.butterscotchmartinigirls.com/) entitled "Tequila Makes My Clothes Fall Off" and got a slew of comments based solely upon the title! Many of those who actually read the article commented as well. If you've got any crazy stuff tucked away, whip it out!

Regarding Blogging in General

I feel qualified to talk about this because I've been managing blog networks for several years now. My job has been to keep them interesting, get them read and get their search engine rankings as high as possible.

Be very careful that you do not duplicate your blogs. If you publish the same material on Myspace as you do on another blog, it is considered "duplicate content" and search engines like Google and Yahoo will not pick it up. Only original content gets a search engine rank of any value.

When I blog, I'll publish the full content of the blog at the Sapphire Blue Bombshells Blog (http://sapphirebluebombshells.blogspot.com/) or a guest blog and then post a teaser and link as a Myspace blog entry. That way the subscribers I have at Myspace (over 200) can read the teaser, click on the link and read the whole blog. I don't lose search engine rank and I make the most of my readers this way.

Another thing you should do is link. Whenever you blog and mention a website or even your own book, be sure to link to them. Look at my blogs - whenever I mention my book, I either link to my website or I link to the Sapphire Blue Publishing catalog where my book can be purchased. Blogs that link outward get noticed very quickly by search engines and other blogs. Getting noticed gets you readers. (There's no room for being bashful when you're promoting your writing career or your books!)

Blog once or twice a week. People are busy and if you have too much activity, they may just give up and unsubscribe. More is not always better with blogs. Just be consistent.

Getting People to Subscribe to your Myspace Blog:

Be sure to use the "Invite to my blog" feature. Invite every friend you make on Myspace. So far, my subscription rate has held pretty close to 10% of my total friends.

If someone invites me to their blog, I subscribe. If they don't, I won't. I do try to read and comment on every blog I'm subscribed to.

Commenting on other people's blog gets your name and your book cover out there and seen by those who might not otherwise see them. Be very careful not to spam other people's blogs though. Just seeing your book cover is enough for them to know you're an author with a book out.

Myspace Blog Stats:

From your myspace page, click on "Manage Blog". Your stats are about halfway down the page in the left column. That left column also includes a link to "my readers". That will show you all of the people who are subscribed to your blog.

Juggling Blogs

If you already blog on your website, your publisher's website or an author group blog, don't write full blogs on Myspace. When you blog at these other sites, post a teaser and a link as a Myspace blog entry - not the whole blog.

Calendar

The Myspace calendar is a great place to post when and where you are doing guest blogs, making personal appearances (or attending other authors' personal appearances), hosting/attending workshops, or even when you made a bestseller list - because you will.

Bulletins

Bulletins are nice, but they are a "Now you see them, now you don't" prospect. Everybody posts bulletins so they cycle through rather quickly. Unless your Myspace friends are really bored and surfing bulletins, they won't get much play. Use them, but use them sparingly. Bulletins are like salt. Just enough is tasty, too much is ikky. Heck, I have a friend who posts a bulletin every time she receives one of those painfully over-forwarded emails with a quiz of some sort in it.

Comments

Everybody is busy. People on Myspace don't expect to receive messages from all their friends every day. Do you really think people with 10,000 friends stay in close touch with each of them? Of course not. That's where comments come in.

At the bottom of your Friends section is a link to "Birthdays". Every morning, I wake up, check the birthdays and drop a "Happy Birthday" comment to everyone having a birthday that day. Not only is it a nice thing to do for the birthday girl or boy, but it also sparks their interest in who I am. It may even get them (or someone reading their comments) to check out my Myspace site.

If you follow your friends' Bulletins or Moods and notice something that deserves congratulations or condolences, drop them a comment or a message. It's the right thing to do for a friend, right?

Events

These are the press releases of Myspace. If you have a personal appearance, a book launch, plan on attending a conference/workshop or any other special date relating to your writing career, post an event notice. Seven to ten days in advance is generally the best timing.

Don't forget to put a picture of your book cover on your event invitation. Make use of every bit of space to promote your book!

Remember to use HTML tags to create links in your events. Make it easy for people to find you and what you are doing. Links are easy for anyone to create. Just check out a basic HTML tutorial for instructions on how to create links.

Music/Playlists

I was able to generate a good deal of interest in my book by creating a soundtrack (playlist) through www.Playlist.com. Playlist.com is Myspace friendly and enables even the most technically challenged to add their playlist to their Myspace page. Myspace Music also offers a similar feature.

What music do you listen to when you're writing? What music do you feel connects with your story? Creating a playlist is easy to do, costs nothing and generates interest even if your story isn't out yet.

This probably seems a bit overwhelming for you but it isn't meant to be done all at once. Initially setting up a Myspace page and getting it just right takes time and energy. Once you have the page set up, if you spend an hour a day putting all of these tools to work for you, you should be a bestselling author in no time (and at no monetary cost) at all!