Using Pinterest to Promote your Books - Kathleen Jones

Spending time on social networking sites can take too much time from writing, so I try to keep it to a minimum.  It’s fine spending hours on Twitter and Blogger and Facebook promoting your work, but if you do too much of it, quite soon there won’t be any work to promote!  But I've recently found a new distraction that might just prove to be useful.

Pinterest is one of the names that’s been coming up a lot recently and I’ve been ignoring it.  But I’ve changed my mind.  I took a look at a couple of authors who were using Pinterest and was intrigued and very impressed.  Linda Gillard uses it to promote her work and so does another Electric Author Catherine Czerkawska.  Catherine's boards are particularly stunning!

I’ve been trying to find new ways to promote my recent novel The Sun’s Companion and it suddenly seemed to make sense to share all the images that were around me when I wrote it and which illustrate the story perfectly.  It’s set initially in the north east of England where my grandparents lived, but at the beginning of the war one of the characters moves, as a land girl, to the Lake District where I was brought up.  Both settings are very photogenic.  Almost without realising it, I found myself compiling a photo-album of the book;  Partenkirchen, where the half German Anna was brought up, the gravestone that Tamar finds with her name on it, the internment camp where Anna spent months at the beginning of the war, the fell farms where Tamar worked as a land girl - they’re all there.

Pinterest is a lovely way to make your book instantly visible to people.  They have a photo-tour of the landscape before they even sample the text - and it might just tip the balance between a sale and a walk-away.  Remember the old cliché?  One image is worth a thousand words?

Before I knew it, I was uploading all the illustrations from my biographies too - prospective readers can now have a preview of both the images and the story before they buy.

Pinterest isn’t totally user friendly yet.  The Pin boards are easy enough to set up, but once you’ve loaded your images you can’t shuffle them around.  You need to load the images in the order you want the reader to see them. And they have to be at a low resolution so that they can be uploaded and downloaded on any kind of internet setting.

I found this PC Mag article on how to get started on Pinterest very helpful for anyone not techie minded.

And this Wiki How page tells you how to adjust your settings and profiles, as well as pinning images, with easy screen capture pics.

You can also join Pinterest as a business customer at a rather higher level, presumably with more gadgets, and there are sites that tell you how you can use Pinterest as a business promotion tool.

This article from the HuffingtonPost is also useful on how to use Pinterest to promote your work.  Very clear too.

And you then have to make sure people find you.  Add the Pinterest link to your website and blog, and the bottom of your emails.  Tweet the links to your books, beg and plead with family and friends and people you don't even know to Follow your boards!  Grovel!  Make sure the titles of your boards relate to subjects people might be searching for - someone followed my board before I'd even finished it because they were googling the subject.  Then, hopefully, it should take off.

I’ve had a lot of fun browsing through the photo albums on Pinterest - it’s the perfect displacement activity for an author who’s hit the wall at 55,000 words on the latest biography and desperately needs to get going again in order to meet the deadline.  Only another 25,000 words to go, meanwhile, I will just go and pop another pin on the Norman Nicholson board . . .

Find out more about Kathleen Jones' books at www.kathleenjones.co.uk
Kathleen also Blogs at A Writer's Life
And you can find her on Pinterest too!
She also Tweets @kathyferber

The Sun's Companion is available on Kindle  (on special offer) and e-pub
It's an Awesome Indies Approved novel and it has stunning 5 star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads!