How to Secure "Perfect" Book Reviews with Goodreads Giveaways

Welcome to episode 60 of Published. Today I'm speaking with Mimi Chan, the Senior Marketing Manager at Goodreads. Mimi will tell us all about the Goodreads platform and how you, as an author, can use it to connect with readers and promote your book. Welcome to Published, a podcast by Greenleaf Book Group, where we'll discuss the ins and outs of the publishing industry, from writing a book and finding the right publisher, to gearing up for a book launch. And now, here's your host, Greenleaf Book Group CEO, Tanya Hall. Welcome back to Published. In this episode, we're talking about the power of Goodreads as a tool for authors as they work on growing their readership and creating buzz around their book. Goodreads is well known to many readers as a great place to find book recommendations and reviews, but today we're going to talk about how it can also be a great tool for authors. New authors may not realize that Goodreads has a robust author program that you can use to run giveaways, interact with your readers, and advertise your books. And this program is available to anyone. It's easy to use. It makes it a great tool for independent authors who are trying to connect with a target audience. In this episode, Mimi gives us her tips and tricks to optimize your experience on the platform and explains why authors looking for book marketing tools should give it a look. Let's get into the interview. Mimi, welcome to Published. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited about this. Yeah, well, so are we. So for starters, why don't you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at Goodreads? My name is Mimi Chan. I'm the senior marketing manager at Goodreads, and my main role is to help authors connect with readers. So I'm super passionate about learning what the needs are of authors, reading their books, helping them create really unique content that excite our readers and help them to become lifelong fans, hopefully, of the author. Yeah. That's a noble cause that we all support, of course. And for those who aren't familiar, can you tell us a little bit about Goodreads and how it serves authors and readers? Absolutely. Goodreads is the world's largest community of book lovers. We have over 135 million readers or members throughout the site. And what's really unique about Goodreads is that everyone that comes there is truly looking for a book. That's what we're really strong at. It's helping readers discover that next book that they're going to love. And that means that we're also a wonderful site for publishers and authors to try and connect with those readers. And we've created tools and profile pages that are uniquely for the author ways in which they can talk to readers or promote their books that you probably wouldn't find anywhere else. And we have a really wonderful, what we call like a flywheel, where once you start putting some of that content in there, start engaging, it just builds on itself over time. And from one reader to their followers and, you know, their friends on the site, it just gets bigger and bigger. So that's really what Goodreads is about is building that strong reader community. And there's absolutely a role of authors in that. Oh, for sure. And you didn't mention some of the tools and features really quickly just now. But what are some of the features that you wish authors knew about or used more? Oh, this is such a great question. All the time. I wish that authors would come on the site before their book was published first of all. I wish authors would come and just join Goodreads as a member and start establishing those relationships. Maybe it's in a group in a genre that they're writing in, start reviewing and reading books, especially in your own genre. So that you start becoming a book pacemaker. Somebody know for having good writing skills and ability to talk smartly about books is in the genres that you love and write in. And then once you have a book titled, you know, they're really going to be releasing a book. And that book on the site get on there right away as soon as you can. That way people who hear about you hear about your book and start adding it to their shelf and kind of bookmarking and sharing about it. It's a place where they can put it like on hold almost like if you're trying to put a book on hold the library. You can do that on Goodreads. And then what we'll do on the site is we'll remind those readers that they are interested in that book, whether through a launch announcement in an email or maybe if you run a giveaway. It's really the easiest way to advertise the book on the site and reach a lot of new readers really quickly. That's just a book of the way that you can run on the site. And then the other thing that I told authors all the time is that you need to find and encourage readers to follow you. Because the more followers you have on the site, the more you can talk to readers and more of things that you do show up in news feeds of your followers and readers. And not just for any one single book before every book that you write or for everything that you do on the site. So if to narrow down if I were to say there's three things that I would recommend to authors do on the site is one, I just recommend, first of all, they just joined. Even if their book isn't ready yet, join the site, connect their Kindle account to the site. And then two, once they do have a sense of what their book is going to be, and even if you don't have a cover, but at least you have a title, you have a way to share the synopsis for the book. Get the book on the site. You can either create a book listing yourself or you can ask our librarian or expert teams to help you with that. And then third, start to engage with readers and asking readers to follow you in every place that you write a review or have content or when you open up, ask the author or readers to ask you questions. And all those different places, if you run a giveaway, ask readers to follow you, ask readers to follow you outside of the site, again, that gets the flywheel kicked off and started on the site for you. And so those are the basics of the things that I think every author should do. And it doesn't take very much time, this is the other thing. I tell authors all the time, just find a good 15 minute window once a week, preferably in a morning, preferably on like a Monday through Thursday, because that's when we see highest traffic on the site. And do, just a couple of these things. And if you do that consistently over time, you will build a strong following and you will build a great engagement platform for readers for yourself. I love the reminder to ask for the review or ask for whatever the thing is that you want, because I think sometimes authors will assume that someone's going to do that, or they're maybe too shy, and they feel like, oh, I don't want to ask them, they just gave me a compliment, they liked my book. Well, then you have to turn around and ask for something, and you really do need to. It was actually even hard for me to learn when I was promoting my own book. It just feels awkward at first, but then you get to the hang of it, it just becomes the natural next thing to make sure that you are basically converting their enthusiasm. Well, and when it's also like it's asking for people to follow you, but you're right, it's also about asking them to help share if they love your book or love you as an author to share about that. That actually is a very natural thing for a lot of fans, and so it's not a big ask when you know somebody loves your work. And that's actually, I think one of the keys to asking smartly is to find those people who truly love your work. Those are the people you want to ask to talk about your book. It doesn't make sense to ask somebody who maybe is just okay with your book, or maybe the book just wasn't quite right for them, that happens for even the best books, right? You don't want to try to convert those people into being fans, that's not going to be with the best use of your time. Focus on those people who really love your books, take a look at your book page, look at those reviews where people are giving you five stars, those are the people you want to engage with. And I'll say thank you to those people, encourage those people, hey, would you be willing to write a review? Hey, would you like to get an early copy of my next book? And would you be willing to share about what you think about it? Those are the people that you want to engage with, and that's where you're going to find a lot of goodness. Yeah, definitely. That's good advice. So book reviews, obviously a huge part of what makes Goodread such an effective platform. Can you talk a bit about how generating reviews on Goodreads can help an author have a successful launch? Absolutely. So we find that reviews on the site are largely positive, 92% of the reviews on the site have three stars or higher many times from five stars. And that makes sense when you think about why would you spend your time putting a review in there, putting a rating in there, you generally tend to want to do that. And I'm not afraid about that when you love something, right when you love something. And what I what we see in our research is that when a book on the site has a mix of reviews, both one star all the way to five stars, that's when other readers really start to trust the reviews and the ratings for that book. You want a large range of reviews predominantly, of course, in the four five star range, but even at the restart reviews considered good on the site. And you want also some of those lower ones because it gives validity to your book and makes it feel that the reviews are trustworthy. And so you want to foster that. The second thing to think about with your views is that you want to try to get those reviews as early as possible, hopefully before your book even launches, part of the reason for that is because a lot of authors asked me, how do I get included things like roundups in our editorial coverage, but we start looking at that data really early on how does buzz build on the site for a book. That happens before that book ever launches. And so authors like Colleen Hoover or Celeste, they get on the site, get their book on the site, you start talking about their book and what their writing process is and exciting developments with their book. I have a title now, I have a cover now, you know, the names of the. characters are really clear to me now. It came from this other book that you all love. All of that becomes ways that they can gauge readers. And so that by the time you actually launch your book, they're really well invested. So one of the things that you want to do is early on get copies of those books to those same people so they can add their reviews on this site. And now what we're doing has editorial coverage or at good reason we look at these books early on, three, four months ahead of a book launch, like right now we're probably looking at May or June. We take a look and see which books already have reviews, which books already have ratings, which books already have a lot of buzz behind them. People are adding it to their want to read shelves. Those are the books then that we're going to bubble up as the most anticipated books of the year or the month or most anticipated romance novel sci-fi, whatever it is. And that's how those reviews can really then help you early reviews as early as possible. Knowing that that helps build buzz on the site gets it noticed by things like editorial by other readers that then like feeds more readers back to the site. And then the more views you have on there, the more new readers than add that book to their want to read shelf. And then eventually do pick up that book to read as well. One last thing I would give that another author gave me was that they found one of the best ways they had to get reviews on goodreads was simply by adding a link at the end of their book, whether it's a Kindle book or some other ebook or some other place, but somewhere at the end and pages of your book, just very quickly ask again for people to add a review. And that truly actively generated a lot of reviews for that author on goodreads. I love that idea because yeah, the easier you make it if it's right there and they went all that way to finish the book. That's probably the best time to get them over to the site and get a review. So that's great advice. Yeah. So for anybody watching the video, you may have noticed that Mimi just teleported into a different room. We had a little bit of wind noise there. So trying to make sure you have the best audio experience possible. All right. So Mimi, goodreads is known for giveaways. You mentioned that earlier. But what are some of the other strategies or features that you've seen authors use to use the platform successfully and reach their readers? Yeah. So you're right. Giveaways is one of the few features on the site that it's very simple and easy, but does require a little bit of budget. We're actually doing a promotion on it right now for authors. Everything else though on the site is basically free. So let me tell you a little bit about what those free tactics are that you can use. One, reviews. Reviews is actually one of the number one ways in which authors get more people to follow them. When I talk to authors like Colleen Hoover and I ask her, what is it that got you to like almost half a million followers on the site? She told me that, well, you know what? I think all I did was write these really short snarky, funny reviews. And so I think people just started following me. And it makes sense, right? Because that's a way that readers start to get to know you as a writer in your style. And it's also something that we're known for, right? On the site is how readers discover new authors and discover books as they're reading a lot of those reviews. So you can make yourself a pacemaker in this space just like some of our top reviewers. And people follow you just for that. And then when you talk about your books as well, the ones that you write yourself, they'll naturally be interested in that. Strategically, when you're writing those reviews, a couple things to think about. Make sure that you think like a top reviewer does. Look for books that have authors with large followings. Look for books that are in your own genre. Because now you're collecting or building a readership of people that want to read the type of book that you write. And then look for a book that you can get your hands on early before that books even release. Make your review one of the first reviews on one of the hottest upcoming books. It's one of the best ways for a lot of people to discover you. And then lastly, think about that review space on your own book. It's one of the few places where you actually can control some of the content and engage with the readers directly on your book page. And so don't use that review space as a true review of your own book. That's it. Use that as a space to write about things that are exciting about the book. Maybe promotional information about your book. Maybe you have a special offer on your book. This is actually one of the few places I recommend writing something promotional on your book. And and all that review space. So during that release strategically, well, truly help you build a large following. I have a review I wrote maybe three years ago now that every day I still have somebody liking that review and I'm and following me that I do not know and I'm sure it's because of that one really popular review. And so that's one way. One thing you can do. Something else that you can do is write annotations on an existing book. So once you have enough followers and what's enough, I would say maybe a thousand followers on the site, then I would consider writing Kindle Notes and Highlights. So annotations on top passages in your Kindle book, go to your Kindle, look at your book, see what the most popular highlights are, and then just add special insider knowledge that only you as a author has on those passages. Since these are the most popular highlights, you'd know for sure it's going to resonate with your readers, right? And then when you share those on good reads, we will, if there are automated system, send a notification as well as an email to every reader who follows you or who's added that book to their to their world to reach out. And so now you're engaging those readers with special content, unique content. It's content that you can use not just on good reads, but you can use that in your social, you can put that in your newsletter, you've created something that you can use to market with overall, right? In those annotations, I would include links to other books that you've written that have natural ties to that book. Maybe it's a book in the next series, right? Maybe it's a character in that book that spun off into its own book. Now you can convert the readers of that book to other books. So you're moving them from one book to the next, especially in a series, that's really helpful. You're reminding them what they love about that book and then purking their interest for that next book, gaining them the attitude or want to reach shelf. That means that when your next book does launch, so you're doing this before your next book launch, when the next book does launch, they have on their want to reach shelf. And our system automatically sends them yet another free email for you to let them know that the book is now released and they can now get it. They can now check it out on good reads, they can now buy it, you know, on whichever sites they want to buy it in. We clearly promote it on Amazon, but we also give links to every other place that a reader can buy a book. And so those are two big things, I think, are really helpful. The reviews, the Kindle Notes and Highlights, using it across promote new books, other books. And then lastly, you have asked the author. So on your author profile page, you have the ability to turn on questions and answers. And again, use this strategically. Think about ties when you'd want to activate Q&A around a particular book. Maybe before or as it launches, hold a set time that you're going to do live Q&A with readers, where they can type in a question and you can type back an answer in real time. Promote that in your social in other places, right? The reason why you'd want to do it on good reads, promote it elsewhere is because now people that you drive into good reads, they might like the questions, the answers you post that will show up in their news feeds, their friends and followers on the site, you're getting that flywheel going. But secondly, those questions will live on the site pretty much, let's hope forever. So future readers will be able to see your questions and answers and learn more about you and about your books through those Q&As. Again, there's another piece of interesting content. And then you can use that content and share it again elsewhere. And I think there's so much here that you learn about how readers think about your book, how they're thinking about and asking questions about your book, help you understand what their needs are, get some excited. You can use a lot of that information, including the review information on your book page to help refine how you describe and market your book. So the synopsis is that you write, pick up on those cues, like words that every reader is saying about your book, you should think about, okay, how do I use that work in my marketing? How do I use that phrasing and what gets them excited in the description of my book? Maybe I just should even update, you know, the back cover of my book with some of the things that readers are saying is, especially if they're top reviewers on the site. We get asked a lot, how do we, particularly, engage with top reviewers? This is a tricky one, for sure, because we have community guidelines that you shouldn't just like spam or reach out to people, you know, promoting yourself. And in our fact, I do not recommend, as a whole, the side just promoting yourself that would not go over well. Instead, engage yourself like a reader, be a part of the community. And that means look for top reviewers that you love their style of reviewing. You love what they read and start engaging with them on books that they're reading, you know, like the reviews that they write, comment back on them, started like a back and forth engagement, build a real relationship, and they will naturally start to follow you. And then once you have a relationship, you could then message them, because now you're friends on the site or you're following each other on the site. And you can message them and say, hey, I have a new book coming out. I'd love to offer you a copy. Would you be interested at all? Send them an early arc of it. You'll be one of the first, you know, and that's the way to really engage with our top reviewers, not to kind of blind ask, but to build a relationship first, invest in them a little bit by engaging with their content, given that social currency, right, of your time, engaging with them. And maybe even to support them elsewhere and social. a lot of them are on us. other, you know, book talk, bookstagrams, so on and so forth. We also support those same top reviewers and those other places on our social sites. And so, particularly about our book, hopefully it helps you find really, you know, fabulous fans among our top reviewers. One last tip for top reviewers is if you wanna know who are at the very top gets the most followers, have the most people looking at their reviews, there's actually a part of our site where you can look at those people. So, at the top navigation, it's community, and you pull down and says people click on that, and you can sort by who has written the most reviews, who has, you know, has the most people following them, so on and so forth. And you'll see that some of our top reviewers are actually authors, so I hope that'll become one of you. - That's great, and like you said, all of it's free. - It's all free. (laughs) It's amazing. - Yeah. - Right. - Your writers, you said practice. - Yeah, and for the benefit of our listeners who maybe already have published a book, are these same tactics available to them? And not, I mean, it's a leading question. And not just people who are writing new books. - Absolutely. All these tactics are absolutely available to every author. And, you know, even though I do say, and I do truly believe that the earlier you can promote your book, the better, six to 12 months ahead before your book launched, about all possible, still you can use these same tactics, even if your books are already relaunched. Think of it as a relaunch actually. Think of it, like put together a new plan. Think about it, like you would a new book. And think of it as a relaunch. What would you do differently? This is your chance. Maybe you wanna change to cover, you know, a little bit. Maybe you wanna add a little bit more to the digital version of your book. We get like a special edition. And then do the same things you would do for a new book launch. Run a few giveaways on it, so that you can get like really new people looking at the book right away, really fast. Reach out to some of those reviewers that you've built relationships with. Put some standard status updates. I'm really relaunching or really seeing my book. It's got a new cover. Give them something exciting, right? For it. There's a new part of the story that you're gonna wanna read. So what and so forth. Add that to the review. Change the synopsis in the description. Post a general status update. I actually don't know that. Talk about general status updates at this point. So on the main homepage, if you go to the left navigation column underneath books you're currently reading, this is general status. And especially once you have those followers, so thousand plus followers that we're talking about. Every time you post something and that status, it shows up in a news feeds of those followers. And then if they'd like it or comment on it, it shows up in their news feeds to their followers and their friends. And so that's a great place for you to talk about your old book, "Make it new again." Interesting questions about that book. Share when you've added kind of notes and highlights for that book. Now you've added some new content around it. Those are things that you can do with your general status. There's also HTML there. And so that's one of the few places that again, you'd be a little bit more promotional. Maybe you have a special offer on your back list title. Maybe it's unlimited for the first time. Maybe now it's a primary, whatever it is. You can share about that and that status update. Share about it in the book page. Share about it in your giveaways. Like those are the three ways that you can be more promotional. It's in your status update on the review of your own book and with giveaways. - Great. Everybody take notes. So you've mentioned some big names. Can you share some success stories of authors who have successfully used good reads to help with their book launch? - Yes, absolutely. I hope Catherine won't mind, but Catherine Coles is a new book that just launched in February. It's a romance novel. And we took a look at her, her book and we talked actually about what the campaign would look like for her on the site in marketing that book early on. So I'll give you the same tips. If you're building a marketing plan and you're integrating good reads as part of your marketing plan, one of the things that Catherine did and I'd recommend for other authors is one, she's actually been a site for a while. So she actually has built relationships with some of those book influencers that I talked about earlier, some of those top reviewers. So do that work early on. And then maybe about six months ahead of time, she started to send those books out to reviewers. At the same time, she started to run a giveaway for her book. Again, this is a great time to run one during the month of March 'cause it's giveaways month. And we are for sales. It's only $99 for giveaway right now. So start running a giveaway for a book that you know is coming out up to six months ahead of time. That's as early as you can run a giveaway on the site. Once she's done those two things, now she's starting to get people like reviewing and rating the book on the site. She's got the book on the site, she's listed it. That's the only way she can start even having those giveaway. So she's listed a book at that point. She's written the description for that book. She's updated her author profile page to make sure that it's clear that her new book is coming out. Now she's starting to post status updates around her book. Exciting things are developing. Maybe again, I got the cover now. We've decided on the launch date. This is one of my books releasing all that exciting news. She's starting to share that on her general status updates. About three months in, she stepped it up. Again, she's running like three to six giveaways. And so by the time she's two to three months from book launch, I check in with my editorial team and they're starting to notice her book moving up the rankings. There is a page on the site where you can look by month, which books have gotten the most buzz, meaning mainly which books have the most people adding it to their shelves. And I'll send you that link later. She's for you to share. But you can take a look at that and see where you stand in that ranking and how quickly you're moving up and know that our editorial team's looking at that same listing a few months ahead of time. They don't look at just that, but that's one good strong indicator for them of what book has buzz. And so it's a good indicator for you as authors to see if your book's getting enough buzz to get interest and coverage. So she's looking at that, right? And we're seeing, look at that. OK, so based on that, it looks like maybe we should do a little bit more giveaways, because it looks like down here, and I know it would bump up up here, because I get you another 1,000, 3,000,000 people adding that book to their shelf. Based on that, maybe we should take a look at, OK, who's already read your book in the past and left your books, and maybe you haven't reached out to before. And they don't have to be really top reviewers. At that point, you're just looking for people who are going to read your book and love it, and really to talk about it. You're going to reach out to those people on the site. And say, hi, I'm the author. It will probably be really excited to hear from you and offer them up a copy of your books. And now you're adding more reviews and more ratings to your book, for the people who are coming to look at it. She's also doing things like talking about all these things in her newsletters. She's posting about these things. Every time she does one of these things, a good reason she's posting about it in social media. So outside of good reason, she's leveraging the content and excitement of what she's created here and other spaces. As she's getting closer to the book launch, that's when you're looking at things like, OK, do I need to put sexual offers together for maybe past books? This is a new series for her. So this is not as applicable, but I've seen other authors start to offer the first in the series for free to get people to get hooked onto that and then promoting the next book in the series, the last book in the series. And so those are some of the things that I've seen Catherine do and other authors do, leading right up into book launch. Now, hopefully by that point, you have a lot of people following you and having the book on their shelf on good rays. Now the system starts to really kick in for you because now we're sending out all these giveaways emails. And then we're sending out the new book release email. And then after that, at some point, maybe before, after the book release, you're doing those kind of notes and highlights. If you do it before, it helps you get followers for when your book releases. If you do it after, maybe you actually aren't often that it's big enough to have enough people to add this book to their list, but you're seeing that, oh, I look at the book stats. On the book page, you can look at the book stats and the book details to the top or the top right. It says stats. Click on either of those links. I'm talking pretty fast now because I'm getting pretty excited. So look at those stats. And you can gauge things like, OK, I see that a lot of people have added a book, but maybe they actually haven't read it. I'm three, two, three months into my launch. And I've got enough people to add the book. I have 10,000 people adding the book to their shelf, but only 500 people have read it. So that's a good point to think, OK, maybe I should write kind of notes and highlights, even though it's an existing book. It's not a past book, I'm converting readers over to. But for my new book, maybe if I wrote notes and highlights, that would encourage people to then pick up the book and make it the next one they read. So now you might instead do that. Or that might be a good point for you to post an update to your review on that book, because that will also generate a news feed to people. Write about something that's maybe happened two, three months into the book being launched. Maybe now you're on your book tour. And you want to let people know, hey, you can come see me at these places. Or maybe that's when you have the virtual Q&A on the site. People who read my book come learn about it. People who haven't come learn why you should read it. That kind of thing. And again, all along this whole time, every tactic, Catherine's putting in their follow me as an author on Goodreads. Follow me as an author on Goodreads. Write a review if you love the book on Goodreads. That just, again, just get set fire. We'll go in faster and faster on the site. What we're pushing forward for is that, you know, as you start getting that coverage, now Catherine's book actually did make it into the round of romance books that have the most buzz in February, based on hard doing all that work. And if we continue that momentum moving forward, then my hope is that she'll make it into Goodreads' Choice Awards. And when you get into Goodreads' Choice Awards, that's the time of year. We're promoting all those books and to millions and millions of readers and then all kinds of places in our general newsletter to 40 million readers throughout the site and our ad banners in Kindle Special Offer ads on the Kindle and the weight screen. Now your book's test is getting even more awareness, right? Later down the road because we're covering in all these other places and people who win the Green Choice Awards I have seen books basically 10X the number of people who add the book to their shelf once they win the awards. So just being part of the awards you'll naturally get more people but once you win it just explodes and so it's it can be challenging as an indie author to get that much attention it takes it takes work and it takes time right you're building that up over time but that investment really does pay off because that's exactly what Colleen did on the site she started doing that something like five or ten years ago and now her books are consistently in the Green Choice Awards and a lot of times her books back then and even now aren't backed by publishers a lot of these are indie titles that she's publishing herself but she's built such a base of strong fans on the site that she can move books just by talking about her own books on good rates. Wow that's hopefully authors aren't feeling overwhelmed by the five to ten-year head start that she had but you have to start somewhere right you have to start somewhere so less thing too she started as a reader on the site really early on and eventually she decided she wanted to write a book and so you know that saying that everybody has a book in them well you all readers first started to reader to start as a reader and then when the book comes you already have the five or ten years under your belt. That's right well there's the saying the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago the second best time is today exactly exactly. Well and one of the things that I want to point out to and any one of these things I'm recommending to you as authors you may not see movement on like one thing give away too much but on a lot of things you may not see movement on just that one thing it's a marketing maxim that you need to touch somebody a customer seven times before they're gonna buy your product or pick that up and so the more times you can do this right and that's why we recommend you do these things over time not all at one time then in the readers my subconscious of these they start to think and I said I don't see this everywhere I've seen this author in this book everywhere there must be a reason for this I need to pick this up and figure out why this is so popular you know and and reality is that you've done the work of in accepting that book that's what you're doing when you're doing all these different actions on this site and and you can get our readers to help you in doing that right because if you can give them to follow you give them the like and engage with your content again goes to their fans and readers is not just you talking about your book that's really the beauty of our side of that community it's a really strong and positive and beautiful community that you know we are that we continually foster that we protect that we you know lift up and in the same way we think of like the community the same way that we want to protect and support and lift up on goodreads I love that now are there any areas or features on this site that authors frequently struggle with and if so is there some you struggling so yes and I don't know is there some advice you could offer to help them avoid those struggles all right friends let me get a little closer to you because I know this is personal but it is it is personal that's your personal when you're on the site and there are some things on the site that I think authors have concern about and I recognize that so the things that I hear a lot of authors is one there's a lot of concern about negative reviews or reviews based on books I haven't released yet and then two reviews that just aren't don't feel nice you know they just don't feel good and what I would say to those things is one again majority of the reviews on the site are really positive so 92% of the reviews on the site we took we went and analyzed every review are really positive we also have a team that's really focused on ensuring the best customer experience particularly for authors because we know it's a trust that we have between us right on the site and so we really protect that customer trust a lot and so there's ways in which you can let us know when you see something on the site through the help page contact us where we take that concern really seriously and we'll look into things seriously we have really strong community guidelines for that reason and we hold all of our readers and authors and publishers to them that being said even then there will still be times when you probably won't agree with something that someone is saying on the site usually about your book right not about you but usually about your book and what I would say to that is even the most popular books on the site have people that disparage it and that is normal and like I said earlier it actually fosters trust in the reviews when there's a range of reviews so you said earlier like should you know she avoid it she ignored those are one of the few things I say avoiding nor ignore those negative reviews instead focus on the really positive reviews and engaging on just those really positive reviews the other thing that I would say is if you do see something again that that you don't agree with on the site the best thing to do is just to flag it and let us know it's not going to do any good to personally address it I think we will be able to help you in most situations in most situations if if and again if they are validly you know giving their opinion on your book then just ignore it but if there's anything else that's negative let us know so we can address it yeah like personal attacks that kind of a thing absolutely yeah absolutely we'll we'll address that right away right away and there's even times when I'll encourage authors to reach out to me I love talking with our authors and I mean I'm only one person so it's kind of hard to scale that but I'm I'm pretty good about responding to the messages that I get on good rates and so you can find me on the site I'm not hidden it's Mimi Chan and and message me if you ever have something that you need help with I'm happy to do that that's generous of you well thank you for that now discovery of course is critical on every platform so you mentioned a couple things earlier that I suspect fall into this bucket but are there ways and author can more or less optimize their book listing so that its surface is higher on the site they can get in front of more potential readers so how do you surface your book listing higher on the site a lot of that is really driven by our system our system and so some ways that you can tap into that for instance are when you do something like run a giveaway premium giveaway is going to list that book higher up will feature it higher up so if you read a series of good ways I always recommend running the premium one first because it gets a lot more people seeing it and it gets a lot more people adding it to their shelf the other thing because you can do is some of the things we already talked about right getting people to add reviews getting people to add it to their shelves is actually the number one way to get your book to be listed higher and recommend to more people so it's all about how do you get more readers to add that book to their shelf and that's what the things we talked about earlier promoting when your book is listed on the site in all different places not just on goodreads encouraging people to add that book to their shelf there talking to your followers using general status update again escape people to add the book to their shelf is the number one way you get that book to start rising up higher on different listings posting about that book in different places throughout the site and this is I think for more advanced users of goodreads but joining certain groups where you can ask people to add those books to their shelves but groups again where you're truly invested part of the community listopia where people add books to lists all different kinds of lists you can see if the owners of this is willing to add the book to their to their list for you and and then again if if you have an existing like group on the site that you engage with such as there's an author group on the site if you go to the top navigation and I believe it's under a community again and you look for groups there's actually a group that's all about authors and readers supporting each other and that's one of the few places where you can go and just put out there hey I have a book would you folks please add that to their shelf to help you know get more awareness rounded would anyone be willing to read my book and give me a review on it you know whatever your honest review opinion is and so there's a few niche places like that communities that you can go to again this is I think a little bit more advanced um for authors to get in front of people that really want to help other authors other readers and other authors want to help each other and so that's a really nice part of the community that you can tap into at times like that okay are there any particularly powerful events that goodreads has throughout the year perhaps that might be of benefit to an author I can think of a two or three so at the very beginning of the year we have our annual reading challenge readers always at the beginning of the year have goals around their reading people have never have read in like years will suddenly come back into a level reading because So making resolutions, they want to improve themselves, they want to learn something new, and reading more books is a common way that you can do that. So we see a huge spike in readers at the very beginning of the year, the first one or two weeks of the year, and a lot of them are taking the reading challenge. I want to read 10 books this year, average American only reads like one or two books, so this is huge for them. So that's a really great time for you to get engaged on the site, for you to be encouraging readers to pick up your book. And there's those 10 or however many they want to read, to kick off the reading challenge for you to take the reading challenge yourself, and share about the books that you're reading and how you're challenging yourself. So you can actually kind of build engagement and community around the shared desire to read more books for the year, at the beginning of the year, with reading challenge. And then you could actually even share updates on how you're doing on your reading challenge, or ask your readers how they're doing on their reading challenge for the year. There's a whole page that lists all the books you've read for your reading challenge, and gives you stats on how close you're getting to your reading challenge. You can share that at any point, and at the very end of the year, it turns into a graphic about your year in books and the books that you've read. And it shows like your reviews, the books that have had the longest pages, all this kind of interesting fun information, and that you can share that at the end of the year. So you kind of cap off your year of reading and your reading challenge. The other thing is that throughout the year, we have different summer reading, genre of weeks, good-reached choice awards. The way you get included in all those things is everything we've talked about in terms of building buzz on your book and getting your book onto readers want to read shelves. And so just by doing all those things we've talked about, hopefully you'll naturally start to become part of those things. However, if you want to be more active in being part of those genre of weeks, then take a look at those articles that start adding those books to your shelf. Talk about those books that are being talked about during those genre of weeks. That's what people are going to be talking about and buzzing about, right? So be an active part of the conversation at those times. Vote for your favorite books during good-reached choice awards. I show your support of other authors. Readers actually love that. Love seeing authors supporting each other. And so, and then encourage people if you're in good-reached choice awards to vote for you. I think that's absolutely something. We talked about asking, you know, something you can ask readers, Dan's, ask them to, you know, again, ask them to follow you, ask them to write reviews, ask them to vote for you in good-reached choice awards, ask them to add your book to their want to read lists, ask them to, you know, share it in and take part in any promotions you're having. Those are all good-ass that people who love you are going to be happy to hear from you about. You got to make the ask. Yeah, you do. I love hearing from my authors, my favorite authors. So whenever they ask me, I get super excited. Yes, yes, I will write a review for you. Of course, I would rate that book by stars. Absolutely. That's awesome. Great. Well, you have been so generous with your information and your help and your feedback today. Do you have any parting advice you'd like to give our listeners? I really hope that all of your authors are listening, join good reads, and find just a really beautiful community of fans to support them on it. I truly believe that the readers that you want are on the side, they just haven't discovered you yet. And so my hope is that all these different tips that we've given will get you down that road to having just as huge a fan base as some of our most popular authors. That's possible. I truly believe that's possible for every author. Do not be afraid of the site. Do not avoid the site because the reality is, you're already on good reads. You may not be a member yet, but you are already on good reads. Your book is there, your author profile pages there, that picture from high school that you didn't want is on there, because somebody found it. Control that, control that. Get on the site, control your brand, control your book, controls what's set about it, be an active user of promoting your book on the site, take part in the community, and I think that you will find it really, really rewarding. And I truly hope that I will see you there. So feel free to reach out to me anytime. Welcome to good reads. How fantastic, Mimi, thank you so much. You're so welcome, thank you for having me. That's it for our episode today with Mimi. We hope you enjoyed learning about good reads. For notes and resources from today's show, go to greenleafbookgroup.com/episode60. You can also find advice for writing, publishing, and promoting your work in my book, Ideas Influence and Income, which you can learn more about at ideasinfluenceandincome.com. If you've enjoyed our show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever it is you listen to your podcasts. It means a lot to have your feedback and helps us make sure we're answering your publishing questions. A big thank you to Eleanor Fishborne who produces the published podcast and we will be back next month with another new episode. Thanks for listening to Published. To learn more, please visit greenleafbookgroup.com and remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes. (upbeat music)