er”>+Evo Terra LOVES authors. He's really only looking out for your best interests here folks.
I, for one, am glad the naysayers are coming on board….in droves.
Reshared post from +Evo Terra
It's time to stop ignoring Pinterest, authors.
[sigh]
It makes me a little sad to type those words. Truth be told, I've been less-than kind to Pinterest, leading with my testosterone and not my frontal cortext when the topic comes up.
I was wrong.
There. Are you happy? I was completely wrong about Pinterest. No, I'm not willing to go so far as to say that it's The Next Big Thing in the digital world, but it's also not a shot in the dark. It's real. It's there. And as an independent author, you need to be aware of it. More importantly, your book covers need to look great when pinned.
Book covers as displayed on Amazon.com suck. Hard. That damned "Click to look INSIDE!" idiocy is an utter buzz-kill. Oh, I have no doubt that it helps Amazon.com sell more books. But it makes the image of your book when pinned on Pinterest look like shit.
Luckily, there's a simply fix. Host great quality images of your book covers on your own website. When someone decide to share your book because they find it pinteresting (surely I'm the first one to make that pun, right? #fail), chances are pretty high that they'll start at Amazon for their pinning.
And when they see that infernal "Click to look INSIDE!" crap on top, maybe they'll venture to your website to see if you, the author, have a higher quality image that doesn't put out-of-context crap on what otherwise would be a good visual item to share.
So do that. Always. Make a "bibliography" page if you need to. And don't slam up the fully expanded front, back and spine image. That only looks good when it's wrapped around your book. No, I'm suggesting you get a fine quality (bigger is better) and cropped image of your front cover and display it proudly on the page.
Go check. Right now. Go to your website. Look long and hard for an image of your book covers. Do you even have one? If so, are the images tiny? Take the next step and see how that page looks when pinning.
Because this thing called Pinterest isn't going away. Might as well resign yourself to that fact. As I have.
Google+: View post on Google+
Dammit, woman. I said I was wrong! What more do you want from me???
Pinterest is a tool in my toolbox that, on the day I know I'll need it, I'll be able to use adeptly. I'm not naysaying, I'm just not seeing how it fits in to my Overall Scheme. I wish it would.
But how am I supposed to use Pinterest as an author?
Step 1, +Christine Cavalier, is to make sure your own site is set up to handle those who do use Pinterest. Have you tried pinning a cover of your books?
I guess it's a more graphical, less interactive version of Goodreads, +Christine Cavalier .
+Evo Terra I'm not yet published, that was more rhetorical. BUT I am a blogger right now. I don't blog about crafts or gadgets or photography. I blog about psychology of the Internet. These are concepts. How do I pin a concept? ("how do you take a cloud and pin it down?")
Remember that I'm a brand new follower of The Way of The Pin, and I certainly don't have all the answers. But I'll try to answer your question, +Christine Cavalier.
No, you can't pin concepts. Pinterest is a place for you to collect and share visual things. Images. Things that can be touched and easily represented in a photo.
Now, there is the opportunity to write accompanying text with the visual items you're pinning. I'm not sure of the length, but I've seen some that are easily several hundred characters, if not a thousand. So maybe, as blogger on the psychology of the internet, you seek out an image that represents a single concept. That's a little backwards from the "oh, this looks cool let me pin it!" mindset that drives Pinterset today, but it could work.
The key is sharing visual items that others care about, too. I have two pin boards: Book Covers That Don't Suck and Beer Labels that Kill. Two things I'm pretty passionate about, and two things where visuals already exist around the internets. Two things that others care about, and actually enjoy seeing what others think fit those criteria.
Yours is more challenging, but not insurmountable. I'll end with this: you don't have to be on Pinterest. If the visual sharing medium doesn't work for what you want, then mosey along and find something that fits better. But… when you get published, you owe it to yourself to make sure others can share images of your book(s).
Upon further investigation, I see you're already all over Pinterest, +Christine Cavalier! As such you needed less "hey, here's how Pinterest works" and more "Ok, you get it, but let me give you some ideas on how you can use it to bolster your position as someone who blogs about the psychology of the interwebs."
Sorry for not doing that. I didn't have all the available info. I'll ponder and get back to you with ideas. And I'll probably not continue to dominate +Lynette Young's post.
I shall refrain from snark comments about Evo dominating something of mine 😉
Glad I'm a part of this thread, as I'm at the same stage, and curious too. So many new platforms to fill out and deploy, then wait till the promised magic happens… I can't count them all.
+Evo Terra Lynette's stream is perfectly suited for this conversation. She's an agent, a facilitator of the use of emerging tech.
Evo, you know me, I'm PurpleCar. I'm pretty sure we've interacted before (mostly about the Psychology of the Interwebzes. I've been doing this a while), but sorry I wasn't more clear.
I've personally been thinking about how to visualize my posts, or the concepts in them. This is spurred by Pinterest, but on a higher level, it's a great thing to be able to educate users on all different levels. Having visual representations of my essays will only help my readers. Before Pinterest, I didn't spend time on this idea. Now I am.
So, more than just pinterest, I'd like examples of how people have used visuals to represent concepts. Your idea about book covers is a perfect example. Book cover artists are tasked with portraying a tone, a "feel" of a book. Perhaps if I study their methods a bit (and I'm schooled at least a little in art already), then I can apply my lessons to "mini book covers" as it were, for each of my blog posts.
As you can see, I started a Pinterest board with the more interesting graphics from my blog that existed already. But really, if I were to reverse engineer it, I'd go to Pinterest's popular board first, then blog about a concept I see there. Then I'd create an interesting poster, graphic, etc., that is repinnable on its own to use as the graphic for the post.
If I can get successful on all of that, I'd still have to redesign my entire blog to be more visual if I want to grab the attention of pinning readers. This is probably what I will do. I will need another blogging theme that is more geared toward photography, and not Thesis, which is more text-oriented.
This is the life of a present-day blogger, though. Text alone is dead. Long live Text+Visuals.
So, that's where my head is. If anyone has any suggestions, please speak up. Thanks!
Here's a possibility: distill discoveries you make about the online Human Condition to truisms or analogies or metaphors, design little "Facebook bumper stickers" that you see all over (with imagery and/or typography), and pin them. Let them propagate and get shared. Maybe brand them with a URL.
+Rick Wolff Like my RT'ed Twitter one liners, like, "Don't piss off the Internet, yo."? or "Your site makes me want to toss my cookies?" (Which I did pin, but didn't link back to the blog yet).
That's the idea! (Cookies = visual) Even denser thoughts too.