Use Smashwords Forum as Part of Your eBook Marketing Efforts

[Ria Stone]

During my efforts to solicit submissions for SWF first anthology, I looked back at some new member introductions and ebook announcements.

I found that many authors came to Smashwords Forum only once.

Others seem to have hit their stride, learned to market their books and moved on.

But, what surprised me the most was the lack of contact information. Many author's links were disabled, many had no blog or website and no email contact.

Those authors that had links to their Smashwords profiles or website made it easy to find their eBooks and many had contact options.

Consider updating your Smashwords Forum signature to include links to your website, blog or Smashwords profile, so there may find you.

Keep writing.

[jaydax]

You may be right. Lots of us just display just our forum name e.g. 'Jaydax' rather than our real name 'John Chapman' I also tend to avoid making my email address available - I get enough spam and don't trust websites to hide my address from email harvesting programs.
I'm not guilty about the link to my website - it's in my sig.
I was guilty about my Twitter name though. I changed it from JChapmanAuthor to JChapman1729 a while back and hadn't updated it in here.
Now if we have links from here to our websites shouldn't we also have links back to this forum?

[Ria Stone]

Jul 4, 2015 16:43:12 GMT -8 jaydax said:

You may be right. Lots of us just display just our forum name e.g. 'Jaydax' rather than our real name 'John Chapman' I also tend to avoid making my email address available - I get enough spam and don't trust websites to hide my address from email harvesting programs.
I'm not guilty about the link to my website - it's in my sig.
I was guilty about my Twitter name though. I changed it from JChapmanAuthor to JChapman1729 a while back and hadn't updated it in here.
Now if we have links from here to our websites shouldn't we also have links back to this forum?

Hola John:

I do think we should have a link on our blog, website or profile that links back to Smashwords Forum.

I don't know about you but sometimes when I am searching for an author, I am surprised how hard they are to find and to contact.

For example, I wanted to send a word of appreciation to John L. French for his book "Past Sins", he was hard to find on Amazon, (even when you look for him on Amazon, now, he's hard to find), my only option was to write a review, which I did. But, I had to contact his publisher to send my note of appreciation. I doubt most fans would go to that trouble.

I just think authors need to make it easier for their readers and fans to find them. Mr. French did have a reason for privacy, given the nature of his job. But, if you write books, you are in the public eye. To me, the lack of ability to contact an author, and that email or contact information can be to a pseudonym or a PR agency, whatever, just be available.

I guess this is one issue that bugs me. If you call yourself a "writer", to me that means you are in the business of writing, therefore you need a business approach in some of the aspects of writing, like PR.

While I have not done it lately, I periodically, do a search on my pen name, just to see what comes and it does change. I think it is something most writers should do, just to see how readers might find them.

But, that's just me.

P.S. I use DuckDuckGo as a search engine and sometimes it misses a lot. But, then, I go to Google or some other search engine, if need be.