How can authors use Pinterest?
Pinterest for Authors? Yes, you read it right. Pinterest is currently known to be very popular among beauty and lifestyle bloggers, designers, hobbyists, Photographers, culinary artists and the like. However, if you were under the assumption that Pinterest works only for them, time to re-think! This highly visual medium can work as a brilliant platform for authors to not only seek inspiration but also promote and showcase their work to a larger audience.
Pinterest is a visual social network that lets you showcase your content in a digital scrapbook or mood board form. It makes sharing visual content easy. You can pin, re-pin and like pins posted by others. A pin here essentially refers to an image and re-pin refers to share. A very good advantage of Pinterest is that you do not need to specifically create content for Pinterest. You can simply pin content from your website, blogs or any other online sources or re-pin images posted by others. The idea is to share and re-share content to keep the network growing.
Pinterest is often overlooked by writers/authors. However, according to a research conducted by Mashable, Pinterest has the highest referral potential than any other social network. Here are a few ways authors can use Pinterest to strategically build their online presence and connect with their audience which will eventually lead them to show interest and perhaps buy your book!
1) Who are you?
While you are on your way to promote your book or written piece online, it is important to not only talk about the book but also let people understand the person behind the book. The idea is to ‘Be you’ and connect with the audience on a more personal level and share what you like and admire. Pinterest lets you do this in a more organized way through ‘boards’. You can create different boards for different buckets of content that you would like to show your audience. For example, you would want to create an ‘Inspiration’ board to share images of what inspired you or what inspires your writing. Share your aspirations and your goals. You might also want to create a board called ‘Favorite books’ or ‘Books I read’ where you share the books you personally loved reading. To be precise, create and share content that represents you as a person and reflects your characteristics. Let people know the different sides of you, other than being an author.
2) Its not just about ‘your’ book.
Although you are building yourself as a brand on Pinterest, do not go the Hard-sell way. Keep it subtle, establish a thought leadership and maintain it. Share pins that talk about the authors you like, the philosophies you believe in and the ideologies you want the world to know. Don’t just restrict yourself to sharing content about your book. Think out of the box and share related ideas and images.
One way of doing this is to create a ‘Book Reviews’ Board. Creating a board of all the books you have reviewed on your personal blog or website is a great way to attract readers and thereby generate traffic on your website/blog. You could review books of a similar genre or any genre that interests you as a reader.
3) Behind-the-scenes
Yes, your final book is excellent and you should totally promote it wherever possible. But a great way of establishing a connect with your readers would be to share the approach you adopted in writing the book. Share the process, the research, the inspiration, the difficulties and challenges you face on a daily basis when trying to ideate or write a book. You can also include pictures of related characters or settings from your book to give the readers a visual experience and help them relate to the content of the book. Let people know your way of creating a masterpiece!
4) Share content relevant to your target audience
Getting a clear idea of your book’s target audience is essential. If you are writing a book for mothers, post relevant content on Pinterest. If you are writing a book based on historical fiction, post content that is related to the book’s theme. The key is to share content related to the book’s broader idea and thus make it relevant to the target audience of the book. This will not only result in shares but will also help in creating a background to the book launch or will serve as a road to book sale.
5) All about books
Book lovers will love and share anything that is book related. ‘Bookmarks’, ‘Bookshelves’, ‘Book covers’, ‘Book puns’, ‘Gifts for Book nerds’, ‘Organizing your books’, ‘Book reading clubs’, ‘Literary events and festivals’ and so on. These boards will get a lot of re-pins (shares) and gain a large number of followers.
6) Life snippets
People always love to know the real you. Sharing life snippets is a great way of giving people a glimpse of your day to day life. Most authors are often questioned about their daily writing routines such as how many hours a day do they write and how do they get rid of their writer’s block. Giving your followers a sneak peek into your life by sharing your travel pictures, pictures of any book club events that you attended, pictures of you going for a walk or sharing a picture of your favorite cup of coffee is a great way to show another side of you to your audience. If there is any special place such as a favorite cafeteria or a spot where you love to sit and work on your book, you could share that too.
7) Secret Boards for your personal research and planning
Other than connecting with the audience and promoting your book, Pinterest is a great tool to find inspiration and conduct research for yourself. You could use secret boards to pin ideas that you would like to collate for your next book but don’t really want your followers to see. Pinterest boards are more like digital storyboards and thus are useful to collect information in visual forms.
You can also plan the content you want to share on Pinterest through secret boards. Instead of putting out all your pins at once, you can pin them on your secret board and then put them out on your public boards in a timely manner. This will ensure that you are not giving away everything at once.
8) Quotes from your book
A great way of promoting your book is to create a board that showcases quotes from your book. There are a number of apps available that help you create attractive visuals in minutes. Use these apps to create visuals of quotes from your book and pin them onto one of your boards.
9) Humorous content
Humorous content always works well and gains a lot of shares. To lighten up a little, you could create a board that showcases funny memes or images related to books and writing. This will help you achieve a lot of re-pins from your followers and thus will help in expanding your network on Pinterest.
10) Share some Freebies and tips
Freebies are always successful! Give some leads on free E-books or written pieces that you might have come across and would want to share with your followers. You could also provide some links to free and interesting tools that you use for your writing.
Help your fellow writers and authors. Share some interesting tips about writing and publishing from your own experience. Remember, content that provides solutions to people’s problems is the best kind of content!
11) Collaborate with other authors or writers
Create a shared board to curate and pin content with fellow authors or writers. You can pair up with authors writing on same or related genres to pin content on a shared board. This will not only increase the number of followers on your Pinterest network but will also increase your credibility.
12) Pinterest for Business
As an author, a very important thing to keep in mind while using Pinterest is to convert your personal account to a Business account. This will help you access Pinterest Analytics which is an important tool that will enable you to track the reach of your content. Pinterest Analytics gives you information such as pin impressions, pin viewers and engagement. It also helps you to know which of your pins was shared the most, the number of times it was saved, re-pinned and the number of clicks it received. Using this data, you can analyze which of your content buckets works the best and thus can help you better promote your content on the platform.
Pinterest is often underrated by authors as authors are more about words than visuals. However, if used to its full potential, Pinterest can work wonders. Like any other social network, consistency is key. Do not overload your boards with a million pins at once, nor be irregular with your content. Plan your content and post it at regular intervals to create an impact. Be choosy with your content and focus on quality and relevance more than quantity. While maintaining your own Pinterest boards, it is also important that you be actively involved in engaging on boards created by others. Like, comment and share on content that attracts you and you will slowly see its effect on your own boards. Hope this list has given you some ideas on what you can do to brand yourself on Pinterest. So start Pinning!
