Amazon forums
I started to post a comment in reply to a post over at Steve Weber's blog, about promoting books on Amazon's customer forums page. But the comment got longer, and decided to go ahead and post it as an entry.
Steve raises the question of authors promoting their books on Amazon's customer forums, and makes the point that the forums are seeing greatly increased use now that the are posted across multiple books based on keyword, rather than a forum for each title.
What I've noticed looking through the politics, war and scifi forums (the ones which fit my books the most) is that there's some strong discussions going in, but there's also a small number of writers jumping in saying "pick me! pick me!"
Goes like this:
Q. Can you recommend a good book on x?
A1. I recommend blah blah....
A2. I though blah blah was ....
A3. I wrote a book called ...
You get the picture. What is interesting is that the voting links, where people say whether not a post "added to the discussion" invariable punish the self-promoting author.
What I think this means is that if you are going to promote in Amazon forums, you have to be a little more subtle than that. Otherwise, people figure it is just spam. So participate in the forums, but not just to say, "Well, buy my book." Instead, make relevant and valuable contributions that people will find of use. It will help your credibility. Whether or not it helps book sales is an open question.
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If you want to promote yourself by using forums of any kind, contribute to the community and help out, don't just spam, you'll find that other forum members will then do your promotion for you!
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