This year, instead of promoting your own books as holiday gifts, give back to your author community by working to promote your friends’ books.

Your author friends will appreciate the support while you enjoy the good feeling that comes with helping them reach new readers.

Here are five ideas to get you started.

1. Write a blog post listing your favorite books for 2016.

Since most authors are also big readers, this shouldn’t be too hard.

Be honest with your list. Maybe it includes a  mix of new books and books written decades ago that you read for the first time this year. Perhaps all of the books on your list were released this year. What counts is that you enjoyed reading them.

You can approach this in any way you want — but do a friend a favor by including his or her book on your favorites list.

2. Write a newsletter article about books you’re giving as gifts this year.

Many authors support the profession by giving books as gifts — why not make your gift list public? Share it with your email subscribers, and be certain to explain why each book is on your gift list.

3. Do a Facebook Live interview with an author friend.

This works when your author friend is local and you can get together in person for the broadcast.

If your author friends aren’t local, use Facebook Live to offer several holiday gift book reviews and recommendations over the next few weeks — and make sure at least one of the recommended books was written by a friend.

4. Create a “Books I Love” Pinterest board.

Pin book covers with links to their Amazon sales pages. In the “description” section for each image, tell people why you love the book.

5. Host a Twitter chat with an author friend.

Make sure you promote the chat in advance so people know when it will happen. Share your Twitter handle and your guest’s so people can search and find the conversation. Give the event a hashtag and share that with you networks, too.

It truly is better to give than to receive. This year, make your author friends the beneficiaries of your generosity.

Please add to this list. What else can you do in the next few weeks to help boost your friends’ book sales during the holiday season? 

Tip of the Month

I always share a “Tip of the Month,” a free resource or tool for authors, on the last Wednesday of the month.

If you have a smartphone, you probably use apps. One of my favorites is “Agent Obvious,” a collection of more than 500 tips and words of wisdom from literary agent Laurie Abkemeier.

Here’s just one example: “Don’t trash talk the competition in a proposal. Inevitably, people who worked on those books will read it.”

Download Agent Obvious for iPhones in the Apple app store.

I’ve created a short video that shows how to link your image quotes to any book sales page. Watch the one-minute video here to see how quickly you can be selling more books on Pinterest:

Prefer to read how to do it?

Here’s a loose transcript for those who prefer to read, not watch:

If you have an image quote on a Pinterest board that isn’t linked to your Amazon sales page, you could be missing out on sales. So, you want to make sure those image quotes are linked to your Amazon sales page. I’ll show you how using an example from my Pinterest account.

It’s three steps:

1. Start with “edit” at the top of your pin.
2. Go down to the website blank and paste in the URL for your book’s sales page on Amazon or any other online retail site.
3. Select save.

Click on my pin and you’ll see that it goes right to my Amazon sales page. It’s as easy as edit, paste, and save.

Do you think your Pinterest activity is helping you sell books? Why or why not? 

If you are, you probably have pinned your book cover to a board dedicated to your book and related images. Highlight the fact that your book is for sale (subtlety is over-rated!) by adding the price to it. It will look like the image here on the right.

Here’s how to do it

Don’t know how to add a price to your pin? It’s real easy. Watch this short video (or read the transcript below). After beginning to play the video below, select “Watch on YouTube” in the lower right corner of the viewer to see it in full screen version. Or, go directly to YouTube to view it there.

Loose transcript

It’s real easy.

• Start with the board on your Pinterest page that has your book cover. I’ll start with mine as the example.
• Select the pin with your book cover, then select edit.
• In the description, add the price for your book, remembering to add the dollar sign. The dollar sign is important because that’s what  tells Pinterest to treat your price differently —  and differently means you get this banner right here in the upper corner. it looks pretty good, doesn’t it?
• Then select “save pin,” and go back to your book in the final version to see what it looks like.

Do you have a favorite Pinterest book promotion tip? Please share it here!

“I’m still not convinced that it would work for me, as it seems like Pinterest is more for females and topics that chiefly interest them,” he wrote. The target audience for his book is men, and he doesn’t think men are on Pinterest.

His message was a reminder to me that it helps to know the demographics of Pinterest users, so I shared the infographic below with him. And while I also confirmed that he was right — most Pinterest users are female — I also pointed out that more women than men buy books in general. For that reason alone, he doesn’t want to overlook women in his marketing efforts, whether he’s using Pinterest or another tactic. Women buy books for men as gifts, and his sounds like the perfect gift for birthdays, the upcoming December holidays, anniversaries, Father’s Day, and so on.

Is it for you?

So … should you learn how to use Pinterest for book promotion? Here are a few facts about Pinterest that might help you decide:

• It has grown to become the third most popular social media site in a very short period of time.
• Its users spend more time on that site than on any other social network except Facebook. That means they’re very, very engaged when they’re using it.
• The site has 12 million users – and by next month, that number will certainly be even higher.
• It generates more referral traffic to outside websites than YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn combined.

To make an informed decision, you need to know your book’s target audience as well as the demographics of Pinterest users.  Here’s more information on finding your target audience:

• How to find your book’s target market
• Finding your novel’s target market
• How to find your book’s target market with Twitter advanced search

Who, specifically, is using Pinterest?

Is your book’s audience using Pinterest? According to this infographic from OnlineMBA.com, women dominate the site. Most have “some college” education; almost half of the users are in the $50,000 to $99,999 income range. Can they afford to buy books? I’m thinking that the answer is “Yes!”

I always recommend learning as much as you can about a new resource before adding it to your toolkit. For me, that usually involves studying those who have gone before me to see how they use it and taking a class or reading a book on the subject. When I came across Pinterest expert Andreea Ayers and her resources, I asked her to help us figure this resource out with a teleseminar on how to use Pinterest to promote books.

If you think your audience is using Pinterest (the infographic above helps with that) or if you just want to learn more about this visual social network, listen to the audio recording of my interview with Andreea about “Pinterest for Books: How Authors, Publishers, and Others Can Use the Fastest-Growing Social Network for Book Promotion.” She shared a great deal of helpful information that I know you’ll find useful.

What’s your question about using Pinterest for book promotion?