How to Help Your Friendly Neighborhood Novelist

1: Acquire: Pick up the book in some form or other! (Which so many of you have already done, and I love you for it). Purchase if you can, but buying isn’t in your budget right now, ask your local library to get it. Libraries are awesome and help get an author’s words in front of many eyes.

2: Review: Preferably on both Amazon and Goodreads. This matters a lot — GR is where lots of readers go to check things out before they buy, and Amazon starts promoting books more once they acquire a certain number of reviews (rumor says 50, but no one’s really sure). It doesn’t have to be long! 5 stars and “I loved it! Can’t wait for the next one!” or similar will totally suffice, and you can copy the same review onto both platforms. You don’t have to have bought the book on Amazon to review it there, either.

3: Recommend: I’m pretty sure more books still get sold by word of mouth than by anything else. If you enjoy a book, tell someone else that you think would like it! (This goes triple if you know someone who, like, works in acquisitions for Netflix or HBO, just sayin’. 😉 )

4: Face Out: I’ve gotten a lot of great pictures of From Unseen Fire “in the wild”, at bookstores, and that is so much fun for an author to see. But there’s also a trick you can do to help visibility in-stores! When you see a book on the shelves, turn it so that the front cover faces outward rather than the spine. Books that “face-out” are more likely to catch the eye and get picked up.

5: Social Media: Share the book with the world! Whether that means sharing/reposting/retweeting the author’s material or creating your own, help get the word out to a larger audience using whatever platforms you’re on. Instagram is very big for books, but FB and Twitter are still great, too. And if the book has a hashtag, like, say, #FromUnseenFire, use that when you post.