There are too many authors out there who write great stuff but don’t get near enough exposure. I met some of these authors this last weekend. They were funny and goofy and intelligent and hopeful. I had drinks with an author wearing tiger ears and sat cross-legged and listened to another play the guitar and sing Jonathan Coulton’s re: Your Brains and Hey There Cthulhu.
I complained a little yesterday about a terrible writer’s panel I attended, but I failed to mention all the really great panels I did attend and how informative and helpful they all were. Of the hundreds of people I met and talked to, of the dozen authors I had the pleasure of speaking with, I only met one who made a point to discourage most of the would-be writers in the room from attempting to fulfill their dreams. The rest were encouraging and optimistic and kind and honest, too. I’m very proud of the local writing community I am affiliated with.
I originally wanted to share with you just a few names of authors who impressed me this weekend and I wanted to encourage you to check out their work if you think they might be writing something you could be interested in.
Unfortunately, all but two of the authors I met and wanted to share with you have no online presence whatsoever.
*Groan.* Let this be a lesson to everyone who reads my blog and has not yet started developing an online presence – in this day and age, you absolutely have to be findable by a Google Search. You don’t need a blog, but you need to have a site where you can be contacted, all of your publications are listed, and there is a link to where someone can go to buy them. This is especially true for self-published authors.
In our tech-addled world, there are two truths you need to know:
1. Everyone Googles everything.
2. Internet people are incredibly lazy.
The days of authors staying out of the limelight are over, blog friends. You absolutely must make it very easy for anyone looking for your name to find a prominent list of links to your books. If you cannot be found by Google, people will give up on you and they won’t go any extra miles to track down your book. Why should then when there are plenty of other perfectly wonderful authors who show up in a Google search?
So instead of offering a bit of free advertising to these wonderful authors, you’ll just have to take my word for it that they are awesome, though I can’t give you any way to actually find their books. Here are the three I did manage to track down, though.
Sommer
My name is Sommer and I'm a writer from the Midwest. I am currently working on a YA novel about superheroes, reading as much as I can, blogging, and saving the world.
Yikes, didn’t proof that comment. Corrections to ‘their are ghosts’ (should be there) and ‘out work to’ (should be our work to). Need more coffee to engage brain next time. The sign of a perfectionist, I know.
Great advice, Sommer. That’s why I blog, to keep the writing fingers flexed and ready. And yeah, to be able to be found by those we send out work to.
What I find really tricky is keeping an online presence when their are ghosts from one’s past that keep cropping up if one is too easy to find. Where is that fine line between easy to find, hard to spam?
Thanks for sharing. Too bad about the one speaker who tried to discourage writers, but some people want to keep down the competition. We all know it’s tough out there in the book world.
Hey Sommer!
I was doing research for my next book (*cough*surfingtheinternet*cough*). I saw this article and thought of you. Steampunk furniture!
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/10/steampunk-worthy-furniture-naval-mines-mati-karmin.php?campaign=TH_sbr_popular
Limelight makes my skin a sickly green color reminiscent of Gollum. I prefer natural light. I can always be found in natural light.
That’s why I started blogging a year before my book was released!
“Unfortunately, all but two of the authors I met and wanted to share with you have no online presence whatsoever.”
So important to remember. Had these writers had more of an online presence, you’d be giving them free positive publicity right now. I do look for author’s blogs and web sites, and I’ve even googled an author looking for honest discussion of her books. Googling myself, I’ve found reviews of my work I hadn’t known existed.
I agree. I google people as soon as I decide I like their books. Google is awesome that way… Glad it was a good experience for you!