Why You Should be Using Pinterest to Promote Your Book

by guest blogger Melissa Woodson

As the publishing industry has constricted in recent years, authors have taken on more and more responsibility for promoting and advertising their own books. The traditional image of the introverted writer has become less and less viable, as successful authors have had to make their presence known on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. After all, the public isn’t likely to read your book if they don’t know it exists. And while traditional marketing and advertising often require a significant budget and specialized skills, social media is free and fairly easy to use. So why not get started with Pinterest?

What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a social network built around virtual bulletin boards. Instead of a timeline like Twitter or Facebook, you have a bulletin board that you “pin” photos to. Each photo has a caption that you can use to explain and/or link to more information. Other users can follow your board, comment on your photos and so on. The site’s popularity stems from its visual appeal and intuitive design. It’s easy to use, and visually oriented people find it easy to communicate with. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But I don’t write picture books!” And that’s exactly why you should use Pinterest.

Visual Storytelling on Pinterest
Today’s marketplace is over-saturated with high-definition, carefully composed, hyper-manipulative imagery. Selling something as unassuming and understated as a book can be challenging in this context, but Pinterest can help you to close the gap. Successful social media users don’t try very hard to sell their products. Instead, they use social media as an outlet for storytelling and community engagement. Telling the story of your book’s creation, your genesis as an author or the subject of your work are all great ways to use the site. You can also invite other users to take part in or respond to the story and begin the process of community building.

Pinterest for Marketing
By using a series of images—whether you create them yourself or cull them from other sites—to tell stories and build relationships may not sound like an author’s job. But it is a great way to entice 21st century readers away from their laptops and into the pages of your book. As you begin to build a community of engaged followers on Pinterest, they will begin to do the work of marketing your book for you. Just wait until fans begin creating boards dedicated to your work!


In today’s media environment, literary creators need to be particularly savvy when it comes to using 21st century marketing tactics. The fact that you managed to tell a 300-page story without any pictures doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to sell it without using any pictures. Pinterest is an intuitive and social way of using visual images that authors can capitalize on without learning specialized skills or raising funds to hire photographers or graphic designers. The opportunity is simply too good for any writer interested in commercial success to pass up.

Melissa Woodson is a social media and outreach coordinator for 2U Inc., a higher education company that helps top-tier universities bring their masters degree programs online. The online LL.M. degree offered through Washington University in St. Louis and the Masters of Public Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are among their partnered offerings. In her free time, she enjoys running, cooking, and making half-baked attempts at training her dog. Follow her on twitter @hungryhealthymj.

Curation Not Selection is the Future

By C.J. West
Suspense. Creativity. Action.

I read a great article by Seth Godin this week talking about the changes in what we read. before the digital revolution much of what we read was published by a select group of companies. Those publications (books, magazines, and newspapers) were read primarily because they were scarce resources.

Only so many books and newspapers were published. So, even if your local newspaper offended your political sensibilities, you had no choice but to read it if you wanted to get the weather and sports scores.  Scarcity meant that our individual preferences took a back seat to what publishers decided to produce.

It’s no wonder that when we were freed to choose a news outlet that appealed to what WE wanted, those newspapers died.

Enter the digital revolution and the long tail. Now if you want to read historical fiction about George Washington being attacked by vampires and you know where to look, it exists.

Note: while writing this blog, I made up the idea of George Washington being attacked by vampires. I searched and found two books on the subject. The first is George Washington and Werewolves. Not far off!

My point here is that we have moved into an age where curation is far more important than selection.

What’s the difference?

In a nutshell, selection is choosing what is available. The big publishers controlled selection for years by choosing which books were published. Control of selection sailed when Amazon allowed authors to publish anything they liked. Pandora’s Box is open and there is no pressing the lid back on.

You can argue that some limits on selection might be good, and you might be right, but now we have entered the age of curation or guiding consumers through the maze of what is available to find something enjoyable and meaningful to them.

The key here is finding work that is meaningful to the person searching. Millions of blogs attempt to do this by providing reviews of books in a genre or topic area. You’ve all been on Goodreads, Shelfari and Library Thing.

In the last two weeks I’ve discovered Pinterest and created boards of my favorite novels, indie novels, movies, and poker books. The great thing for me is that Pinterest takes me seconds to bookmark something of interest and my followers can come and see the things I like in a visual pin board format that works for those of us who are visually oriented.

My prediction is that digital curators will become more and more important to authors and I suspect an explosion of digital curation will be fueled by the ingenuity of digital entrepreneurs.