Enhance Your Book to Make it More Marketable
In this day and age, you need to a lot of different things to make your ebook more marketable and discoverable. One neat option is Shelfari.com. Shelfari.com is run by Amazon and was created to connect all different book-loving people – authors, readers, publishers, and aspiring authors. Shelfari has basic tools to help connect these groups of people. Taken from their website, their mission “is to enhance the experience of reading by connecting readers in meaningful conversations about the published word.”
Shelfari allows one to recommend books, share ideas about a book, interact with authors, discover books that are popular and more.
Shelfari is a free, community-based site. Anyone can add information about a book for others to see. With a Page Rank of 6, it’s a fairly popular site. Maybe not as popular and as widely used as Goodreads.com, but popular nonetheless.
Why Should an Author Use Shelfari?
Where it benefits an author or publisher is that you can add more information about your book. Consider the analogy of a DVD extra. A lot of people like to watch extras that come on a movie dvd – items like interviews with the cast, how effects are created, set design information, etc. Done correctly, these enhance the movie experience over and above simply watching the movie itself. The same holds true with extra book content.
Shelfari currently has a standard set of categories that you can fill out:
- Description
- Ridiculously Simple Synopsis
- Summary
- Characters/People
- Popular Covers
- Quotes
- Settings and Locations
- Organizations
- First Sentence
- Table of Contents
- Glossary
- Themes & Symbolism
- Series & Lists
- Authors & Contributors
- First Edition
- Awards
- Classification
- Notes for Parents
- Subjects
- Popular Tags
- Links to Supplemental Material
- More Books Like This
Anyone that visits Shelfari can view this information. And as stated earlier, anyone can add information – it doesn’t just have to be the author although I do wonder how much information would be added by a third party that has nothing to do with the book.
Where can these extras be viewed?
On a dvd, the extras are obviously right on the dvd, accessed via the dvd menu. The same holds true for these book extras. I tend to read all my books using the Kindle app on the iPad. Below are screen shots from my iPad that shows how these extras are accessed and what they look like.
In this first image, you simply click on the book icon at the top left and you can see if a book has any extras.
If a book has extras, you simply click on that menu item and you’ll get a easily viewable selection of categories. You can see 3 screen shots below.
This should help you see the benefits of adding extra information to your books, which may entice readers towards your book(s). There is not one big way to promote your books but a bunch of smaller tactics. Using Shelfari is one of those easy to implement tactics that authors should consider.