Category Archives: Authors

NovelRank Book Giveaway Kick-Off! “MAGGIE: the dog who changed my life”

It’s officially the start of the NovelRank Book Giveaway, brought to you by the kind and generous independent authors and publishers who use NovelRank every day to track their Amazon Sales Rank and promote their magnificent books! Over 12 books have already arrived, with others promised and on the way. I am very excited to get this started!

Without further adieu, the book giveaway kicks off with a wonderful paperback book, “MAGGIE: the dog who changed my life: A Story of Love”. The author, Dawn Kairns, has been using NovelRank for a long time, and I was really thrilled to have her book drop into my mailbox first. Here’s what one reviewer said about this 5 star book:

“This book is a deeply moving story of the powerful connection between the author and her soulmate dog Maggie… Maggie opens the author’s heart and teaches her about trusting her intuition and listening with her heart. Interspersed with well-researched information about pet health care and advice on how to deal with the grieving process following the loss of a pet, this book shows us that animals are so much more than just pets… ”
– Ingrid King

If you would like your chance of winning this book, add your email address to the form below. You’ll be notified by email if you are the winner, and you will also be opting into a follow-up email to let you know when the next book in the giveaway becomes available.

This giveaway is closed. Check out the current giveaway.

Share the Book Giveaway with Others:
Share or or http://www.novelrank.com/book-giveaway (will always be current)

The Rules
Any email address that is not valid will not be accepted. Any email to a temporary mailbox service (e.g. mailinator.com) will be disqualified and may be publicly mocked. Unless otherwise stated, only one book can be won. Multiple entries will not be accepted; don’t make me turn on duplicate protection. The winner will be drawn randomly no later than the 3rd of the following month and contacted via email to receive shipping information. Winners who fail to respond to the email within 72 hours will forfeit their win to another random winner.

For Authors: Getting Involved
For more information about donating your book to the book giveaway, check out this introductory announcement post on the book giveaway idea.

Authors: Donate your Novel for Monthly Promotion and Giveaway!

Girl Reading Antique Book (licensed) Let’s face it, authors are the biggest readers (we call it research) and love reading books as much or more than writing them. More importantly, authors are always looking for ways to promote their book to an attentive audience. With this in mind, and a touch of crazy, NovelRank would like to start doing a monthly book giveaway, supported by books donated by authors like you who track their books on NovelRank.

Update: August 2011

Due to overwhelming response, and a balance of author benefit and time cost, NovelRank is no discontinuing the giveaway program in 2011. Thanks for participating!

Why would NovelRank do this?

NovelRank should be more than a one-trick pony, as some of the unique blog posts have aspired to do. To that end, I would love to also share and promote author’s books in new and unique ways whenever possible. With some interest already from Rebecca Connell, Cami Checketts, Lisette Brodey, Cheryl Kaye Tardif, and Mike Dauplaise (with TitleTown Publishing), I think that this idea is ready to move forward.

What’s in it for me?

Free promotion of your book? Isn’t that what every author wants? Your book would be promoted to twitter, facebook, and the NovelRank blog, and all the while being adored by hundreds. On January 5th, NovelRank had ~100 unique visitors a day. On February 5th, this doubled to 200+ unique visitors. January 2010 had over 11,500 visits to the site. As you continue to spread the word, this will continue to grow.

Seems too good to be true; what does NovelRank risk?

Cold. Hard. Cash. Seriously, I’ll be paying out of my own pocket to package and ship (anywhere in the world) the winner their copy of the monthly giveaway book. I also have to store all the books authors send to me until their time comes.

Anything else?

Not really. Oh, one last thing: I’m actually a slow reader because I’m busy (guess with what), so I won’t be reading and reviewing every book before it is promoted. If you are looking for a review, I suggest LLBookReview.com.

Marketing with Book Preview – Browse Inside your Book

When you walk into a bookstore, you have the ability to pick up a book, open the cover, and read through as many pages as you wish so you can make a purchasing decision. Sure, you read the back cover first, and maybe that was enough, but at least you have the option. When marketing your book for its potential readers, you want to give them the ability to preview the book as well, so they can decide to purchase a copy for themselves.

There are three main methods for providing a book preview, and while all of these seem to compete, it is important to be aware that each one provides a different avenue to expose your audience to your book. In sheer marketing terms, using all of these options would be a beneficial use of your time. Finally, be aware that every one of these options are completely free.

Book Preview with BookBuzzr

BookBuzzr.com offers authors a Flash based book preview that not only has the feeling of physically turning pages, but it allows extraneous, author added details about the book to be included with the embedded widget. Furthermore, there is an extensive list of sharing options for social networking, blogging websites, and email, with a detailed list of instructions for each site.

BookBuzzr even allows you to use the micro-blogging website Twitter to let your followers know whenever your book was viewed. Secondary to that, the BookBuzzr account on Twitter promotes authors and books that are found on BookBuzzr as just an additional benefit for their authors. Going even farther, the fReado (parent of BookBuzzr) website offers listing and rankings for books that have been popular on the website, called their Movers and Shakers.

You can setup your account directly on BookBuzzr.com. You decide how many pages and which pages will be visible to your users, so you can share as much or as little as you wish. This is clearly the most advanced book preview widget available for free today.

Book Preview with Google Books

Everybody knows Google, and if you are searching for certain topics, Google Book Search will provide three books relevant to the search at the bottom of the page. If your book isn’t added to Google Book Search, its odds of appearing in this search are greatly reduced. Of course, Google offers an additional Book Preview widget. There are a few steps you should go through, starting with adding your book to Google Books and configuring all your settings, including custom purchase links, images, and page preview (with optional download). Once the book is setup, you will want to create the preview widget through their book preview wizard.

The Google widget can be configured as a button or a full embedded view. It is HTML based so it doesn’t require Flash to be installed, though the browsing is completely linear and not natural to how a buyer would browse a book in a store. There is an additional benefit of Table of Contents scanning, which makes the table of contents clickable within the preview, taking you directly to the appropriate page within the preview. Like BookBuzzr, this can be used to embed your book preview into your author or book’s website.

Book Preview with Amazon Look Inside

Amazon offers its Look Inside feature to any author or publisher who has their book listed on Amazon.com. Unlike the previous two options however, it is only available on Amazon.com. There is no embeddable widget. The preview is built into the page itself, triggered by clicking on the book’s cover image. Amazon offers a full FAQ for using and setting up Look Inside for your book. While this service won’t provide any additional marketing for your book, it will provide browsing of a small portion of your book for organic Amazon.com visitors to your book’s Amazon page. Be advised that every Amazon domain is different, and thus setting up Look Inside on Amazon.com will not carry over to Amazon.co.uk, and so forth.

LLBookReview.com Interviews NovelRank Creator

Book Stack I was thrilled when Shannon with LLBookReview.com contacted me to do an interview about myself and especially NovelRank. I was happy to answer the questions and hope I was at least mildly entertaining in the process. The entire interview about NovelRank can be found on their site.

About LLBookReview
LLBookReview provides independent reviews of self-published books. Originally formed to benefit Lulu.com published books, they have expanded to accept books published through numerous self-publishing companies across the web.