What Is the Goodreads Author Program?

The Goodreads Author Program is a completely free feature designed to help authors reach their target audience — passionate readers. This is the perfect place for new and established authors to promote their books. 

Create Your Profile

Make your profile a dynamic destination for curious readers. Here are some of the features you can use on your profile:

• Add a picture and bio.
• Share your list of favorite books and recent reads with your fans!
• Write a blog and generate a band of followers.
• Publicize upcoming events, such as book signings and speaking engagements.
• Share book excerpts and other writing.
• Write a quiz about your book or a related topic.
• Post videos.
• Add the Goodreads Author widget to your personal website or blog to show off reviews of your books.

Promote Your Books

Get the word out! Here are some of the promotional tools available on Goodreads: 

• Sign up to advertise your book to the Goodreads Community—40 million readers!
• List a book giveaway to generate pre-launch buzz.
• Participate in discussions on your profile, in groups, and in the discussion forums for your books.

How Do I Add my Books?

1. If you are already a Goodreads member, make sure you are signed in. If not, sign up for an account.
2. Search for yourself and click on your published author name. The author name is listed below the title of your book in the search results. If you do not find your book in our database of published works, please see section below (“Who Can Join”).
3. Clicking on your name takes you to your basic author profile page. This page has your name at the top and “author profile” to the right of your name. This page is part of our database of books and authors and is separate from your member profile page (which lists your bookshelves and friends).
4. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Click “Is this you?” to send a request to join the Author Program. Please give us a few days to process your request. You will receive email confirmation when we successfully upgrade your user account to an author account. Joining the program merges your author page with your member page. The email will also contain further instructions for managing your author profile.

Who Can Join Author Program?

The Author Program is designed for people with published books, or who are in the process of publishing a book. It's best if your work is on a bookseller's website, such as Amazon.com or BN.com, but we will accept any author who has published a book. This includes authors from other countries as well as authors who are self-published (such as through Barnes & Noble NOOK Press or services like Lulu). If your book is self-published and is not yet in the Goodreads database, you may manually add it. 

If you are a writer but have not yet published a book, you may want to check out the writing section of your profile where you can post your writing for others to read and review. 

1. Go to your Goodreads Author profile; https://www.goodreads.com/author/show
2. Scroll down, click on your BLOG. Look to the right side of the page, click on BLOG SETTINGS.
3. See "External blog feed url"? Click on that. (It might say something like "add a feed url" if you do not currently stream anything to your GR blog.
4. Ready to import your RSS feed? Paste your RSS feed (from step #7 above) into the "External blog feed url" box. Hit "ADD FEED".
5. You will go to a Goodreads page asking you if "YES, this is your blog" and "NO, try another feed url". You may also get a check box on the left side under "YES, this is your blog," where you can opt to save your previous blog posts. I recommend clicking that box and saving your previous blog posts. I believe they will just integrate in with your new feed. Click YES to save, NO to try again.
6. Go to your Goodreads page and check out your new blog. It is now your Facebook fanpage feed, straight to your Goodreads blog.

It should look like this: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

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TIP: How to make your Facebook page an RSS stream for Author Central & Goodreads.

I came across a pretty straightforward way to stream your Facebook page onto Author Central. Since FB is where I am most active, I've been looking for a way to integrate it into Author Central since Amazon does not offer and option like they do for a Twitter feed. I am not a huge blogger, so I feel like I am not making the most of those spots on Amazon & Goodreads where a blog is supposed to go. I think it is important to keep all your online profiles/pages updated - I hate it when I'm all geared up about a book, click on the author's page, and it looks like nothing has been updated for over a year. :-[ I know it's not fair to judge ('cause we are not all bloggers, me included!), but it makes me think I might never see the next book and it sometimes makes me lose interest, that's just how I look at it. Feeding my Facebook fanpage into those two sites is a great way to keep things updated without doing anything more than I usually do.  

Here is the method for those who would like to give it a shot:

For Amazon Author Centrol Profile

CREATE YOUR RSS FEED & USE YOUR FACEBOOK FANPAGE STREAM AS YOUR AUTHOR CENTRAL PAGE BLOG:

1. Go to http://findmyfacebookid.com/ and enter your FB fanpage URL. EXAMPLE: https://www.facebook.com/ebbrownauthor.
2. You will get the ID number for your page. COPY that number.
3. PASTE your number into the following URL in place of the long string of numbers at the end. EXAMPLE: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=364948890245925
4. If you are logged into your Facebook fan page at this point, switch over to using Facebook as your personal page.
5. Now COPY the URL your created in STEP #3. PASTE it into your browser and GO.
6. You should see a page that looks like this: https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=364948890245925
7. Copy the URL for your new RSS feed.
8. Go to your Author Central accounthttps://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/home
9. Under the PROFILE tab, scroll down to BLOGS and click on ADD BLOG.
10. PASTE in your URL (the one you COPIED in step #7).

Look for your Facebook fanpage feed to appear in about a day on your Author Central Profile. Mine took only a few hours, but updates to Author Central sometimes take longer.

GOODREADS: HOW TO USE YOUR FACEBOOK ACTIVITY STREAM AS YOUR GOODREADS BLOG

1. COPY the Facebook RSS feed you created in Step #7 above. EXAMPLE: https://www.facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=rss20&id=364948890245925
2. Go to your Goodreads Author profile. EXAMPLE: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
3. Scroll down, click on your BLOG. Look to the right side of the page, click on BLOG SETTINGS.
4. See "External blog feed url"? Click on that. (It might say something like "add a feed url" if you do not currently stream anything to your GR blog.

WARNING: Once you add in your own RSS feed, your previous blog will be DELETED. Your Facebook fanpage RSS feed will REPLACE your previous Goodreads blog. If you wish to save your original Goodreads blog posts, I recommend copying them to another place before you add in your new RSS feed. I was bummed to discover I deleted all my previous Goodreads blog posts, so don't make the same mistake I did!

1. Ready to import your RSS feed? Paste your RSS feed (from step #7 above) into the "External blog feed url" box. Hit "ADD FEED".
2. You will go to a Goodreads page asking you if "YES, this is your blog" and "NO, try another feed url". You may also get a check box on the left side under "YES, this is your blog," where you can opt to save your previous blog posts. I recommend clicking that box and saving your previous blog posts. I believe they will just integrate in with your new feed. Click YES to save, NO to try again.
3. Go to your Goodreads page and check out your new blog. It is now your Facebook fanpage feed, straight to your Goodreads blog.

I think it will be great for someone like me who is not an active blogger, since it will keep your Goodreads and Amazon Central pages looking fresh and updated. Happy RSS feed making!

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In order to take to take full advantage of Gmail's vulnerability, you will want to send out over 400 emails a day to those individual readers who may get excited about your published book(s). To begin, it is always wise to export and save your current contacts, and then import the new contacts (recipients) to your email contact list from day to day. To export your current contacts you'll need to;

1. Sign in to Gmail.com.
2. Click Gmail at the top-left corner of your Gmail page, then choose Contacts.
   
3. From the More drop-down menu, select Export....
4. Choose whether to export all contacts or only one group.
5. Select the format in which you'd like to export your contacts' information. Please note, some of these formats can lose some contact information.
   • To transfer contacts between Google accounts, use the Google CSV format. This is the recommended way to back up your Google Contacts.
   • To transfer contacts to Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, or various other apps, use theOutlook CSV format.
   • To transfer contacts to Apple Address Book, use the vCard format.
6. Click Export.
7. Choose Save to Disk then click OK.
8. Select a location to save your file, and click OK.

To import contacts to Gmail:

1. Create a custom CSV file (from the email list we provide you) with TargetHero.com. Sign up and Sign in, Click on the List menu, Click on the Create a list icon, Enter a name, and then your list of emails,either manually or from a file. This will export and format the email list that you just created as a CSV file that can be saved to your computer.
2. Sign in to Gmail.
3. Click Gmail at the top-left corner of your Gmail page, then choose Contacts.
4. Click the More button above the contacts list and select Import....
5. Click the Choose File button.
6. Select the file you'd like to upload and click theImport button.

When it's done, Gmail will display the number of contacts imported.
Next step is to compose your Newsletter / HTML Book-page into the email body. To learn more about how you can create an email-bodied-book-page in minutes, follow these steps; http://bit.ly/1759Sef

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How to automatically increase your readership and reach 20,000 Goodreads members in one day.

Now, you are ready to meet your fans of 20,000+ Goodreads members. Good.

By following the Gmail instructions above, you can import our 20,000 Goodreads-members-emails that we provide our customers from this link, http://bit.ly/1IcKUhz.

Then, you may use the new Gmail contacts you just created to make new friends.

By using the Goodreads invitation system, it will send an invitation to each and everyone of the contact list in your Gmail account to either become your Friend or Join your Public Group - depending on which of the two you purpose decide you use the email contacts for.

These Goodreads members are ready to make new friends like you.

The file (with the 20,000 Goodreads emails) can be downloaded at, http://bit.ly/1IcKUhz. It will be immediately provided to you. 

List of 20,000 Goodreads Members; http://bit.ly/1IcKUhz