Recently I have been doing a lot of promoting and while I was doing so I found myself getting more and more involved in conversations with other authors on the Kindle forums.
There are actually two kindle forums. There is the Kindle publishers forum which is only accessable through an authors account and this is where the majority of the authors actually spend their time (there has been a lot of hostility towards authors from readers on the other forums for some reason, personally I’d love to get to interact with book authors) here there are the standard help with formatting forums, accounts problems, etc but there are two other forums where I spend a lot of my time.
General questions forum where we all talk about everything from pricing, reviews, blurbs, sales levels and what we should do next.
Then there is my personal favourite section of them all the ‘Voice of the author’ forum. It’s full of marketing advice, authors swapping books for review and general encouragement. I’ve probably bought more books thanks to this section of the forum in the last 6 months than I have in the last 6 years.
In the other kindle forums on the main Amazon sites there is a fairly new section called meet our authors. This shows great promise as long as readers actually come and meet the authors of course. I’ve set up my very own meet the author discussion page so anyone wanting to chat to me about my books etc can head here.
I’ve also spent quite a bit of time in discussion pages for particular books. Each product on Amazon has a section just above suggested similar discussion pages where anyone can either create a discussion thread or join in an existing one about the product. For example one of my readers on Amazon.com created a Why I loved ‘With Proud Humility’ discussion thread.
If you’re an author or a reader I’d encourage you to head over to chat to lots of other people and distract me even more from writing 😉