MERRY CHRISTMAS!
PB&J: Picture Books and All That Jazz: A Highlights Foundation Workshop
Join Leslie Helakoski and Darcy Pattison in Honesdale PA for a spring workshop, April 23-26, 2015. It's a great Christmas present to yourself or a writer friend! Full info here.COMMENTS FROM THE 2014 WORKSHOP:
- "This conference was great! A perfect mix of learning and practicing our craft."�Peggy Campbell-Rush, 2014 attendee, Washington, NJ
- "Darcy and Leslie were extremely accessible for advice, critique and casual conversation."�Perri Hogan, 2014 attendee, Syracuse,NY
Did you know that Amazon.com now has FOLLOW buttons for authors?
Amazon now allows customers to FOLLOW authors.
Indie authors have been lobbying for a SUBSCRIBE button on Amazon, which would allow a customer to essentially authorize a purchase of any new book from a particular author. That’s probably going too far for Amazon!
It works well for services like Patreon.com, which allow people to authorize a certain payment, say $1.00, every time a musician uploads a new video. This type of patronage is an interesting new business model that is as old as the arts, but is new in being codified online. Authors are using it to fund podcasts, short stories and other writing. It’s only limited by the author’s imagination and the fan’s ability/desire to help the author achieve certain goals which remaining financially stable.
Amazon’s FOLLOW button won’t go as far as a SUBSCRIBE, but it certainly gives authors incentive to develop their fans and audience on Amazon. Right now, I might boast about 1355 Pinterest followers, 469 Facebook Fan Page followers, 1205 Twitter followers, and a readership on this blog of over 350,000+. But none of those are directly tied to selling your book. 1000 Amazon Author followers, though, would mean that 1000 people are emailed whenever you have a new book come out. Amazon has done a great job of giving authors access to their book listings through AuthorCentral. Allowing fans to Follow an author on Amazon is a new and very interesting twist. So far, I haven’t seen any counts, so I don’t know if the number of your Followers will be shown publicly. Have you see that yet?
Will Amazon’s FOLLOW button replace an author’s mailing list?
It shouldn’t replace your efforts to build your mailing list. The main difference is the question of who owns the list. Using the Amazon FOLLOW button, Amazon will own the list of names and will use it according to their policies–and whims. If you build a mailing list–people who give you permission to contact them–then YOU own the list and can use it according to your policies–and whims.
So, I have to ask! Please FOLLOW Darcy Pattison on Amazon.
And I have to ask: Please sign up for my newsletter, which emails new posts as they are posted. You’ll also receive occasional other messages about new books, events, etc.
Reblogged this on Tisel Milan Vukovic.
Now this is nice! I am going to look in to it.
Thanks, Erick and Automattic team. I can’t wait to employ this one.
Awesome. Thank you, WordPress.com!
Just added to my blog. Great addition. Thanks WordPress!
A great idea — thank you for making this available.
Very happy about the Follow Me on the Gravatar page. This helps greatly – much frustration beforehand.
I tried to generate a code and received a message that my blog was “unknown”. MasterclassLady.Com
How to make it work for Jetpack enabled sites? Doesn’t work here. Keep getting ‘The authorization token does not match the API target.’ error.
Thanks for letting us know. We corrected a problem with the form last night, so it should be working now. Let us know if you’re still having difficulties.
There was an issue with the form, which we corrected this morning. Please let us know if you’re still having trouble.