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Happy New Year, everyone!
A little while ago I posted a blog about how to set up a Goodreads author page by claiming yourself as the author of a book (presumably that’s not a false claim on your part).
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Today I want to add a short blog about how to tie a new book to your already established Goodreads Author page.
One of the challenges you will face with Goodreads is that you can publish a new book and it can simply not appear on your author page as your book. You can also find that your book shows up twice (two editions, one paperback, the other ebook) and one of those will be tied to your author page, while the other will not.
I had this happen recently with my latest book (Arestana III: The Harry Quest). One of the versions (ebook, I think) showed up and was automatically tied to my author name. The other version (print, I believe), was not tied to my author account. When I finally discovered this, I also discovered that the book that was not tied to my account already had some reviews on it. The good news is that those reviews end up grafted into my Goodreads profile, so there should be no worries if this happens to you.
If you find that a book or an edition of your book is not tied to your account, you can solve this in a simple way. Contact Goodreads.
NOTE: you can find out if your books are not tied to your account by simply searching Goodreads for your book.
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But first, you need to know why this happens
A book can end up not tied to your account because of a number of reasons, two of which are:
- Your name could be a common author name and Goodreads may tie it to another author.
- Initials. If you use initials in your name, Goodreads requires periods and no spaces between multiple initials. So, for example, my book could show up on Goodreads as written by Shawn P B Robinson. Goodreads won’t tie that name to my author account unless it is written by Shawn P.B. Robinson (note lack of space between initials and a period after each initial).
So, the solution to this problem has been changing lately. There used to be a forum specifically for this, then you had to contact Goodreads… currently, you have to go to the following link:
www.goodreads.com/group/show/220-goodreads-librarians-group
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The old way of doing this was to be very short in your message. They only wanted facts. I would recommend that you keep your message short and to the point so they can read your message quickly and deal with it quickly.
When writing your message, the information they need is:
- a link to the rogue book
- a link to your author page
As a Canadian, the short and direct way is difficult for me. It’s hard for a Canadian to speak without the flowery politeness. I like a more friendly approach. Perhaps they need to take a page from the Great White North rule book!
Here’s that link again!
www.goodreads.com/group/show/220-goodreads-librarians-group
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Enjoy!
Shawn
