Busy (Best-Selling!) Beaver, Part 2: LinkedIn

Hello World,

This is Part 2 in my ongoing series of posts explaining my experiences going from a relatively unknown writing schmuck to an Amazon bestselling author. Today's post is about my experience on the social networking site, LinkedIn. This happens to be a long (and important) explanation, so I'm only going to tell you the first half today. (I must stick to my promise to keep these posts relatively short).


:)

I joined LinkedIn a couple of months ago at the advice of a writing friend. I was very slow in using it at first, linking only with people I already knew in real life. But soon enough I decided if I wanted to market myself I needed to reach out and make more connections.

I went on a brief search for other authors and gained a few more connections. Then I learned there were groups that posted useful articles & conversations, so I sought out and joined several writing groups. I occasionally read these posts, but for the most part I kept promising myself to look into them more closely when I got the time.

Little did I know I was actively sculpting the proverbial snowball.

Then one day in early December (yes, just 1 month ago) I found and joined a group called "Book Marketing Group", and almost immediately I got an email saying there was a new comment on one of the posts. The original post was entitled "If you have a Facebook author page, share your link here and we can connect!" Well, I had had a facebook author page for well over a year, and I'd pretty much topped out on the friends/ family who were willing to become my fans, so I thought, Sure! Sounds good to me.

I clicked on it, and the proverbial snowball had been placed at the top of the hill. 

The new comment was an author posting their facebook link. I clicked it, liked her page, wrote her a nice little note on her board in the hopes that she'd like me back, and then went back to the original post to see if there were many more authors I could connect with.

There were.

Over 3,700 comments were in that thread, and the original post had been made more than 18 months earlier.

It was at this point that the snowball was nudged gently toward the edge of the hill. 

What did I do? What were the results? How did this lead to my becoming a bestselling author? Sorry, you'll just have to stay tuned. Click the subscribe button to make sure you don't miss my next post. (Teaser: I didn't sleep much, I got great results, and people are idiots).

Teasingly yours,
-K

ps: Words written since last post: Zero for fiction, but I did fill out an interview questionnaire which I hope will be published very soon. :D