Social networking is powerful. One-third of the world uses social networks regularly. Studies show that 71% of shoppers are influenced by social media in making purchasing decisions. While physical book clubs and reading groups still exist, online communities for book lovers make it easy for readers to share the books they are reading and their thoughts about them with a much wider audience. Social networking sites for books allow readers to connect with other readers around books.
On these sites, readers can keep an online record of the books they have read and those they want to read. They can share these lists and their reviews of the books they read with others in the community. Best of all, many readers use these communities to discover new books to read.
These online book-lover social networking sites offer authors a great way to harness the power of communities. You can use these online book communities to develop an audience and gain more readers for your books. As an author, you can join these communities and interact with readers. These social networking book sites provide you with another channel to promote your books and talk about them with interested readers. As an author, you can also set up a profile and engage in advertising.
Online Book Communities
You've probably heard of Goodreads, the largest and most popular of these online book-lover communities. Goodreads is the largest site for readers and book recommendations in the world. It boasts more than 7.3 million members, from casual readers to bookworms.
However, Goodreads is not the only book-lover community on the Internet. Here are five more you can join to harness the power of community to promote your book:
LibraryThing
This community hosts 2,961,306 book lovers. LibraryThing connects readers to people who read the same books. It has more than 12,000 groups in which you can talk about particular genres or subjects, find the name of a book you have forgotten, join challenges to read a certain number of books in a year, or anything remotely related to books. They also have an early reviewers program for which you can sign up to review books, and you get access to more than 3,000 early-release books every month.
BookLikes
BookLikes helps people share their reading life and discover new books. It's a blog platform designed for book lovers. Users can write reviews as well, and they have a fun timeline feature so you can see when and how much you’ve read.
Riffle
A vibrant community of book lovers, Riffle inspires people to read more books by connecting them with librarians, avid readers, authors, and deals on books they’ll love. It’s like Pinterest but for books only.
Bookstr
Bookstr connects books with people. The site makes discovering books entertaining, informative, and socially engaging with fascinating articles in the Author’s Corner, Book Culture, and Pop Culture, as well as quizzes, a lifestyle blog, and recommendations.
BookCrossing
BookCrossing is a unique community that reaches into the “real world” more than others. Users can tag and track their books by marking them with BCIDs (BookCrossing Identity Numbers). Each BCID is unique to each book. Once it’s registered on the BookCrossing website, the book can then be followed forever. It's free to join. They encourage readers to not let books collect dust on the shelf but be released in the wild to find and connect readers all over the world. They are active in 132 countries.
Keep in mind, that the key to making the most of these online social networking communities for readers is the same as with every other social network. The majority of your activities should be about connecting and providing useful information to others through joining the conversation and rating and reviewing books.
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