The Author Desk is a free newsletter for nonfiction business authors, including coaches, consultants, speakers and fractional executives who want their book to bring in clients. Every 7 to 14 days, Elizabeth Javor takes one thing she checks on every book that comes to her desk and shows you how to check it on your own. She has worked in publishing and book marketing since 2007.
Who can see your LinkedIn Featured section
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THIS ISSUE Who sees your Featured sectionOpen a private browser window, search for your own name, and click through to your LinkedIn profile. Look at what's there. Then sign in and look at the same profile again. The first time through, your Featured section is missing. LinkedIn's help pages say that to view someone's Featured content, "the viewer must have a LinkedIn account and must be logged in." Anyone who reads your profile without signing in won't see anything you've featured, including people who look you up after you speak at an event or appear on a podcast. The section also doesn't help anyone find you, because LinkedIn says Featured content isn't discoverable through search. Sign in, and the section comes back. Check the order before anything else. Unless you've reordered the section yourself, LinkedIn puts whatever you featured most recently in first place. If you featured a podcast episode in August and a post in September, the post now leads, and the sign-up page you set up last spring has moved further back. Sharing a post about your book doesn't add it to Featured on its own. LinkedIn has no setting that automatically pins new content there, so you have to add anything you want in the section by hand. For a post, that's done from the More menu on the post itself. If you clear out old items while you're there, use "Remove from Featured" rather than Delete. Remove from Featured takes the item out of the section and leaves the post in your Activity. Delete removes it from your profile entirely. Either way, LinkedIn can't restore a removed item to the section, so you'd have to feature it again. If you take everything out, LinkedIn hides the section, and a visitor scrolling down your profile goes straight to your Activity section, which LinkedIn says covers your posts, comments and likes from the past 45 days. Featured posts also keep each post's own visibility setting. A post set to connections only shows up in Featured for your connections and no one else, which leaves out every prospect who isn't already a connection. Tap the first item and see where it lands. If it's your book's Amazon page, the person who was deciding whether to talk to you is now in a store. The page is built to sell the book, and it shows them other authors' books while it does. They might buy yours, and they still won't be any closer to a conversation with you. Amazon won't tell you who looked. Your book belongs in the Featured section, and so does whatever you offer readers who want more from you. Whichever one you put first is the one visitors see first. On my own profile, the first Featured item is the page where an author can request a free Book-to-Client Review. You don't need to post on LinkedIn to do the same. A post has to exist before you can feature it, but links, documents and images can be added to Featured without one. If you've been building all of this on your company Page instead, LinkedIn's help pages say Featured exists only on individual profiles. A prospect reading your personal profile won't see what's on the Page unless they go looking for it. When you feature a link, LinkedIn pulls the title and image for its card from the page itself. Click Edit below a featured item to change its title and description. If the image is wrong or missing, LinkedIn's Post Inspector, at linkedin.com/post-inspector, shows what LinkedIn has on file for that page. After you fix the page, you can ask Post Inspector to read it again. Fixing the order takes a couple of minutes. Deciding what belongs first takes longer, because it depends on what you sell and how long your buyers take to decide. FROM THE INDUSTRY Fake interview invitations are asking authors for fees Writer Beware reported in May on fake radio and podcast interview invitations sent from Gmail addresses. In the examples it published, the invitations eventually ask for a fee of $175 to $350. Writer Beware notes that radio shows don't charge invited guests. Before you answer an invitation, find the show's contact address on its own website and compare the two. Writer Beware Ask your publisher for its AI policy The Authors Guild published AI best practices for publishers on October 13. It says publishers should give authors a written AI policy and should never let staff upload a manuscript to a public AI system. If you're working with a publisher on your next book, ask for its policy before you sign. Authors Guild Best regards, Elizabeth Website · Substack · LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook 600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246 You've elected to receive emails from The Book Marketing Source. Unsubscribe |
The Author Desk by The Book Marketing Source
The Author Desk is a free newsletter for nonfiction business authors, including coaches, consultants, speakers and fractional executives who want their book to bring in clients. Every 7 to 14 days, Elizabeth Javor takes one thing she checks on every book that comes to her desk and shows you how to check it on your own. She has worked in publishing and book marketing since 2007.
THIS ISSUE Your audiobook may already be in Kindle+ On October 22, Amazon renamed Kindle Unlimited to Kindle+ and added audiobooks for subscribers in the US. Subscribers can now read a book, listen to it or do both at no extra cost. Listening is paid the same way reading is now, by page, out of the KDP Select Global Fund, and KDP says it's adding money to that fund to cover listening. Some audiobooks went in with no new action from their authors. If you made an audiobook with KDP's virtual...
THIS ISSUE Nobody can sell you a TEDx spot Somebody emails you about a TEDx talk. They know an organizer, a spot is opening up, and there's a fee that covers coaching and the stage. TED's own page on how TEDx speakers get chosen answers that offer directly. Go and find that email, and look for the number. TED's rules for the people who run these events say that TEDx events "may neither pay nor charge speakers." On its page for speakers, TED is blunter. Any fee-based "TEDx service" is...
THIS ISSUE You'd never know it happened Somebody read your book last month, looked for the thing you offered at the back, and never found it. You have no idea it happened. There's no bounce report for a paperback. Three things go wrong back there. Here they are in the order they're most likely happening to you. The first one only exists in print. In Kindle, your link is live, and a reader taps it. On paper, it's a string of characters somebody has to copy out by hand onto a phone while...