Today, I’m starting a countdown series of posts leading up to my book launch next week. In celebration of this launch, I’m going to be posting on my blog along with my daily countdown. These posts will countdown the different ways I’m promoting my book to generate excitement and sales.

Today’s Topic: www.Pinterest.com

I’ll admit I can be a little slow on the social media uptake at times. I’d like to say it’s a generational thing, but really I’m just anti-social (in the best sense of the word, of course) So when I heard people talking about using Pinterest.com to promote your book, I was … confused to say the least. Ever the optimist, I decided to embrace Pinterest and see what happened. Yes, I created a board called “Jennifer Geoghan Novels” and started to pin things to it related to my series, The Purity of Blood novels.

I pinned pictures from the various places the books take place in Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, etc. I figured if you were already reading the books, it would be nice to see the places I mentioned in the books. Still … nice as that is, I still wasn’t getting how that was supposed to promote the books to new readers

And then light dawned in the forest ….

Or in the case, I got an email from Pinterest.

In that email, it said that something I’d pinned to my board had been repined to someone else’s board.   Humm… That’s when it occurred to me that if I created my OWN pin, one where I could write the caption to the image and not just re-pin something someone else had pinned, that this might be were the promotion aspect came in.

Embracing this idea, I started adding lots of pins, photos in this case, pictures I’d taken of the various places in the books, as well as other images like quotes and the covers of the books.

I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say I posted a photo of the Old Lighthouse Museum where much of my third novel takes place. I’d post the photo with the caption “The Old Lighthouse Museum, Stonington, CT (As mentioned in The Blood that Binds, The Purity of Blood Volume II by Jennifer Geoghan now available on Amazon)” And yes, some of those photos have already been repined and sent out into the great cyber world, hopefully to bring me riches in the form of royalties and the knowledge that I have made the world a better place through the majesty of the written word.

ALSO: once you upload an image, you can click on the “pencil” to edit it.  Open it up and you can insert a URL to link the image to a webpage.  In my case, I linked the image to the book’s page on Amazon.

I’d love to get your feedback on Pinterest. Have you had success/failure with it? Any ideas to work the site better for promotion? Let’s hear from you!

-Jennifer