Who Knew?

One day I got an email saying I had a new follower on Kindle. And I said…

So, being the curious person I am, I followed the links and lo and behold there’s a nice little social platform inside the Kindle world I didn’t know existed!

Here’s how authors can use this little known space for extra juice for their blog and for connecting with their fans.

1. ALWAYS buy your own book in Kindle format.

2. While reading your book make sure you Highlight and create Notes

3. Then go to your online Kindle interface. https://kindle.amazon.com/

This is the space you get to through your computer. I haven’t had luck with it through my mobile phone, but as in all things, that might change tomorrow.

(see the image below)

Here are a few things to notice on this Home Interface:

• Top navigation links: These are the ones that are important for authors to explore
• Daily Review: this is a “flashcard” for each of the books you’ve read.Amazon says, “Daily Review is a tool to help you review and remember the most significant ideas from your books. It shows you flashcards with either your highlights and notes or the Popular Highlights from one of your books.”
• Followers and Following: This is the bit that got my attention in the first place. Turns out those 285 that I’ve followed were followed automatically!! As far as I can tell these are Twitter followers that are now connected to Kindle. I searched high and low for an explanation, but I can’t find one. So, if you connect your Twitter account in your Account Settings, this might happen to you, too.
• Your Recent Activity and Activity of those you Follow: Interesting, but nothing I would watch daily.
• People with similar books: I’m guessing this is Kindle’s dating widget? I imagine there are people saying Hi to each other in this space, ” I saw we have 46% of our books in common…” 🙂

After you explore this interface a bit, click on the top navigation link “My Books.”

This is a list of all the books you’ve bought in Kindle format.

Remember, you don’t have to have a Kindle device to enjoy Kindle books. You can just use the Kindle app on your iPad, iPhone, Android phone and on your computer to read these books.

If you bought your own book as a Kindle format you will see it in the list. Also note you can:

 

• Mark it as Read: If you want to create a Review card it needs to be marked as read.
• Make Reading Status public: Why not.
• Make your Notes Public: THIS is the part we are trying to get to. The next section will explain the POWER of this checkbox.
• Direct book link: THIS is the next link to click

Click on the title of the book. NOW you can see why this little space can be so helpful. Let’s look at my fellow Five Star Speaker Dave Kerpen’s book ” Likeable Social Media.”

 

• You can post an UPDATE about the book: Just like on Facebook people! (Sorry, I think I channeled Grandma Mary there for a moment)
• You can COMMENT on someone’s PUBLIC HIGHLIGHTS:  !!!!!!!!!!! 
• You can SHARE someone’s PUBLIC Highlights: Or you can share your own highlights.

And this is what happens when you Share:

 Notice on the right column of the Book page interface, you have a list of the most popular highlights. This particular one from Dave’s book shows 405 people highlighted the SAME phrase in the book. I don’t know about you, but if I knew that many people were picking up the same phrase as important to remember, I’d

 

• make a special blog post about THAT PHRASE
• I would also link to the public interface on Kindle to acknowledge the space
• AND I would set a challenge to make it to the top highlighted books of all time. 🙂

 

I hope this quick tour around the Kindle Social Space inspires you to explore it and see what kind of goodness can be found. Authors need to really understand how this can work to their favor and spend some time here sharing, commenting and using the information Kindle provides to promote your books.