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too. This is a valuable cross-promotion tool because it boosts your exposure among readers in your target audience.

If you're really popular on MySpace, don't limit yourself to just eight top friends. Click Change my Top Friends, and on the top left corner of the screen you'll see a drop-down menu where you can increase the number of Top Friends displayed on your main page to as many as 24. If you'd rather display fewer Top Friends, you can reduce it to four.

Author Marcy Dermansky creatively used her MySpace Top 8 to help promote her debut novel Twins. Drawing from her 3,000 MySpace friends, Dermansky found several with names matching the character names in her book, like Lauren, Chloe and Smita. She moved them to her Top 8. For the more unusual names in the book, like J�rgen and Yumiko, she had to search for new friends using MySpace's search engine. New friends who got invitations were so intrigued about the book, they often bought it simply to read about namesake characters, adding to the book's buzz. See:

www.MySpace.com/ChloeAndSue Tips for working MySpace

After you've signed up at MySpace, pay special attention to these elements of your profile:

Headline. # When you set up your MySpace account, you're able to upload a picture--perhaps your portrait or book cover--and a short message labeled your #headline#. Use this space to identify yourself: who you are, and what you write about. Use this to its maximum effect. Add your book title or a brief description of the type of books you write. You can update this section anytime to promote recent books or editions.
About Me. #Here, list your history and your influences. HTML is allowed in this section, so include prominent links to your own Web site or blog, and buy-the-book links.

Although it isn't obvious, there are several things you can do to customize your MySpace profile, as long as you're willing to fiddle with the settings. For more information:

www.MySpaceSupport.com
Photos. # Many authors use their book cover as their main photo on MySpace instead of a portrait. In any case, use professional photos and artwork when possible. Hire a real photographer or enlist a talented friend with a digital camera. Don't brand yourself an amateur by using a crummy snapshot. Your MySpace blog

As a MySpace member you're able to publish a blog linked to your profile. Here you can include content too lengthy for your messages or bulletins. Blog posts are searchable through MySpace and regular search engines like Google, so naturally you'll want to include plenty of information about your book.

If you're already publishing a blog on your own domain, you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel on your MySpace blog. Simply repurpose some earlier content from your own blog, posting it on your MySpace blog for the benefit of your new friends.

Ask your friends to "subscribe" to your blog by clicking Subscribe to this Blog while they're visiting. Then they'll receive e-mail alerts of your new posts.

To add a post to your blog, click Manage Blog from the menu just to the right of your main profile picture, then scroll down to the box labeled #My Controls# and click Post New Blog.

MySpace blogs contain a handy way to link to your book on Amazon. Just below the box named #Body#, where you enter your blog text, is a box labeled "Tell us what you're reading, viewing, or listening to." In the pull-down box, select #books#, then in the search box, enter your book's ISBN. This will add the link buy now from Amazon to the bottom of your blog post, along with an image of your book cover. You can forward the same link to your MySpace friends, who can post it on their blogs, adding to your exposure.

Contests and giveaways are reliable ways to promote your book on MySpace too; the only limit is your imagination. Offer a monthly drawing for a free copy of your book, awarded to one of your new friends. Just the act of offering a free drawing for your book will encourage others to buy it--they won't want to wait to see if they've won the contest.

MySpace Groups

Joining various MySpace "groups" is perhaps the best way to find new friends. From MySpace.com, click Groups on the top navigation bar. On the left, you'll see a link for Search Groups, where you can search for your genre, topic area, favorite authors, etc. Join groups that reflect the type of books you write or like to read, or other topics that interest you.

Joining groups is a better way to connect with potential readers than just randomly sending friend invitations to any profile that you happen to see. Some groups allow you to post bulletins where you can mention your book. But check on this: It's important to know the group's terms of use, and you don't want to be accused of spamming the group.

Interests. # Here's where you enter your basic likes, in categories such as books, music, movies, television, and others. Don't leave it blank. This is how many people will find you on MySpace, by searching for friends who have common interests. Create your own group

You can create your own MySpace group, giving members several more avenues to discover you. You can attract a wider readership by forming a group dedicated to your subgenre or topic. And by doing a good job of running the show, you'll establish your credibility as an expert in your field.

If you already have a big, dedicated following, you can make it all about you, starting a fan club Group for yourself on MySpace. Or you can enlist one of your friends to do it.

Dedicated pages for titles, characters

Some authors create a separate MySpace profile dedicated to each new book they write, using the book title as the profile name. After creating the profile, these authors often send bulletins to all their friends, requesting that they add their new book's profile to their friends list, getting more exposure. For fiction authors, creating a MySpace profile for a fictional character can be an attention grabber.

MySpace Books?

In 2006, MySpace created its own music-recording label following the success of many unsigned bands on its site. Creation of a book publishing subsidiary could be a logical next step.

MySpace created a special section devoted to books in 2006, which includes rankings on several hundred books by popularity--how many times the book has been linked to on Amazon by a MySpace blog.

You can find MySpace's book section by going to www.MySpace.com and clicking Books from the upper left navigation box. The area also features a "books" blog, three genre-based book groups--such as Writers Lounge, Classic Literature Lovers and Mindless Creativeness--and a list of several "featured books."

Certainly MySpace's books section will grow as the site matures. MySpace was bought in 2005 by the media conglomerate News Corp. Like Amazon, MySpace is well positioned to provide micro-publishing and vanity publishing services to its millions of members.

Uploading videos

Video is a great way to promote yourself and your work on MySpace. People respond more when they can associate a face and a voice with the words.

Lots of new companies have popped up recently to provide authors with video content to promote their books. If you don't have the resources to hire a video producer, it's fairly easy to create your own video. A simple question-and-answer session can provide video content to publicize your book. Position yourself in a chair in front of a bookshelf or potted plant and have a friend ask a series of questions about you, your book, who it's written for, and why you wrote it. If you're on a budget but aren't able to shoot your own video, solicit volunteer film students from a local college. Students are usually willing to work on such projects, which provide experience and something to show on their resumes.

MySpace best practices

And here are several more rules of thumb for using MySpace as a publicity tool:

Try to keep your MySpace pages streamlined and clutter-free.# Make sure that anyone who sees it can easily discover your book and, if interested, buy it quickly. Put "buy this book" links so they'll appear on each page. Keep your name in front of people by posting frequently to your MySpace blog and by sending a bulletin of the blog entry to all your friends.# But don't abuse the privilege--if you post too frequently without something of value, your friends will quickly decide to ignore you, or delete you from their list of friends. Ignore folks on MySpace who try to sell _you _something you're uninterested in, or those who try to hook up for a date.# Unless you're interested in this, it's best to focus on the friends who find value in your ideas and books. When you set up your MySpace page, it's easy to make clear you're not there for dating--that way you'll eliminate a lot of spam from unwanted "friends." Don't feel obligated to accept every friend who zaps an invitation your way.# It's best to concentrate on having 50 friends you truly connect with, rather than having thousands of friends you quickly forget about. To leverage MySpace as a professional asset, your page must look professional.# Your potential friends will check out your existing friends, so your MySpace utility will be undermined by having too many friends who have no connection to your niche. It's fine to have some oddballs in there, but be certain you have a clear connection with your Top 8 friends. To keep the hits coming, you've got to maintain your MySpace page.# Throwing together a page and never visiting or tweaking it will do little good. Don't promote your MySpace profile at the expense of your own domain.# MySpace is a great networking tool, but you don't want to depend on it exclusively. Perhaps someday MySpace will go out of business, begin charging high fees, or simply won't fit your image anymore. In any case, you can purchase an important insurance policy for only $9 a year by registering your own domain name and forwarding the traffic to your MySpace page--your domain registrar can handle this for you. Instead of printing your MySpace URL in your books and on business cards, you'll print your own domain, and you can forward the traffic to MySpace if you wish. Later, if you decide to focus your efforts elsewhere, you can take your traffic with you by forwarding it someplace else. Other places on MySpace

Book clubs are increasingly popular on MySpace, such as Teen Lit, #http://groups.myspace.com/ teenlit#, founded by Sarah Mlynowski, author of Frogs & French Kisses. About 100 teenlit authors belong to the group.

At Memoirists Collective, authors hold contests offering readers the chance to get their own memoirs sold to a major trade publisher. See #www.myspace.com/ thememoiristscollective#. The group has more than 1,000 members, or "friends." It was founded in 2006 by author Josh Kilmer-Purcell and four other newly published memoirists who met by networking on MySpace. Periodically the group holds contests, with winning memoir manuscripts passed on to the authors' editors at trade publishers.

The group serves as a sounding board for members and a place for authors and readers to meet and chat about their craft.

Here are examples of other authors who have applied their creativity to MySpace to generate their own book publicity:

www.MySpace.com/TheSistaHood Elisha Miranda # uses MySpace for grassroots marketing of her debut teenlit novel _ The Sista Hood_. She has a MySpace page for each character in the story, allowing readers to follow the lives
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