About Goodreads lists

Many thanks to all who voted for my three books on the Goodreads poll. No deadline had been set, but since it was entitled "Best Indie to Read in 2012," it seemed logical to consider New Year's Eve to be the deadline. By that measure, my books finished 1, 2, and 4. But more votes trickled in, and the last time I checked, they were 1, 2, and 3. Gosh, who can complain about that?

Goodreads has all kinds of book lists where you can vote. Just go to http://www.goodreads.com/list, where you can see them. Notice that in the upper right corner there is a link where you can create your own list. Explore them and get ideas for books that might interest you, or for lists that might be suitable for your own books. You may add the books yourself.

Once your books are listed, you need to let people know. I contacted most of my friends and acquaintances on writing lists and on Facebook. The most effective approach for me was to ask each person individually. It's more work than a blanket request, but much more effective. Most people gladly helped, because I assured them it would take only a minute. Only one friend told me no, because she mistakenly thought it required Facebook membership, and she claimed that Facebook is "the beast of the apocalypse"! Oh well. Mostly I stuck to a no-nag policy--ask a person only once, and move on. To avoid duplicate requests, I kept a list on Word of everyone I asked.

Make the process easy. At first I sent people the steps necessary to locate my books on the list, and that was cumbersome. So what worked was finding the exact location of my highest-ranked book on the list, copying the URL, and converting to a short URL using bitly.com. Once I did that, many people voted for my books quickly and easily.