Last night I was reading a report by Digital Book World called What Authors Want: A Survey of Authors to Understand Their Priorities in the Self-Publishing Era – in which they surveyed nearly 5,000 authors-aspiring, self-published, traditionally published and those who have done both or “hybrids”. One of the facts that jumped out at me was only 57% of the authors surveyed had profiles on Goodreads. I couldn’t believe it. Of all the places not to be engaging readers, Goodreads is a huge miss in the discoverability web. I know there are authors who don’t know how to make goodreads work for them, but not having a profile is inexcusable – it takes minutes to create (and is FREE) and has a long lasting impact on author discovery.

Creating author profiles across the web on the RIGHT websites does 3 important things:

1. It boosts your off-page Search Engine Optimization…