Do you know that Pinterest is the third biggest search engine? Yep, after Google and YouTube shoppers go to Pinterest to make their buying decisions. Which means that if you’re an author with books to sell online, you should have an account on Pinterest. Unlike Instagram or Twitter, your pins don’t disappear after a few minutes. People save them to their boards, either to use immediately or to come back to when they’re ready. They last for as long as you want them to – one of my most popular pins is a couple of years old. Every now and then I’ll refresh it and pin again.
The Tips
1. We usually start out with a personal account, using it to save pins of clothes, shoes, recipes and if you want to use your account to make sales you can still keep all of these on boards you can set to ‘secret’. It’s best to have a business account when you want to make sales.
2. As an author, you will want to optimise your profile to reflect your author brand and this means having an identifiable photo, a well-constructed bio, and links to your publications.
3. You’ll hear lots of talk about Boards and Pins. The easiest way to describe what these are is to visualise a corkboard where you keep household or office reminders. Maybe you use one as a Vision Board? Pinterest is exactly this – you create a board, name it, and then pin images to it.
4. You can have up to 5 “Featured Boards” and the first one should be entirely devoted to your writing.
5. It’s not difficult to use Pinterest but like all programmes new to us, there are best practices:
- Ensure your pins are vertical – 600 x 900 pixels
- Put thought into your board covers – your account will look much more professional if all the covers are branded
- Design is better when there’s less of it so lots of white space is good – don’t go mad with all sorts of different boards. You can create Sections within a board if you want to have lots of different topics.
Whatever you do, make sure you have fun – oh, and use video, Pinners love video! The video opposite is a typical of a pinned video – Pinterest suggests no less than 6 seconds and no more than 15, so this one is 10 seconds.
Besides ads and videos specifically about your books, what else would you pin?
Hi Sionna. You can create boards for each of your books or stories. Give faces to your characters, landscapes and cities/towns to your locations. 🙂
If one featured board is dedicated to your writing, what would recommend using other featured boards for? Or is it best to just focus on one as an author?
Hi Sara. A writer would have boards for ‘books and/or authors you love’, ‘book covers’, ‘inspiration’ etc. You don’t need too many and if you’re changing from a personal to a business account you can make your personal boards secret.
Also, can you expand more on “board covers?” I’m picturing the background that your pins sit on, is that even close?
If you have a look at https://norahdeay.com/convert-a-personal-pinterest-page-to-a-business-pinterest-page/ there’s an image of my Pinterest boards and a link to my Pinterest account so you can see what I mean. Your pins sit in a collection on a board and you have one Pin that’s a board cover.