An easy book marketing hack to help you dominate Pinterest and rule the interwebz

I’ve never really gotten into Pinterest. I’ve started a few times, but I just didn’t “get it.”

But today on Facebook I saw a post by John Kremer about how one of his graphics had been repinned by 1,416,972 people and brings over 7,000 people to his website every month. That’s pretty damn amazing for one picture.

How it works

To post on Pinterest you can upload a file from your computer, or you can put in a link to a website page where the picture is. You want to do the latter. If you upload a picture from your computer, you can put a link in the description – but if you upload from another website, that image will automatically link back to the website.

So what you should be doing, is using a great image for each blog post, and pinning the picture from your blog post to Pinterest to get more traffic for that post. Except those kinds of pictures probably won’t get shared so much (still, they’re great for boosting SEO and traffic).

If you’re lazy like me, you can post a bunch of images into one post so you can then pin them all, one by one, from the same link (because it’s easier and faster). All those images will link back to the page, so it’s got to have some relevant content or explanation on it. You could just write “Here are the images I added to Pinterest this month! If you like them, you should check out these other links or articles on my site…”

Where to get the images

The best images are infographics or lists. Luckily I’m a designer so I can get started making some. For my books, I could pull out sections and write “The top ten book marketing tips” or “10 rules for indie authors.” I’ll work on those later.

But there’s something much easier.

I have two books that are already formatted for ebook and print; I’m going to use the print PDF version because it’s designed a little better, so the pictures will look more interesting.

All I have to do, is open the PDF and zoom is as wide as it will fit on my screen. Then I can use Snagit or another screen-grabbing software to crop the text or quote straight of of my book and save them as JPG’s.

These are all from my book, Book Marketing is Dead.

It took me about 20 minutes to crop and save them out of the PDF.

Now I can go into Pinterest, and select “add from website” and link to this post, so that all these quotes will show up, which I can then pin to Pinterest. In the description I can write “quotes from my book, Book Marketing is Dead” and link to my Amazon page.

Most have an attribution already, but there are a few which I had to cut off without it, so I need to make sure to add in the comments where it came from/who said it.

You can do this with a fiction book too, it’s a great way to highlight your best passages and give hints of the novel without giving it all away; picture quotes like this are also great for sharing on Twitter and Facebook, with a link to the sales page.

PS) In WordPress, make sure to change the image title for each picture, to add in a lot of keywords (I changed all these pictures to titles like “Pinterest Book Marketing” and “Social Media Book Promotion.” Image title tags are an important place to put relevant keywords.

Want to see how they all look on Pinterest? Check out my board.

By the way, if you like any of these quotes, please click on it for sharing options!

Update: in the 2nd batch of these, I realized the plain white images are boring and need a color border…

I wanted to add a simple orange border to go with my site branding. I could do it in Photoshop, but that takes a while if I wanted to edit all the photos, so I looked for some other tools.

First I tried Pixlr-o-matic, which has a bunch of nice grunge and ripped paper border effects, but also a couple nice clean ones.

Not bad, but not what I wanted.

I finally gave up and did them all in Photoshop by adding an orange stroke around the image:

I added a whole bunch more quotes (from my other book, Write Publish Format Promote, on this page).

Final tips

If you want these to look more awesome, use Canva.com for very sharp looking, professional images (if you layout the text yourself.) You can layout the text in white over a dark image.

You can also upload your image-quotes to Fotor.com, they have some great options for frames.

On the other hand, you could also just past them into WordPress or MS Word, change the fonts and colors, make the text big, add a beautiful graphic and then take your screenshots. If you use Word’s “Text Box” feature there are some simple frames you can choose.

Make sure to zoom in as much as possible so that your photos will be high-resolution.

The 3 secrets to book marketing, and a haunted castle tour. Totally free. Get it here.

Derek Murphy

I’m a philosophy dropout with a PhD in Literature. I covet a cabin full of cats, where I can write fantasy novels to pay for my cake addiction. Sometimes I live in castles.