Google Alerts
This morning’s report of Google Alerts (keyword: Madison Woods) was interesting. Most of the time it’s hardly interesting or relevant, but it’s one of the potentially useful marketing chores I continue for a few reasons.
I don’t know whether I should tell you the reasons I use it first, or explain why today’s was so interesting first…
Okay, this morning’s was a little unusual.
The story it pulled had to do with the county where I currently live. There are a lot of counties across this country named ‘Madison’ so it doesn’t always tag my particular county. My keywords are set up to ping on either word in the phrase, not necessarily both, so I get a lot of flotsam to sift through sometimes.
So here’s the story it hit on:
http://www.daytondailynews.com/lifestyle/new-writer-discovery-meet-frank-wheeler-jr–1378260.html
- The book premise itself was interesting because the setting is where I live and I recognize these characters even if the author has changed the names.
- I didn’t realize there were news columns for finding new authors and this opens up a great potential when it comes to finding reviews for my book when it’s ready.
- There was a third reason, but I’ve forgotten what it was now after focusing on these other two. (It’s not old age. I swear.)
So do you use Google Alerts?
Mostly I like using them because it lets me know when one of my stories has received a review somewhere. When the Cthulhurotica anthology came out, not all reviewers reviewed all the stories, but I collected the links to the ones who mentioned my story. I found those reviews because of the alerts.
I’ve often not been pinged when my blog has been linked to in someone else’s posts and the alerts let me know so I can go check it out.
Plus, I find out useful things I didn’t think of, like the column this week’s story came from. Now I will do a search for all the public news channels that have such a column and add them to my list of contacts when my book is ready for reviews. Many of them are probably swamped, but some might be trolling for material when my request comes through.
