Try to keep your MySpace pages streamlined and clutter-free.# Make sure that anyone who sees it can easily discover your book and, if interested, buy it quickly. Put "buy this book" links so they'll appear on each page.
Keep your name in front of people by posting frequently to your MySpace blog and by sending a bulletin of the blog entry to all your friends.# But don't abuse the privilege--if you post too frequently without something of value, your friends will quickly decide to ignore you, or delete you from their list of friends.
Ignore folks on MySpace who try to sell _you _something you're uninterested in, or those who try to hook up for a date.# Unless you're interested in this, it's best to focus on the friends who find value in your ideas and books. When you set up your MySpace page, it's easy to make clear you're not there for dating--that way you'll eliminate a lot of spam from unwanted "friends."
Don't feel obligated to accept every friend who zaps an invitation your way.# It's best to concentrate on having 50 friends you truly connect with, rather than having thousands of friends you quickly forget about.
To leverage MySpace as a professional asset, your page must look professional.# Your potential friends will check out your existing friends, so your MySpace utility will be undermined by having too many friends who have no connection to your niche. It's fine to have some oddballs in there, but be certain you have a clear connection with your Top 8 friends.
To keep the hits coming, you've got to maintain your MySpace page.# Throwing together a page and never visiting or tweaking it will do little good.
Don't promote your MySpace profile at the expense of your own domain.# MySpace is a great networking tool, but you don't want to depend on it exclusively. Perhaps someday MySpace will go out of business, begin charging high fees, or simply won't fit your image anymore. In any case, you can purchase an important insurance policy for only $9 a year by registering your own domain name and forwarding the traffic to your MySpace page--your domain registrar can handle this for you. Instead of printing your MySpace URL in your books and on business cards, you'll print your own domain, and you can forward the traffic to MySpace if you wish. Later, if you decide to focus your efforts elsewhere, you can take your traffic with you by forwarding it someplace else.
Other places on MySpace
Book clubs are increasingly popular on MySpace, such as Teen Lit, #http://groups.myspace.com/ teenlit#, founded by Sarah Mlynowski, author of Frogs & French Kisses. About 100 teenlit authors belong to the group.
At Memoirists Collective, authors hold contests offering readers the chance to get their own memoirs sold to a major trade publisher. See #www.myspace.com/ thememoiristscollective#. The group has more than 1,000 members, or "friends." It was founded in 2006 by author Josh Kilmer-Purcell and four other newly published memoirists who met by networking on MySpace. Periodically the group holds contests, with winning memoir manuscripts passed on to the authors' editors at trade publishers.
The group serves as a sounding board for members and a place for authors and readers to meet and chat about their craft.
Here are examples of other authors who have applied their creativity to MySpace to generate their own book publicity: