Author Buzz is a social media site built expressly for creating and enhancing author platforms. Just in case the clue in the name failed to give that away.

There are a number of ways you can use Author Buzz to promote yourself as a writer as well as your website and your books. But the best way – the Author Buzz way – is through community building.

The Directory

The Author Buzz directory is a must use for authors. Not only can you add a listing for each and every one of your books (for free) but you can also create another one just for you as an author.

To get the most out of your directory listing, you should have a website you can link to. If you are promoting yourself, your home page is fine but if your listing is for one of your books then the link should lead to a dedicated landing page for just that book.

Do not make potential readers search the site looking for the thing they clicked through for. Trust me, if you don’t take them to where they want to be, they are going to leave before they see anything at all.

Your Author Profile

Creating an account on Author Buzz means creating an author profile. Your profile is something that can come up in searches and it is what gets linked back to when you interact with other site users.

Making a good profile, with information about you and your books is a must.

I will level with you. Some of the features that I envisaged offering for profiles have been really hard to make. I’m still building and testing. You will get them when they are ready. Fortunately, the best – the community feature – is fully operational.

Build community with a group

Groups are your own walled-off bit of Author buzz. In many ways, they are similar to Facebook pages except they come with an optional forum, an optional (free) WordPress blog, and the ability to have all your headlines from other sites piped in via RSS.

Members of Author Buzz can subscribe to your group (if you allow them to – see the privacy options to learn more). Subscribers will see your updates, blog posts, and so forth in their personalised Author Buzz feeds.

You don’t even need to have an Author Buzz blog to get your headlines into your group. Just paste your site feed into the external blogs box and away you go. Instant updates to your group.

Your own forum

Each group has (an optional) free forum built-in. This is the core social aspect of a community. It allows your tribe of fans to talk to each other, with you, and build a community together.

This allows you to build your author platform the Author Buzz way – through friendships and connections with other human beings.

Free WordPress website

As part of setting up your own group, you can ask for a free WordPress blog which will be created for you while you finish setting up your group. You can even decide if you want other group members to have access to your site to publish posts.

Some members use the group and website feature to create a community-run blog with many authors all writing together. You can set access levels to your new blog based on group membership. You can limit it to just you, or open it up to your community. That choice is yours.

Why should I use Author Buzz UK?

Author Buzz Forum

There is also an Author Buzz forum. The forum is a great place to go to get feedback from other users, help and advice on building your platform, and even make a few new friends.