Social Sheila Video: Pinterest at a glance

If Pinterest is still a mystery to you, please be assured that it's pretty simple, with an offline corollary everyone is familiar with. Pinterest is merely a virtual scrapbooking website, which allows you to discover, collect and share individual images or collections of images with other Pinterest users.

Jane Friedman's blog recently published a very useful guest post by Amanda Luedeke.  with ideas for authors using Pinterest, which I won't try to duplicate here. But one idea I loved from that blog and its comments stream was creating a novel inspiration board, allowing you and your readers to experience more of the look and feel of your book through a collection of images you've found on Pinterest or on the wider web.

I remember Celia Rees explaining at last year's SCBWI conference about the literal pinboard she creates to inspire herself when in the midst of writing, and I can definitely see the appeal of Pinterest for this immersive visual inspiration.

In this video I'll take a quick look at a writer who's created dedicated pin boards for her books, plus I'll show the basic functionality of Pinterest, including how to sign up, discover interesting images (also known as "pins") and pin boards to start following.

Research shows that, if you intend to pin images that lead people back to a shop which sells your book or other book-related merchandise, you may be able to increase sales by including pricing information in the pin itself. Every image you pin on Pinterest includes description fields which you must fill out in full; don't forget the pricing information in those fields.

Pinterest users can find and share any website images they like on Pinterest 

Pinterest users can find and share any website images they like on Pinterest – but if you feel very strongly that you don't want anyone to share images from your website, there is "no pin" code you can embed into your webpages to block this activity.

Personally I think that, as long as images shared on Pinterest include a link back to your website, the exposure on this platform is more beneficial than harmful, but I'm not an illustrator and understand there may be other perspectives among Scoobies on this issue. For more information on "no pin" go here.

Don't forget to click the "bull's-eye" icon below if you'd like to view this video in full resolution.



@spacekidsbooks
Sheila Averbuch lives in East Lothian in Scotland and is currently working on SPACE KIDS AND THE SPY FROM PLANET 12, a sci-fi adventure for 9-11's. She holds an MA in journalism from Stanford University and a BA from Harvard University in American History & Literature. Sheila is managing director of the content services and social media training agency ENNclick and blogs at www.spacekidsbooks.com


5 comments:

  1. Thanks Sheila,
    I found Pinterest a little confusing compared to other 'post what you are doing' websites but this has given me some great ideas thank you :-)

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  2. Great intro to Pinterest. It's inspired me to go and make some inspiration boards for my WIPs.

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  3. Thanks for your comments folks. It can be a bit exciting to see one's pins getting shared ("repinned")...enjoy and let me know how you get on!

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  4. Sheila, as usual I've learned a lot - I didn't know you could make the board private for instance. So brilliant again Sheila, thank you!

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