You've poured your heart into your book. You've crafted every sentence, agonized over every plot point, and finally held that finished product in your hands, but if readers can't find you, your masterpiece might as well be invisible.

The good news is there's a powerful solution that costs you nothing but time, and can multiply your discoverability overnight.

While readers buy books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers, they discover books on entirely different platforms. These aren't vendor sites, they're reader communities where millions of book lovers spend hours every week searching for their next obsession.

The five essential platforms every author must claim:

• Goodreads - The world's largest reader community with over 90 million users
• BookBub - 10+ million subscribers actively hunting for new reads
• The StoryGraph - 4+ million users seeking personalized recommendations
• LibraryThing - Nearly 3 million serious readers and collectors
• Hardcover - A rapidly growing, ad-free alternative for engaged readers

To be crystal clear, these are not retail platforms. You're not selling anything here. You're not setting up shop. You're simply ensuring that when readers search for books like yours, your name appears.

Think of it this way. Amazon is where readers buy. These platforms are where readers dream, discuss, deliberate, and decide.

And critically, having your books listed on these reader platforms violates absolutely zero terms and conditions with Amazon, KDP, IngramSpark, or any traditional publisher. This is pure exposure expansion, nothing more.

What happens when you don't claim your author profiles on these platforms:

Your books might already be listed (often pulled automatically from retail databases), but they're orphaned. Incomplete. Missing your photo, your bio, your author voice. Sometimes the information is outdated or incorrect, and you have no power to fix it.

An unclaimed profile can send a message that either “This author isn’t professional”, or "This author doesn't care enough to show up."

A claimed, polished profile declares professional from an author who takes their career seriously. And in a market where readers have infinite choices, professionalism isn't optional, it's the baseline.

Each platform has its own process for author verification, but the core requirements are remarkably similar:

1. Proof that you are who you claim to be (usually linking to your published books)
2. A professional author photo (the same one across all platforms)
3. Your author bio (the same one across all platforms)

The consistency matters more than you might think. When a reader discovers you on Goodreads and then checks you out on BookBub, seeing the same photo and bio creates instant recognition and credibility. It signals that you're organized, intentional, and real.

Different photos or bios across platforms create confusion. Readers wonder if they're looking at the same author, or if one profile is fake. Don't give them any reason to doubt.

We've created detailed walkthroughs for claiming your author profile on each platform:

• How to Claim Your Goodreads Author Profile 
• How to Set Up Your BookBub Author Account 
• How to Claim Your Author Profile on The StoryGraph 
• How to Establish Your LibraryThing Author Presence 
• How to Create Your Hardcover Author Profile 

But, Are All of Your Books Actually Listed?

Just because you've claimed your author profile doesn't mean all your titles are showing up.

Sometimes platforms miss books during their automated data pulls. Sometimes they have one edition but not others. Sometimes your backlist gets overlooked entirely.

After you claim each profile, your next critical task is verification:

Each platform has different processes for adding missing books:

Let's talk numbers and psychology. When a reader discovers a book they love on Goodreads, they often:

But this only works if you're actually present on all these platforms.

Every platform has its own discovery algorithms, its own community culture, its own power users and influencers. A reader who would never find you on Goodreads might stumble across you on The StoryGraph. Someone who ignores BookBub might be a LibraryThing devotee.

By being everywhere, you catch readers from every direction.

This isn't additive, it's multiplicative.

Each platform feeds the others. A reader discovers you on one, searches for you on another to verify legitimacy, follows you on a third to track releases. The more places you exist, the more "real" you become in readers' minds.

Claiming your author profiles on these platforms is essential, but it's only the foundation. The real magic happens when those profiles come alive with activity. Reviews accumulating, Ratings climbing, "Want to Read" Shelves filling, Followers growing, algorithmic recommendations triggering. 

Each platform's discovery engine rewards engagement and momentum. A static profile with three reviews gets buried. A profile with hundreds of ratings, consistent reader interaction, and social proof gets amplified by the algorithms, appearing in recommendations, trending lists, and discovery feeds for years to come. 

The explosive exposure that transforms careers doesn't come from simply existing on these platforms, but from strategic, sustained promotion that builds the kind of algorithmic momentum these platforms reward. 

If you're ready to move beyond presence to true performance, to harness the full power of reader discovery platforms and build the kind of visibility that compounds over time, get in touch with us. Let's discuss how we can help you transform your author platform from a set of claimed profiles into a engine of perpetual book discovery.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Kathy K.

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