Are You Keeping Track of Yourself?

Once upon a time, there were clipping services and publishers used them to track news about the books they published.  If you were a lucky author or agent, the publisher would send you copies of the reviews and articles they received from the clipping service.  But I imagine such services are all defunct, because now we have Google Alerts.

If you are an author, then you need to be using Google Alerts.  Just go to http://www.google.com/alerts and create alerts for your name and for the titles of your works.  Whenever Google finds a new mention of you or your books, you’ll get a notice.  You can then go straight to Twitter or Facebook or other social media and share that good news.

And if the news is bad, knowing sooner than later will help you manage a response.

Z