Authors: Lasso your book blurbs, put them on LinkedIn

Admit it.

You feel like I do—way too busy and far too hassled—to stop and recommend somebody on LinkedIn when they ask you to, even though the tan bar says “It only takes a minute.” You and I both know we’re sometimes tempted to slave away at these recommendations much longer than we need to, and fritter away precious time.

That’s the fist thing I thought when I saw this subject line in my email yesterday: “Thanks for recommending me! Can you paste it into LinkedIn?”

The request was from Dave Mathison. I recommended his book, Be the Media, several years ago, and I’m pretty sure he used the blurb to market his book. Now, he was writing to ask me to make the same recommendation for him on LinkedIn.

But he did something that made my job incredibly easy.

He typed my recommendation into the Linkedin request. All I had to do was save it to my clipboard, paste it into the LinkedIn recommenation window and, with a few clicks of the mouse, I completed the process in less than 30 seconds.

Smart, Dave! But it gets even better. Dave says he assigns the task of contacting people like me to an intern. 

Authors and publishers, what about all those great book blurbs you’ve collected? Make them do double-duty for you by also asking the writers to include them in your LinkedIn recommendation. And do exactly what Dave did. 

Do you have any ideas on how to make those blurbs do triple-duty in your book marketing campaign? If so, the Comments section awaits.