Google Keep: The Tool for Marketing Authors

Google Keep captures what’s on your mind, keeps your notes, and makes them easy to retrieve. Anyone with a Google account has access to this powerful note-taking app from Google.

With Google Keep, you can add notes and photos, make lists, set reminders for important tasks and keep them all at your fingertips. You can even record a voice memo and Keep will transcribe it.

Because Keep is cloud storage, it synchronizes across devices. You can add a memo on your phone in the middle of the night, then access the memo the next day on your laptop.

Authors can use Keep from story creation and world building to keeping track of each book and every author link from Amazon Author Page to the author website. You can add each of your social media links for author outreach for guest blogging or media appearances.

Story Creation in Keep

Characters

Author Kevin Partner is a dyed-in-the-wool pantser who uses Google Keep to organize his characters. As he writes, he fleshes out the back-stories of the characters and adds those notes to Keep so he can refer to them. Because he can add photos in Keep, he can find and keep reference images of actors or drawings that look roughly like the character.

World Building

Google Keep is outstanding for novel background research. For example, Partner uses Keep for his stories set in late Victorian London. When he needs to work out what sort of carriage his characters use for travel, he saves that information in Keep with links to Wikipedia, etc. into a note card called “Transportation.” Though his world includes vampires and demons, he can evoke a sense of the real place.

Partner also stores photos on Google Keep when he does location research. Keep converts text in a photo to digital. That way photos of old newspaper articles become searchable.

As he says,

It would be easy for me to lose my way if I didn’t organise myself.

If you write your novel in Google Docs, you can connect Keep to display your notes alongside your current document. Go to Tools > Keep Notepad to display, then use the search field at the top to narrow the displayed cards.

Simple Note Organization

Not only is Keep is easy to access and use but you have multiple ways to organize notes once you create them.

• Color code related notes. Assign a color to a theme like marketing or author book promotion. Once you’ve color coded your notes, you can search by color to bring up all associated notes.
• Apply labels. Create labels and assign them to notes. Later you can search by label to find related notes.
• Make your own folder. Although Keep doesn’t provide folders, you can create a note card that serves as a folder. Each note has its own URL. Create a folder like Kevin Partner did for “Transportation” by including the links for each transportation note.

Fast retrieval is an asset for information management and Keep lets you design your organization to retrieve information. No more digging to find that one note you took last year.

Keep provides many quick and easy ways to add and organize notes. Android Central have created a guide to get you started. It explains how to:

• create and manage lists
• dictate audio notes
• share and collaborate
• set reminders
• add images
• extract text from an image
• bookmark websites

With the ability to keep research notes in one place with fast retrieval, Google Keep is an asset to an author’s note keeping.

Author Marketing

Organization is just as important for authors once they publish. You want to keep track of all the various parts of your author business. Google Keep holds all your important links in one place ready for you to share.

Your Book

Now that you’ve published, you have a product to market. Keep stores all the links you need to share to individuals, on social media, and other places, like author guest interviews. It’s easy to copy and paste the links to promote your book. Keep track of:

• your links to all online retailers
• a direct review link to Amazon to make it easy for readers to post a review
• ISBN numbers for print and ebook formats
• a link to a free copy of your book for reviewers
• a brief sizzling synopsis

PRO TIP: Create a geni.us link for Amazon which opens in the country-specific Amazon site for the person who clicks. There's one link for every country.

You, the Author

As a published author, you are a business entity. Just as you collect links for each book, save all your important business links in one note in Google Keep. Include:

• both a complete and shortened link to your website
• the link to your email list sign-up form
• the link to your Amazon KDP account.
• links to any other author accounts: Smashwords, Draft2Digital, etc.
• your Amazon Author Page
• your author press kit
• author interview links and other places where you have been a guest
• social media links: twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
• links to important tracking spreadsheets you create: sales, review requests, etc.

Store every place you have a presence as an author. The longer you are in the business, and the more marketing you do, the more links you will gather. Keep stores them all in one place for easy access.

Promotions

Store information about current promotions:

• the promotion page link, plus a shortened link: grab it every day for sharing
• links to any accompanying artwork for the promotion
• the link to the tracking page for the promotion

Business Links

If being an author is your main profession, you'll have important business links. Keep these in a business note: - your business license - your business structure documents and legal assigned numbers - your business bank account log on page - phone numbers and/or email addresses for important business contacts: graphic designer, content editor, copy editor, publicist, etc.

Alternatively, you can give your business contacts each a separate card and create a “folder” as mentioned above.

Many Resources, One Access System

There are many options for storing notes and information but not all of them have the search capabilities of Google Keep.

Getting the note you need right now is fast and easy with Keep. You can search by keyword, label, or color to bring up one note or several related notes. You’ll save precious time finding the information that you need fast to build your author career.