Tuesday 13 August 2013

Review: Making Killer Google+ Profiles


Making Killer Google+ Profiles
Making Killer Google+ Profiles by Evo Terra

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Disclaimers first. I've internet-known Evo Terra for some years, because he runs podiobooks.com and I'm an author there. Evo was the reason that I (and most of the other Podiobooks authors) joined Google+, and by encouraging us to join en masse he also got us off to a good start of having people to connect with.

Also, he mentions me positively in this book, as someone who's doing G+ well (in his opinion), and, consequently, he gave me a free copy.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether you think any of this influenced my rating, but I will also lay out for you what the book does so you can decide if it's for you.

This is a book primarily aimed at authors who are Google+ newbies. If you are an author and haven't yet joined Google+, a) please do, and b) get this book and do everything it says. Likewise if you've only joined recently, or joined a while ago but haven't been active because you're not sure how it works or how it will benefit you to be on there.

If you're not an author, it may still help you. Some parts are author-specific, but a lot of it is good advice for anyone who's joining Google+, particularly if you have something you want to promote. (The advice includes being a human, not a spam-machine, in case you're worried about that.)

If you've been on Google+ for a while, it isn't going to tell you too much that you don't know, but you still might learn something. I did. I've made tweaks to my profile and added a couple of Chrome extensions that I think will be helpful.

It's a short, easy read, written in the friendly, cheerful style of a For Dummies book, though it manages not to talk down to the reader too much. There's nothing fake about that, either; I've known Evo long enough to know that this is his genuine personality, though he usually swears more.

It's well-edited by a mutual Google+ acquaintance. I did spot a few simple typos (usually short words like "to" that are missing) and passed them on to Evo to correct, but you won't be yanked up short on every page by some egregious grammatical error.

Definitely worthwhile for authors who are about to try Google+, and might well help other people too.



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