Pinterest, a year old social pinboarding site, allows you to create digital pinboards and share them with friends, colleagues, and strangers. I’ve become a little obsessed with it since a graphic designer friend sent me an invite about 6 months ago. If you’re anything like me and endlessly cut out pages from the latest Anthropolgie catalog or constantly email yourself images from Apartment Therapy -you’ll also love this site!
Along with Pinterest’s use in home design (at least for me!) it can be extremely helpful for authors when working with their publisher and/or graphic designer to concept a jacket design. Pinboards are an excellent way to organize your thoughts and see patterns in what type of covers and images appeal to you.
I recently worked with travel blogger Dina Bennett on researching possible cover designs by creating shared pinboards with images of other travel memoirs and images we found by searching for themes like “cars” and “road trip” on Pinterest.
Here is a link to the Travel Memoir Covers pinboard that we created.
A few publishers have already jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon. Random House and Monacelli Press are using Pinterest to create reading lists. Random House has a pin board of “Funny Books”, “Feel-Good Books”, and “Killer Coffee Table Books.”
Authors can also use Pinterst to create reading lists of favorite books or even create lists of things based off themes in your book. A good example are the pin boards that Visit Bucks County created to promote tourism in the county.
And for you authors/journalists out there, you may also want to check out this MediaBistro piece on the 5 Ways Journalists Can Use Pinterest.
Happy Pinning!