Pinterest Is My New Interest

I have only “discovered” Pinterest within about the last month. Previously, I knew that non-writing friends, especially females, gushed about it. Sometimes I ignore what females gush about because it usually has to do with shopping and I dislike shopping. One friend said she couldn’t believe I would be on Pinterest. But several author friends poked me (Sorry, can’t help it) with urges to check it out, and see if it could be used as a marketing tool. We had a contest there for a book giveaway for another author and had lots of fun trying to add related items to the board along with her website, artwork and book pins. Not sure how she made out in term of sales results, but I did discover one really odd thng about Pinterest. I discovered this about Twitter, too, and it still puzzles me. If you follow people, like their stuff, and repin, people come see your stuff, and sometimes like and follow it as well.

I make two applications from this discovery. One is physical, and one is spiritual. The physical one is that I have expanded my Pinterest boards to include pictures from our website, our blog, and one board devoted to all our book covers with straight to Amazon links. Amazon has added the feature of Pinterest links to its products so that was easy to do, even with 24 titles now available. I hope people will come and look, and maybe repin or link to our stuff. I also have some interesting stuff related to my writing. I have a Steampunk page because I am working on a steampunk graphic novel. I have gorgeous places and clothing, Victorian mostly, because the Steampunk book will be set in that era. I also have boards for other authors’ books, to showcase them.

Transitioning to the spiritual application, I have an author friend who has had trouble making Pinterest work. He got pretty bitter about it. When the subject came up, he would poke his nose in and complain about how it didn’t work for him. So here’s my spiritual application. Sometimes God pokes you with an idea. You might say, “I’m not really interested in sticking a bunch of pictures up, spending time on this, when I have more important things to do. And besides, some of this stuff doesn’t work right.” You see, there’s a new feature where you can add book prices and Pinterest will put your books in a storefront-giftshop area. I’m having trouble getting that to work. My author friend mentioned earlier is gloating. In poetry, no less. Also, I do like pictures, and cool stuff, and it can become habitual to just pin cool pictures and get carried away with Pinterest. It’s been called “digital crack for women” by the New York Times.

But God will work it all out, just like some of the other things I believe He’s prompted us to do but which we don’t fully understand right now. There’s no point in letting it make me bitter and frustrated, or letting it control me and prevent me from doing other stuff. God wants us to have balance in our lives, and He also wants us to find places where we can let our lights shine. Our primary purpose in our writing is to glorify God, to teach about Him, to guide others to His Word and His truth. So here is our Pinterest light. Hope it directs you God’s Way.