Though LinkedIn really isn’t thought of as visual-oriented social media – the status update images generally are small with most people visiting the site to read resume-oriented text – photos still can be used to help boost your book sales there.

Indeed, studies show a photo with a status update can increase the number of people looking at your LinkedIn post by 11 times. If you’ve already got 100 people viewing your post, raising that number to 1100 is worth the effort of adding a photo to it.

There are plenty of people using LinkedIn, too. The social media site boasts more than 332 million members with at least two new members per second.

Of course, some photos are worth more than others in drawing LinkedIn visitors to your post. Given that, here are some quick tips for maximizing your LinkedIn photos:
• Communicate something about your books to potential buyers – Use the image to show, in no uncertain terms, what you’ve written about. This isn’t necessarily a book cover, but it might be the image used on your cover.
• Share in-the-moment photos of you as a professional author – These can be you giving a book reading, interacting with readers at a signing, and if writing nonfiction doing what you write about (such as you kayaking Lake Superior if your book is “101 Must-Do Kayaking Trips”). These photos can show you’re a popular author and that you take your book subject seriously.
• Show a writer at work – A photo of you writing – at a keyboard or with a pen and notepad – instantly tells readers that you’re an author. Add some knickknacks that show your genre, such as a model spaceship for science fiction, a Sherlock Holmes cap for detective stories, or a statue of a cowboy on a horse if you pen westerns.
• Add text to give context – An image of a gun with splotches of blood in front of the barrel needs context to show if you are a writer of mysteries or spy thrillers. Words like “Author of Bestselling Crime Fiction” solve that problem for you.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.