Long ago, in less digital times, major corporations and public figures paid a lot of money to companies to grab any mention of its clients in hundreds of magazines and newspapers. Today, you can do this yourself for free by using Google alerts.

• It’s important to have Google alerts set up for your author name, titles of your books, and names of your publishers. Here are several reasons why you should sign up for Google Alerts:
• You may find a new review you didn’t know about.
• Blogs/yahoo groups discussing your book, so you can see what others think of your writing and thank the blogger or group moderator for discussing your works.
• Get an alert when someone looks something of yours up. It might be an excerpt, a blog, a cover, or a review of your book.
• You might see where your book is for sale in, say, a country like Australia.
• If someone is posting your article on their site and didn’t get your permission, you’ll be able to notify the person that he doesn’t have the right to post it.
• Find pirate sites early selling your ebooks illegally. Authors work too hard to have their works stolen by these people.

Google Alerts is awesome for research, too. While working on your book, you may have done a couple of search engine searches for some information you were missing, or even visited the library. With Google, you can set an alert for a topic you need to know more about and, with people posting new things to the Internet every day, you might not think to search each day. With Google Alerts, you don’t have to remember. For example, maybe you need to know more about robotic surgery for heart disease, so you set an alert for it.

Setting up a Google Alert is simple. You do need to have a Google account, which is easy to obtain. You may already have one if you have a Blogger account. Go here: https://www.google.com/alerts

Enter your term and describe what kind of results you’d like and how often you want them. By type, you can select news, blogs, web, updates, video, or discussions. I put everything for my alerts. You may find that you will want to create individual alerts for, say, news only (if you’re tracking a story in the media), or web (if you’re avoiding blogs and forums). The possibilities are endless. You can also select how often to receive alerts (you may not want to select “as it happens” because if you’re asking to be alerted about something that gets posted to the internet a lot, you’ll be swamped with emails). Mine is set for once a day. And, finally, you can have your items delivered as an email or as a feed.

A friend told me to put every way imaginable people might type my name so I could get all the ways people hunt for me. She also told me to be sure to put quotation marks around my entries or I’d get every alert for every Diane on the Internet. Instead of just typing Diane Craver, I typed “dianecraver”, “dianecraver author”, “Diane Craver”, “Author Diane Craver”, etc. Also, do it for your website, as well as the titles of your books.

You can always edit your alerts at any time you want as long as you’re logged into your Google account. You might decide later you want less or more information.

Google Alerts gives you relevant information that keeps you active in promoting your books. So try it and have fun with your Google Alerts!

Diane Craver has published through a variety of houses, including Booklocker.com, Samhain, Desert Breeze, Whimsical Publications, and Victory Tales Press. Her books have received great reviews from readers and reviewers. New releases, A Christmas Gift and A Christmas Collection Anthology, will release mid-November. To learn more about Diane and her writing, visit her website & blog at: https://www.dianecraver.com and https://www.dianecraver.com/blog.