Getting Started

Congratulations! You’ve been approved as a specialist on Placecloud. You’re going to have a lot of fun. Below is an easy guide to get yourself set up by creating your profile and, if you’re a published author, connecting your books to Placecloud.

Once you’ve been through the steps below, you can start publishing viewpoints and running live virtual tours.

‘My profile’

In the ‘Me’ dropdown, select ‘My profile’. ‘My profile’ consists of three sections:

Profile details

This section is pretty self-explanatory. If you have your own website or blog, you can input the links here. If you’re an author and there’s somewhere specific where your books are for sale which you’d like to display to users (e.g. your publisher’s website), you can input that here. And you can connect to your social media profiles.

Profile photo

No explanation needed here.

Optional – for published authors

Placecloud connects directly with Goodreads. Goodreads is basically an enormous book club with 2.6 billion books. It’s owned by Amazon, so if your book or books are listed on Amazon, then your book is also automatically listed on Goodreads. If you’ve never visit the Goodreads website, it’s a good idea to register, connect with your books, and make sure everything is as you want it to be (e.g. the book cover images are there).

In this section of ‘My profile’, simply type your name into the search bar, and select your own profile from the list that comes up. If your profile doesn’t come up, or several identical profiles for you come up, then sign up / log in to Goodreads and ensure everything is as it should be there.

Once you’ve connected to your Goodreads profile, you’ll be able to connect directly to your books via ‘My Books’ (see below).

‘My books’

This section is only applicable to published authors.

In the ‘Me’ dropdown, select ‘My books’.

By adding books here, you’ll be able to display your books directly on any viewpoint you create, transforming it into an advertisement for your book.

You should see a button saying, “Add my books from Goodreads”. If you don’t see this, you need to connect to you Goodreads profile over on ‘My profile’.

Press “Add my books from Goodreads”. You’ll see the list of your books from Goodreads. Select one. Having selected a book, you’ll see a button saying, “Set URL”. This allows you to specify the web page you would like visitors to go to to take a closer look at your book, e.g. Amazon or your publisher’s website.

To add another book, press “Add my books from Goodreads” again, and repeat the process.

If you have any issues, get in touch at [email protected] and we’ll respond quickly.