Online Book Promotion
by Jess Moleman

Online book promotion for self-publishing authors

The internet offers self-publishing authors numerous ways to promote their work.

Here's an overview of the (free) online tools I use or will use to draw attention to my novel, A Comet Appears.

In this post I will link to a number of online services and explain how I use or will use them to promote my book.

Before we get started

To make your online book promotion a success, some things are needed again and again. These include:

• A short description of who you are (100 words)
• A good avatar (photo or image of yourself, small and preferably square)
• A high quality image of your cover
• The back cover text or blurb of your book
• Tags, 10 to 20 words or short phrases that describe your work
• The URL of your sales page or own website (add this everywhere it asks for "your website")
• Some content (articles, blog posts, etc.)

Make sure you store these things in the Online Book Promotion folder on your computer, so you can easily find and add them wherever you’ll need them.

Also, most sites offer the opportunity to add personal links. Make a document where you add the URLs of all your profile pages and add these to your personal links. This way you connect your pages with each other and the internet.

Squidoo is a website where you can create a page ("lens") on anything you think is worth sharing with the world. It works so surprisingly easy that you have a good looking, traffic generating page within 5 minutes.

You can make separate pages on yourself and your book. To these pages, you can add links to your Amazon page and you can even directly link to your Lulu book page. To help locate yourself in the market, you can use their tools to link to similar books or music related to your book.

Webmaster's note: Learn still more about using such a strategy for online book promotion within Amazon.

I’m relatively new to Squidoo and haven’t fully discovered its possibilities. With your Squidoo page you can generate revenue for yourself or charity. It is said there are members who generate thousands of dollars a month.

Make sure you complete your profile and link your page to the Squidoo community with the correct tags, so your page is linked to from other pages as well.

View a sample Squidoo page.

Wordpress is a free blogging platform (one of the many). It’s my favourite, because it’s very intuitive and allows you a lot of freedom. You can use a blog to write about the topic of your book, give additional information or extras, or to write about your experiences as a writer.

The good thing about Wordpress is that all Wordpress blogs are linked by subjects. If you write a good post about your experiences with POD publishing (or, say, online book promotion!) and tag this post correctly, other posts (by others) link to this post. This draws additional traffic.

To build and maintain a blog takes a lot of time, but it is worth the effort. Successful bloggers have hundreds of thousands of visitors a day. Do a simple Google search on blogging tips (or more creative terms to learn about blogging) to learn the basics.

View a sample Wordpress blog.

If you have your own domain, you can run Wordpress on this domain too. Check out wordpress.org for more information.

One of the centers of online book promotion, AuthorsDen is where writers and readers come together. Something like Facebook for writers. It looks a bit crappy but generates tons of traffic, when used correctly.

You create a profile for yourself as an author and add your books and short stories as separate pages. Then, you are connected to the online writers community automatically and the millions of visitors of AuthorsDen find you when they look for books.

A great opportunity AuthorsDen gives you is to connect to similar writers (preferably popular ones). This will link people who like the other author's work to your work. Also, adding articles on subjects related to your work can generate tons of traffic.

You can even sell directly from your AuthorsDen profile.

Visit a sample AuthorsDen page.

SlideShare is the YouTube for presentations. Often, fiction and non-fiction books can be summarized in a presentation. A presentation gives an appealing idea of your book. It takes someone only a couple of minutes to get a good idea of your work and with images you can give a good feeling.

SlideShare is one of my favourites to generate traffic, because I am fairly able to create high-quality presentations. I haven’t used it yet for my book, but it’s in the pipeline.

Another strength of SlideShare is that most people are really bad at making presentations. Do a Google search about making a persuasive presentation to learn a bit about it yourself. (To find rights-free images, use Flickr’s Creative Commons search.)

View a sample SlideShare presentation.

An uncommon one, Yahoo Answers. This service allows members to ask and answer questions on a wide variety of subjects, amongst others, “books and authors”. I discovered Yahoo Answers because it popped up ever more often in Google search results and decided to join the website.

There’s a lot of rubbish on Yahoo Answers, but if you check the books and authors section, you’ll notice there’s a lot of talk going about on (self-)publishing books, how-to-write discussions and can-you-review-my-work questions. By contributing in a constructive way to these discussions, I have earned myself a name, linked to the subjects I write about.

Yahoo Answers is online book promotion the long way round (it won’t increase direct sales or even draw traffic), but it helps you to build a name and fame. Smart linking increases the value of your other websites and by helping other authors, you can also create interest in your work.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. You have 140 symbols to write your message, which gives Twitter a high speed and makes it really accessible. People use it to stay up to date on a lot of issues. There are books published on Twitter, but you can also use it as a quick way to tell a general audience about what you’re working on.

I love Twitter, because you can quickly build a considerable following, which also really reads what you write (because you write little). A link to your book sales page therefore draws quite some traffic.

A downside of Twitter is that what you write only lasts about a day, after that it’s gone. You’ll need to update your profile often to keep people interested.

View a Twitter micro-blog.

Flickr is a photo sharing website, probably the best/most famous one. You might not directly link photos to books, but you can certainly add your book cover to Flickr. If you add your cover to the correct groups (on book covers, for instance), this will draw traffic.

Another way to use Flickr for online book promotion is to add photos related to your story. Writing about horses? Add good photos from your own collection about horses. It might establish you as an expert on horses and that way you draw visitors to your book website.

Visit a sample Flickr page.

And even more...

These are only some of the possibilities for online book promotion. Don’t forget the power of social networks such as Facebook and MySpace! And what about the StumbleUpons and Diggs of today’s online world?

And hey, if you'd like...download my entire novel for free!

--Jess

Webmaster's note: Jess has posted separately about his book, A Comet Appears. Read his post and the comments for an enlightening discussion about marketing online.

More Focus on Selling.

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