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New and aspiring authors

New and aspiring authors, start laying your book promotion groundwork now. Writing your book and getting published is only half of the process. That’s the easy part. Now comes the hard part, you have to sell your creation. Yes YOU. It’s never too early to get started building a following. If you’re not making use of the social media sites, do it today. Join them all and use them daily. The more people you know the faster your sales will take off. This is a difficult concept for a person with hermit tendencies, like me, but hiding quietly in the writing cave won’t sell books.

Most of the advice about using social media that I’ve come across says to interact with others in some meaningful way, but don’t try to sell them anything. You can do this by answering questions, offer guidance in your areas of expertise, and chatting about things you have in common.

This is good up to a point, but somewhere along the line you have to let people know about your product or they might never find out. Pushing you book on social media should be done gently. If you post the same ‘buy my book’ tweet week after week you will be ignored, so do this sparingly. A better way to catch a readers interest is to give them some compelling reason to look you up. Posts containing eloquent bits of prose or intriguing insights often make me want know more about the writer.

One good way to get your name in front of potential readers is by writing reviews of the books you love. Amazon and Good Reads make posting reviews very easy. Because of the huge numbers of readers who visit those sites your chances for exposure are great. If you read and review works in your own genre, you will be indirectly marketing yourself to your target audience. I do not recommend reviewing books you don’t like. Put them aside and move on. Negative remarks you make now could come back to haunt you later.

When using social media remember that, as an author, you’re a public figure. Selling your book is a business, not a personal affair. Don’t be tempted to vent your frustrations if you encounter annoying behavior from the people you interact with. I read a flaming post from an author who was irritated by some followers. The closing line instructed those people to F**k off! My thought was, holy crap! Said author is shouting this at potential readers and they undoubtedly have friends and family who are potential readers. The ripple effect could be huge. I was looking into this author from the prospective of a reader. I found the excerpt from one of said author’s books intriguing and had planned to buy. I changed my mind after encountering the flame. Even though the post was aimed at a specific group, not me, I was negatively impacted by the harsh words.

If you have relevant things to say, blogging can be a great way to develop a following. I’m speaking from research, not personal experience. Writing a blog is a concept that I have yet to fully embrace. For me, stories pretty much write themselves, but producing worthwhile blog content requires enormous effort. WordPress and Blogger make setting up a blog so simple, anyone can do it. If you don’t want your own domain name, free solutions are available.

There are many free book promotion sites scattered across the internet. I suggest posting your book on all of them. In my experience these sites don’t generate many sales but in the early stage of the game every single sale is vitally important because people tend to tell their friends about things they like. Ultimately, word of mouth is what will take you from being a complete unknown with a great book to a successful author.

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