Does anyone know of any free ways to promote yourself as an author?

[Cody Alan Reel]

I have an official Facebook fan page but I don't know where to market this at. I'm a dark fiction Kindle eBook author, just to help with identifying my target market. Any ideas?

[Christine Rice]

Start an author blog or website and/or a blog or website for your published book and/or work(s)-in-progress. Use Twitter to tweet about your book and your Facebook page. Get lots of people to "like" your Facebook page by joining LinkedIn groups for authors and post links to your blog, Facebook page, Twitter profile, and your Amazon author page. (If you haven't created an author page on Amazon's Author Central, I suggest doing so.) Join the Writer's Digest Community, Goodreads, and other communities for authors and readers to get to know others in your field and to post about your book and yourself as an author. Create a thorough profile page in these communities. On Goodreads, in order to set up an author account, you must create a reader account, add your book to their database, and then claim the book as yours and switch over to an author account. By putting your book up on Goodreads, when people read your book, they will have the option to add it to their list of books and could possibly post a review of it. On these author/reader communities, you can create a post that says you will offer your book for free to whoever is interested in reviewing it. Reviews are very important for an author's success. In sum, you just need to get involved in online communities and social networks and get the word out about your book and your other social networks so that when you post on your social networks, people will find it and read it. You should post to your social networks daily with quality posts.

[Christina Leigh Pritchard]

Well, you can promote possibly through my new ezine/radio show! Submit your information and if we're a fit, I'll schedule you for November!

http://teeny120.wordpress.com/radio-submission/ 

[ManOfLaBook.com]

Do not market your book on social media. Market yourself as an author, interact with fellow authors and fans. The "buy my book" Facebook page/Twitter account will not work and turn people off.

Great advice about a blog, start interacting with others, write guest posts, post about your research etc.

http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

[Darryl Erentzen]

The following is not a quick fix, but it's the only way to provide lasting results.

In the traditional world of retail, location is everything. Online, information is. Information serves the same role as location, which is to get traffic into your "store".

Put yourself in the mindset of someone who's looking for books like yours.

How would YOU find them? What other interests do you have that are related? What websites or blogs appeal to you? If you did research in order to write your book, where did you get your information?

You need to think about how your target market looks for information, what kinds of information they're likely to search for, then build a site that provides it and write targeted posts centered around keywords related to your topic. Write enough to cover each topic well and don't worry too much about length, but don't write a book in a post; break larger topics down into manageable chunks. This will make your blog or site begin showing up in search engines.

The quality of your posts is what will keep them coming back, so write with warmth, humor, and authority. Once people are drawn to your site, you can direct them to posts that talk about the experience of writing your books, or the intricacies of characterization, or the role of first-person vs. third person perspective, or other means of introducing your work in the course of talking about something else. This is called "pre-selling your audience" and it primes their interest.

Then you monetize your blog by placing links to affiliate products like other people's books in related genres on Amazon. It may seem counter-intuitive to be promoting other people's work on your blog, but nobody online responds to a hard-sell unless they're desperate for the product on offer, so generally speaking the hard-sell only works for non-fiction, and it's still an inferior approach to the one I'm describing. By providing a useful service and recommendations they can trust, you build a relationship with your audience.

When you make it clear that your aim is to provide something useful and valuable to your readers, and only secondarily to make money from it, you're in the sweet spot where they'll trust your judgement and possibly feel a sense of gratitude, as well as intrigued about what this obviously canny individual's paid work is like. After all if the free stuff's this good, the stuff you're charging for must be excellent!

That's when they'll click on the book cover that's been hovering in a discreet yet prominent location throughout their browsing experience on your site. That's when they'll eagerly await your next book and tell their friends about any free promotions. That's when they'll like your Facebook page and actually pay attention to your posts on their feed. That's when you get a following.

Now when you supplement your efforts on your site with more traditional marketing tactics, they'll actually work long-term instead of just providing a flash-in-the-pan boost in traffic or sales, because they're a part of a larger vision instead of the whole show.

You can then put your efforts into stuff like building link exchanges, posting your site in directories, buying occasional Facebook or Google ads or ads from places like www.sitescout.com, because when people click on those ads and go to your site they won't be immediately turned off by an obvious in-your-face marketing message.

You can also go to other people's blogs and make relevant comments that include links to your own site without getting flagged as a spammer, participate in discussions on public sites and do the same, join Groups on Facebook and Google and comment with links to your site (NOT your book), tweet links to your own latest articles and other people's work that may be of interest to your followers.

We're talking several months to a year, here, and TANSTAAFL.

;)

LOL I think I'll post this on my blog... Thanks for the inspiration!

[Darryl Erentzen]

You can also participate in forums like this one, attend related live events, try to get interviewed in traditional media, publish press releases, do a blog tour, start your own group on a subject and moderate it, make a youtube book trailer (careful to only use public domain stuff or licensed material in it so it can be monetized by youtube as well as get more exposure via them), make other youtube videos providing information, interview footage, or just talking about your work into the camera, write letters to the editor and put "author of My Awesome Book" in the signature, try to get press as a subject-matter expert in whatever you write about and mention your book, build a "press kit" containing all coverage in digital form for easy reference and include links to it in any PR emails you send out, get an "auto-responder" set up and use it to build a mailing list of your "fan club", yada yada yada.

Make no mistake, online promotions are a LOT of work, and if you don't have a budget for it, you've got to do it all yourself.

---

The reason all of my comments here are so general is that I don't really have enough information about your specific book to go on and I couldn't be bothered to go look it up.

When you ask a question like this, link to your book or your blog and/or include a blurb or something so people can give you more than platitudes and broad generalizations. Things like including links and blurbs need to become instinctive or automated, so wherever you go online, you're adding to your site's traffic and search engine rankings.

[Darryl Erentzen]

Oh! I barely touched on Social Media marketing! Next episode, Padawan!

:P

[Darryl Erentzen]

As promised, here's a quick primer on some Social Media marketing angles.

This article focuses on the mechanics of visibility online, and contains links to tools and techniques you can use to increase your visibility (commonly known as SEO).

more free ways to promote yourself as an author (social media for SEO)

If you find the article useful, please follow and/or comment. Thanks!

[Cody Alan Reel]

Thanks for all the ideas. The only problem that I have with live marketing (attend related live events, try to get interviewed in traditional media, publish press releases) is that I write some pretty X-rated material. I'm not really trying to market one book, I am trying to market myself so I've got that covered. In all honesty I probably need more product available, but I try to promote when I'm not writing. Right now I have a novella, a novellette and three short stories completed, so I know I need more product to establish more credibility. I'm going to try to use all of your suggestions. Really I try to be as honest and keep my fan page as up to date as I can. I let them know when I'm giving my stories away for free and I post excerpts from the stories I am working on. I just need to get more traffic so like I said, I'm going to use your suggestions.

[Dan Porter]

Marketing a book - or its author - on Facebook is like doing a book signing at your local grocery store; kind of hit or miss on reaching your target audience. Maintaining an author blog is necessary these days, but if that's all you have, you're expecting readers to find you among the tens of thousands of other author blogs. Remember the adage "So many books, so little time." You're one fish in a very big ocean, and readers don't have the time to search for you, even if they have the inclination. If you want to reach the readers who are your market you need to go where they are. Become active on Goodreads, as an author and a reader. Readers anywhere are less than receptive of authors who do nothing but try to cram books down their throats. Another place to become active is on Google+ which, in my opinion, has a much higher percentage of actively engaged readers and authors than does Facebook. In short: Go where the readers are!

[Shauntelle Hamlett]

This is AWESOME advice and I totally second becoming active on Google+!  What I notice is most authors spend a lot of time networking with other authors instead of trying to determine who their readers are and going where the readers would be.

 :)

[Manjulika Pramod]

Hi, U may start promoting on blogs of book reviewers.

This actually helps a lot when it spreads from words of mouth.

[Engelia McCullough]

Hi Cody. Another avenue is to create a Shelfari account which is connected to Amazon. Also, as mentioned by others get involved with a local writing and reading group/book club, if you read other books in your genre write some reviews on them via Amazon, Shelfari, Goodreads, Book Blogs Ning and even your own website/blog. The ket is definitely to look at it as a way to build your network and integrate yourself into the community. Versus just finding a way to sell your book and yourself as an author. Show readers that you care, that your books have something to offer them and you do this for the love of it and not a dollar.

 

I have a binder that covers all four stages of writing including promotion. In that promotion section, I have it broken down by goals and then what resources/items I can do to acocomplish those goals. It ranges from contacting a specific book club, attending a local author library event, conducting an interview of another author to guest blog posts.

 

You may want to check out Dan Poynter's books on self publishing. He has some great promotion ideas. You may be able to pick it up at your local library. Oh, another is World Literay Cafe created and run by Melissa Foster. you should join that as well. Its a great way to connect via social media, critique groups, readers, etc. Thanks!

 

Engelia