Promoting Your Book - A No BS Guide For Authors and Small Publishers

I am currently the Vice President of the Northern California Publishers and Authors association.  At our monthly meeting this weekend, the subject of traffic and websites came up.  I spent a couple of minutes answering the question but realized there must be a need for a more comprehensive answer.

I have seen this list (or variations of it) over the last few months.   It has some standard stuff but should be useful for other authors looking to promote and market their books through their websites

I have no idea who originated it or I would give them credit.  Que sera sera …

1. Write and submit articles to the article directories.

2. Leave comments on other people’s blogs with a backlink to your site.

3. Answer people’s questions on www.answers.yahoo.com.

4. Post in forums and have a link to your site in your signature.

5. Write a press release and submit it to www.PRWeb.com.

6. Advertise your website in the appropriate category on www.CraigsList.com.

7. Give an unbiased testimonial on a product/service that you have used in exchange for a backlink to your site.

8. Start a blog and submit it to the 100’s of free blog directories.

9. Manually submit your website to the major search engines.

10. Optimize each page of your website for a particular keyword or search phrase.

11. Add a link in your email signature to your website. It’s a free and easy way to get a little more traffic.

12. Make a custom 404 error page for your website redirecting people to your home page.

13. Use PPC search engine advertising.

14. Add a “bookmark this site” link to your webpages.

15. Have a tell-a-friend form on your site.

16. Send articles to ezine publishers that includes a link to your website.

17. Hold a crazy content and make it go viral.

18. Give away a freebie (ebook, report, e-course) to keep people coming back to your site.

19. Add an RSS feed to your blog.

20. Submit your site to any related niche directories on the net.

21. Participate in a banner or link exchange program.

22. Create a software program and give it away for free.

23. Purchase the misspellings or variations of your domain name, or those of your competitors.

24. Buy a domain name related to your niche that is already receiving traffic and forward it to your site.

25. Pass out business cards with your domain on them everywhere you go.

26. Start and affiliate program and let your affiliates send you visitors.

27. Start a page on social networking sites such as www.facebook.com.

28. Submit a viral video to www.YouTube.com

29. Conduct and publish surveys to your website.

30. Find joint venture partners that will send you traffic.

31. Start your own newsletter or ezine.

32. Use a autoresponder or email campaign to keep people coming back to your site.

33. Purchase ads on other sites.

34. Send a free copy of your product to other site owners in exchange for a product review.

35. Sell or place classified ads on www.eBay.com with a link to your site.

36. Post free classified ads on any of the sites that allow them with a link to your site.

37. Exchange reciprocal links with other related websites.

38. Network with other people at seminars or other live events.

39. Purchase advertising in popular newsletters or ezines.

40. Advertise on other product’s “thank you” pages.

41. Create a free ebook and list in on the “free ebook” sites.

42. Buy and use a memorable domain name.

43. Do something controversial.

44. Create an Amazon profile and submit reviews for books and other products that you have read.

45. Start a lens on www.Squidoo.com.

46. Use a traffic exchange (low quality traffic, but can sometimes be worthwhile).

47. Get referrals from similar but non-competing sites.

48. Create and sell a product with resell or giveaway rights and include a link to your site in it so others can pass it around for you.

49. Email your list. If you don’t have one, get one.  Soon.

50. Buy a pair of sandals; get your website engraved on the bottom and walk on the beach, stomp in the mud or play in the snow.

Blog Post Summary - there are plenty of online free press release sites to send out a blurb on your book. Time consuming but seems to be worth it.

First off: PROMOTING YOUR BOOK IS A PAIN IN THE BUTT.

Seriously, this takes a lot of time. OK, rant is complete.

My latest thing was sending out press releases on the launch of The Wealth Manifesto. Couple of things on Press Releases (you can learn more about how to write them elsewhere):

1. Write them as if what you are putting in the PR is going to be used verbatim by someone else in talking about you or your book. This actually happens online of course where what you write is posted in it’s entirety. In more traditional media (i.e., print), your copy may be lifted exactly to fill out someone else’s review of your book. Which is great if you do a good job in the first place
2. Make it somewhat “newsworthy.” Just an announcement is OK; an announcement about a book that has to do with current events, controversy of some kind or other things that are more than you just promoting your book (which you are of course doing) is better

My press release can be seen on my main site here.

These are the Free online press release sites I have tried so far. It takes awhile to wade through as most of them you have to register to enter an item for broadcast. Save yourself some time and

a) make a list of the URLs and the username and password that you used to sign up

b) have a master file that has the i) title ii) summary (often limited to 200 characters or less) iii) body of the release and iv) contact/for further information summary.

you will have to cut and paste this same info over and over again so having it handy will make things go faster once you get moving.

1888PressRelease.com – requires registration

24-7 Press Release – requires registration

ClickPress.com – requires registration

eCommWire.com – requires registration; my press release was actually turned down from this site. This is what I got in the email: Denial Reason: Ecommwire is a press release service for ecommerce-related articles

Express-Press-Release.com – no reg

Free-News-Release.com – not working

Free-Press-Release.com – requires registration

Free-Press-Release-Center.info – have to register before you can even see where to submit. When I did a search on my press release/book title today, this was the first site (I had submitted to) that showed up.

More sites and results when I get around to the others on my list. I am going to spread them out a little bit to keep the “news” current.

I have been working on my website for The Wealth Manifesto …A LOT. I do it all myself for various reasons For one thing, I can. THAT by the way, is not always a good reason.. anyway, a story for another time.

I remember Woody Allen talking to Mariel Hemingway’s character in the movie ‘Manhattan.’ The conversation was something along the lines of Woody asking Mariel’s character Tracy about how often she wanted to have sex and she said “A lot. Is that OK?” Woody said “A lot? A lot? Sure that’s OK, ‘A lot’ is my favorite number.”

Working on my website a lot is not necessarily my favorite number but it has to be done.

Websites are obviously a big part of promoting your book as you want the site where your book is advertized, your name is put out there, etc to be found in the area of your specialty, niche, topic, genre, etc.

Not only am I adding all kinds of pages to it right now as a part of building it up to a) sell books and other products but also to b) improve in the Search Engine rankings. So, here is a question for you: do you know what your website is doing for you?

There is a tool you can get from Alexa that will tell you where your website ranks among the 66 million sites out there (there are many billions of pages … but as of March, there were around 66m sites). It will give you the ranking of any website you visit with this very small little blue number in the bottom of your browser.

This site, believe it or not, ranks 2,560,738 as of right now. Not bad for something I started 2 weeks ago and have done nothing to enhance it’s performance. The Wealth Manifesto site started out at 1.8M on March 19 2008 and as of yesterday was around 752K. This is without a whole lot of SEO (which I am working on).

So, several reasons you should put the Alexa toolbar on your site:

1. You can see how your site is doing in the rankings, check if changes you are making are improving your rankings, etc
2. You can check up on competitors in your business or authors selling similar kinds of books
3. The Alexa.com site itself has all kinds of useful general info on what is going on in the Internet. For instance, did you know that Facebook just passed Myspace in traffic last month to become the #1 social networking site? Good reason to be on Facebook promoting your book eh?

This is also a good tool to see if others you may want to do business with know what they are talking about. We recently had a guest presenter at an organization I am a part of come in to talk about how she would help people improve their website to be search engine optimized, improve their traffic, etc. Dont know what she charged because I didnt care.

Why did I not care? I checked her website before I went to the presentation. It was ranked around 2.7 millionth, lower than my site ever was before I did anything and lower than this site (didnt exist at the time) without me doing ANYTHING except cranking in the content.

Is this someone you want “optimizing” your website?

Nah….

OK …. I think I am done with this exercise. My efforts to get anything out of the amazon.com top reviewers has been a bust.

I have gone through the Top 100, sent out approximately 30 emails (+ or -) and have thus far received exactly 1 reply (mentioned in another post on this subject).

Several possible reasons for this that you may want to consider if you are going to try it.

1. A good portion of the reviewers are just not appropriate for a personal growth/self-help non-fiction book. Easily 50-60% are either music, DVD or fiction only reviewers.
2. Of the remaining NF reviewers, many of them specialize: cookbooks, Jewish affairs, economics, tech, etc.
3. They are just not interested in my book. I dont think this is personal or specific to my book (It’s a good book … but of course I think that!). I think I saw maybe 3 or 4 similar books reviewed in all of th browsing that I did through the completed reviews. Not an exhaustive search but a few pages deep for anyone that was promising.

If you do this, search for reviewers that have done reviews for similar books, make sure and include your email address if you use the Invite to be an Amazon Friend method (mentioned in pt. 1) and let them know where they can find more info on your book to decide if they want you to send a copy.

More on my ongoing and daily march to market The Wealth Manifesto….today, we try a few online catalogs.

I am finding that a variety of places that will take a submission for possible review will also allow you to input information into an online catalog that they produce (or sell or whatever). This is separate from whatever may happen with the review and sometimes, there is no reviewing that is done.

These are the 2 that I found today:

CHOICE Reviews Online - Choice magazine is an essential collection development resource for academic libraries. We publish nearly 7,000 reviews annually, spanning all academic disciplines. Written by teaching faculty and academic librarians, Choice reviews are generally the first professional postpublication comments on new scholarly works. (Note: This magazine is somehow associated with the ALA.)

Submission guidelines can be found here:

The 2008 Buying Guide can be found here (this is where they let you enter all kinds of info about current and upcoming products). Since this is managed through Survey Monkey (more on this site at another time), you may want to go back to the the previous link to get the current link to the Buyers Guide. This is what the link is is today (5-13-08):

The other place I found was The New Age Retailer. This is obviously only applicable if your book is oriented towards that demographic in some way (link):

This page lets you put in a brief blurb on any new release. It’s sort of like free advertising since they have a pretty large readership (10000 store owners