Promote Your Book with Social Media
Have you written a book? Many people fancy themselves to be writers. They have great (sometimes) ideas, and want to share them with the world. A great way to do that is to write a book.
This has been a great barrier over the years, as finding a publisher for your book can be quite a challenge. Many now-famous authors were rejected by agents and publishers repeatedly before finally getting published.
With the advent of POD (Print On Demand), it is now possible for anyone to be a publisher. Of course, just because it can be done cheaply doesn’t mean you will do it right. There are page design, cover design, ISBN and Library of Congress numbers, copyright issues, and many other factors to consider. There is a whole area of law that covers publishing…there are many things to be concerned about.
But let’s say you have a book ready to publish, or already published. Whether you have a garage full of books, or have used a POD provider to create the book (thus you don’t have to stock them), you are faced with the same problem: How do I sell my books?
A book distributor is one way. That will help you get the books in the bookstores. But with almost 200,000 books published each year in the U.S. alone, there is no guarantee that stores will want to stock your title. In fact, if you don’t put some kind of marketing campaign behind it (that means spending money), I can pretty much guarantee you that just having a distributor won’t help you much. Believe me, I speak from experience.
A publicist, some money for ad purchasing in the magazines book buyers read (Publishers Weekly, etc) and a great website can all help. But social media can be used to great advantage in promoting a book–it can conceivably perform much better than traditional marketing efforts and will almost always be cheaper. I can show you how.
Watch this space for some tips on how to promote your book using social media.
