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Plug Your Book!
17
On the Internet, word of mouth is amplified and accelerated. Thanks
to online communities, it’s getting easier to sell good books, but it’s
getting harder to sell mediocre ones. Word gets around. For the
strategies in this book to work, your book needs to be strong, because
your best competitors are online too.
Internet word of mouth depends on an educated consumer. You’re
asking the reader to help promote your book, and this requires a very
good book, according to your audience. Bad word of mouth will hurt
your sales. Online marketing only helps a bad book fail faster.
How to use this book
The beginning sections of this book explain the basics of online book
promotion, techniques that provide the most bang for your effort. As we
proceed, some of the methods will be more complicated, requiring more
skill and resources. Perhaps not everything discussed here will be
practical for your book.
Your job is to select which promotional techniques might work best
with your audience, and then use them aggressively and tirelessly.
Online publicity works particularly well with nonfiction, but can be
applied to fiction too. The more techniques you try, the better your
chances of success. A single strategy won’t work, but a combined effort
will produce results, and the effect will be cumulative.
Many author Web sites are mentioned in this book. Take time to
view these sites, instead of skimming ahead. Consider what you like and
don’t like about what other authors have done, and apply the best ideas
to your own efforts.
This book is not a quick-fix plan; there is no such thing as overnight
success. It might require a year or more of steady work to see
appreciable results. If that seems like a gamble and lots of work, it is. But
I assure you, it’s nothing compared with what it took to write your book.
Read through this entire book once. Then read it again, selecting
and prioritizing what you’ll tackle first. Mark on a calendar when you’ll
start each phase of your plan. Then get to it. Evaluate your progress after
three months. Determine what’s been successful, and redouble your
efforts there. Then try something new.
Your freedom to use all the techniques described here might depend
on how your book was published. Self-published authors who own the
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