So you’ve published a Book

You sweat over each word as you write the story. You finish it. You’re done at last, right? Not quite. You have to work hard designing your book as you go through the publication process and then the real work begins. You have to get the book into the hands of readers.

Once you publish you book, you are not done. You have to market it and ensure that it sells. That’s not as easy as it sounds when you don’t have a lot of money. I use this blog to promote my stories. Slide a plug for your book into casual conversations. Did I mention that FCIS: The Tricolor Killer is available at Barnes and Noble? It’s available at both Barnes and Noble and my store on Smashwords. The eBook version of The Accidental Colony is available at Smashwords and at Barnes and Noble. The print version of The Accidental Colony is available from my store at CreateSpace and from Amazon. This and Twitter are the cheap ways to do it. It costs nothing but time.

Another way to promote your book is to create a website for the works. If you do that correctly and put in the right metadata, you can drive sales to your book of fiction, or non-fiction, or whatever kind of book you have for sale. That sort of thing works well enough. Sometimes you just want to walk up to strangers and demand that they read your book. It’s probably better just to advertise. Newspapers, magazines, and websites are your best bet. If you have hard copies of your books, you could try selling them from Craigslist.com. No matter how you try to sell your work, it needs selling. In this world, nothing really sells itself. Someone has to work at it. If you are a self-published author you are that someone. Get a table at a flea market and sell copies of your book there. that may require a little outlay of cash on your part, but you will get a few sales and pay for the outlay that way. You never get something from nothing. Sometimes, you just have to get out there and sell your book. Call a radio station deejay and plug your book. Whatever works for you, just do it. You’ll sell more books.

Mark Coker put out a marketing handbook at Smashwords called Smashwords Book Marketing Guide. It contains helpful tips on marketing your eBook. CreateSpace has its own Marketing Central containing tips as well as providing links to paid services. However you do it, if you are an author – you have to promote your book. Simply publishing it is not enough.

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About pebblepup

I am not one who is comfortable talking about myself but here goes. I enjoy writing, family history, and reading. I decided to do this blog because I wanted to try something new. I decided to make it a weekly blog because I wasn't sure that I could keep up with a daily one, and monthly seemed like I was writing a magazine. I think I did ok with my choices. You'll notice that there are not a lot of graphics on my site. That's because there are graphics plastered everywhere on the Internet and those sites sometimes take forever to load. This blog is a place where you can kick back, relax and be ready to be amused. At least I hope I willbamuse you. This blog is on a variety of subjects from my ficitional cat agency, the FFL, which is monthly, to instructional blogs to editorials, which are my opinions only. I admit that I don't know everything and could be wrong -- I frequently am. Now, stop reading about me and read what I have to say!