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Guest post by: Teresa Bohannon Become an Author

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Once you become published you must actively and aggressively promote your book or you will never see any sales...and, unfortunately, if you do not quickly figure out a few tricks of the book promotion trade, you will never again have time to write another book. Fortunately, it is actually easier than it sounds...and that's what I'm here to teach you--easy tricks for promoting your traditionally, self and/or independently published book. If you haven't read the first three articles in this series you will want to go back and them here on Evan Carmichael: The ABCs and 123s of Self-Promotion For Independent and Self-Published Authors Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 And if you want to become a self and or independently published author and don't know how to begin, you will want to read my article: How to Independently or Self-Publish Your Way To Fame And Fortune In Six Easy Steps A Step-By-Step Guide, Explaining Exactly How to Self and/or Independently Publish Your Book Online Now to continue with the ABCs and 123s of shameless self-promotion for book authors. Before we begin, keep in mind one major "somewhat convoluted" point--good promotion builds traffic that gives you the potential to sell books, so even if you don't sell a book to everyone who visits your book page, (and you won't even come close) their visit has increased the potential that you will sell a copy to someone else! Shorten it to an easy to remember mantra however you wish, but make sure you remember that point because there will be times you get discouraged and want to throw in the towel and forget the whole writing and publishing dream. Self-promoting a book today absolutely requires four major essentials. #1 Reviews by book reviewers. "Ouch!" you say. Don't worry, they are not difficult to find. There are literally thousands of them setting up shop online everyday. The trick here is to find a few good ones that focus on books in your genre. Skip researching book blogger/reviewers and you might just get a bad review on your Western novel simply because the reviewer (or their readers) think cowboys were all evil people who murdered the peaceful Native Americans--or vice-versa--that the Native Americans all went about scalping the peaceful immigrant settlers. Anyway you get my point...familiarize yourself with the style and the background of anyone you choose to review your book--or anyone who approaches you to do a review. You want to make sure that they approach the task of reviewing any book--not just yours--in an unbiased and professional manner. Remember there is no book reviewers guild or fair practices law to protect you, many of these reviewers are just people who have found blogging about books as their own key to fame, fortune and affiliate income from booksellers. Choose carefully, because whomever you choose is holding your reputation as an author in their hands! #2 Contests and Giveaways are a must! Plan on participating in a great number of them that are hosted by other people. Apparently, that is the one way that everyone has settled on to promote books on the internet. In fact, I have heard it referred to as bribing people to read about your book! Bloggers host multiple giveaways and contests to draw traffic to their blog, which will "hopefully" in turn send traffic to your book's promotional and/or salespage...which will in turn lead to higher SEO rankings and more sales for you. Plan on not only giving away copies of your book as part of these contests--or blog hopping, linked together, chain of contests--prominently advertised on other blogs. Keep in mind here that signed, hard copies are better than most electronic ones since electronic ones can and most probably will be passed around. For example, one hard copy of a book might be passed around once or twice, just like any other book you've loaned to friends, or sold on Ebay, or traded in at the used bookstore--however, one electronic copy can be downloaded thousands of times! However, do not let this last bit freak you out. If you give away a password protected customized PDF, those so motivated can't very easily plagiarize your book. Mostly they can just give it away to people who would not have purchased it anyway. You can combat this by placing a stern "This copy is presented as a contest prize to NAME OF WINNER and is intended only for their eyes." to a nice "If you enjoyed this book, please send a donation or pay $? its suggested purchase price." comment in the front of the book along with your copyright notice. Either way, keep in mind that anyone who is willing to steal or otherwise not pay for the privilege of reading your book would not have purchased it anyway. #3 Contest prizes that are "not" your book. If you want to succeed at contest promotions plan on spicing it up a bit. Depending on the topic/genre of your book, plan on giving something additional away. This can mean anything from downloadable, printable bookmarks or coloring books, or gift cards at major retailers, to a piece of jewelry (for a romance book), a autographed spatula (for a cookbook), or almost anything else you can imagine. If you will be shipping it via snailmail just try to make certain it is something lightweight, because you just might be shipping it overseas. Two very important points here. The more unique the better and the more valuable the prize the more extended the contest date. This last is important because an extended date means less time you have to spend coming up with unique promotional efforts. For example for my Regency Romance novel I chose to giveaway a very valuable, near-mint, vintage romance comic from 1951 so I listed my contest dates for eligible entries to cover a period of ten weeks. All the people have to do is leave a comment to be entered and they can receive additional entries for things like Following you on Google or Facebook or Networked Blogs, or Liking you on Facebook, or Sharing your contest on Facebook or Twitter, or posting a link to it, or a story about it on their blog etc. etc. etc. They key here is to get the most traffic bang for your buck, and to do that you need to make sure your contest runs long enough to get some traffic. Also note here if you give your visitors the opportunity to receive additional entries you can easily set up an online official entry form at Google Docs that will build a tracking spreadsheet for you. There are also third part random number selection sites to randomly choose your winner so it there will be no question of any cheating in anyone's mind. #4 Author interviews. Most books bloggers are just like anyone else--they need unique content to help their search engine rankings and draw traffic. This means they will usually be happy to advertise your book for you (along with their affiliate link) as long as you give them some unique content to help advertise your book and your contest. Usually this will mean an Author interview that will be included along with a contest or giveaway. However, this does not necessarily mean they are going to actually interview you, they may send you a list of questions or they may just expect you to do all the work and come up with your own list questions and answer them. Either way it's a great way to get your name out there and build traffic to your salespage. So--keeping your genre and their focus firmly in mind--go for it, and do as many author interviews as you can possibly manage! Here is a list of potential questions in case you have to make up your own interview. Why did you start writing? What did you read as a child? What do you read for entertainment? How do you research your books? When do you do your best writing? Do you have a special method or place for writing? Who is your favorite author? What is the one book that you believe everyone should be required to read? What is your favorite short story? If you could be a character in a book who would you be? What is the most difficult part of writing for you? What's the best thing about being a writer? What advice would you give aspiring authors? What is the difference between being a writer and an author? Describe your book in one sentence. What type of movies do you enjoy? What would you do if you won the lottery? What is your secret vice or guilty pleasure? So there you have it.... Whether your book is published by a major publishing house or self or independently published online by you and you alone...contests and giveaways will become a major part of your promotional efforts. Get used to it and get good at it so you have time to write your next book! Smiles and Good Fortune, Teresa Thomas Bohannon ************************************ It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent. – W. Somerset Maugham (1874 ? 1965) Of Human Bondage, 1915

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