Tag: online book promotion

A virtual book tour is a great way to promote your book to an online audience: you make virtual appearances on blogs, websites, and podcasts.

You've almost finished writing your book and you're starting to piece together the beginnings of a "promotion strategy." Part of that effort involves Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Tumblr, Instagram, StumbleUpon, and Habbo Hotel.

Wait — STOP RIGHT THERE!

I know you're excited, but if you try to tackle everything at once you're going to fail. Slow it down! Or as Jonathan Gunson says in his article "The Social Media ‘Train Wreck’ That All Authors Must Avoid…":

Your fledgling author career can rapidly jump off the rails if you attempt to accelerate book sales by trying to be visible everywhere, using the full range of social media channels, without any prior experience, all on day one. Fact is, if you try this, you’ll be overwhelmed.  Even worse, your all-important focus on writing will be derailed.  You won’t sell many books either, and you’ll end up a train wreck. Instead, there’s a right way to ‘take the train’ to author success.

Don't let your website sink your career

Imagine you're the captain of the good ship D.I.Y. Book Promotion. You're heading straight into the seas of indifference and your boat is chugging hard. Your author website should function like the prow of the ship, helping to cut through those vast and stormy waters. Your website should make your voyage faster and safer. But in reality, is your website helping or hindering? Pro-looking websites are essential promo tools for independent authors. Depending on the visitor experience, your website can either earn you new readers, encourage reviewers to actually give your book the time of day, make it easy for press and bloggers to cover your story, and help you feature your content in one simple location (videos, essays, links to interviews, audio of readings, etc.)—or prove to the world that you shouldn't be taken seriously at all. Here are a handful of ways to tell if your website is on your side.

It's gotta pass the 3-second test

Studies have shown that a visitor will have an emotional response to a website within 3 seconds. Do they trust you? Do they think you're respectable?