Using The Web To Plug Your Book

Steve Weber has written a great article about using a website for book marketing.

I think he’s right. If you’ve got the discipline to type out a coherent book that’s actually good enough to sell, you’ve got the skills to market your book worldwide very cost effectively and sell it yourself or through vendors like Amazon.com

If you’re self publishing a book through one of the publishing on demand outlets, you are obviously raising the money to publish it somehow. So when you’re budgetting for your book, why not figure in the cost of some initial marketing?

There’s a growing number of blog advertising companies that for a nominal fee per post allow you to get lots of buzz and back links through their publishing networks these days and - unlike a pay per click ad campaign - generate unique content and back links that will probably stay online for months or years promoting your product, unlike short term ad campaigns.

Online press releases and articles tend towards producing long term traffic as well. Let’s say you spend $100 getting one professionally written and submitted and over 6 months time it sends 400 people to your promotional/email capture page. That’s the equivalent of paying just 25 cents per click. But you might get thousands of visitors. It depends on your book and who it targets.

If you’ve determined that MySpace contains lots of your prospective readers, you can use a tool like Badder Adder to reach out to them.

In today’s marketing environment, there’s no reason why a really good book shouldn’t sell. The ability to reach out with your message and create “buzz” are cheaper than ever before.

Bottom line: word of mouth is the only thing that can make a book really successful. And that has always been the Catch 22: how can a new writer without a track record not only get into print, but get people excited about the book?

At last, there’s something authors can do: use online communities, social networking, and blogs to ignite word of mouth, Internet-powered. Today the last barrier to writing success is gone: Anyone with the skills to write a good book can to publicize it worldwide — easily, economically, and effectively.