Promoting Your Book in an Overpopulated Environment - Guest Post from Author Nora Black

Promoting Your Book in an Overpopulated Environment

In today's crowded and extremely competitive book market each author, especially the self-published author, has to come up with a self-marketing plan to promote themselves and their books, as much and as hard as possible, if they want to sell. Thousands of new and exciting titles are published daily on platforms such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords and other prominent retailers, only a few will ever be noticed or rise to the fore-front shop windows so that  readers might see them. What can you do, then, as an author to nudge your work forward, without looking vain or pushy. Some or all of the ideas here might help.

Firstly, particularly for self-published authors, the Smashwords tool created by Mark Coker which allows authors to build hype for their book before readers can actually buy, by way of pre-order, may build the title in the mind of the reader as it is listed on various retailers, and promoted for the writer free of charge. This tool also gives the author an opportunity to advertise their books prior to sale. The work may be toured by a blog tour company such as Itching for Books Blog Tours or Extaordinaryreads Blog Tours or a host of others, who offer to promote the book by exposing its details on various blogs. Options for the author include offering giveaways, posting guest blogs, interviews, excerpts, book covers and exclusive details on a variety of permanent slots.

Next up, the author can list the book on a member giveaway promotion on Library Thing Member Giveaway  which allows the author to raise awareness for the title amongst the general reading community. By offering to ship ebooks to readers free of charge, the author gains much valued reviews for the book before it becomes generally available for sale. Similarly, Goodreads offers member authors a giveaway tool to promote their books,  however, here the writer needs to offer a printed book, which, depending on where the reader lives can prove fairly expensive for the author since shipping charges are often steep.

Another tool, this one offered by Amazon under their Kindle Direct Publishing Arm is the opportunity to offer their book to readers in the Amazon Prime Lenders Library, which comes with the benefit of being able to present the title as a free book for five days every quarter to literally millions of readers world wide, which often results in reviews and exposure for previously ignored or under-reviewed unknown writers. My own book Bleeding Shame rose to number four on the amazon bestseller list during its free days. The title was promoted using the free-book-days listing such as the one offered on this site and various others such as the free-promotion-book-tool available Here.

Other ideas include using the new Amazon countdown tool, guest blogging whenever possible, operating (and updating ) your own blog, promoting other authors (you might be surprised how often they return the favor). Promoting the work on Goodreads forums. Advertising through a personalized Facebook page (like extraordinaryreads.com on FB for example). And building both followers and fans on twitter and Facebook. Obviously there are many other valuable tools such as advertising on Google and Goodreads, however, still, the most salient thing you have had to do was write a good book in the first place!

Meet Nora Black

Nora Black is an author, swimwear designer, hobbyist software programmer, dog lover and animal adorer. She loves nothing better than setting words down, these days digitally, promoting authors through blogging and reviews, and of course writing new books. 

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