Promoting a book can often cost bundles of money. Here are some tips on how to promote your book or e-book for free. All it takes is a little time.
Here are a few tips and places that may come in handy for you when promoting a book, and how to do this for free. Most of what you find below will only cost you time.
1. Build your own website. There are several free website providers that require only a bit of registration information and free service. These providers also offer templates and page builders to assist you with building the perfect website for your book. It's easy, fun, and great for promoting your current book and any books thereafter. If you can click a mouse, you can build a website.
2. Post information about your book on websites. There are lots of different sites on the net that list books and blurbs for free. These sites provide a form to fill out containing the title of your book, publisher information, release date, and blurb about your book. Some of them even allow the reader to rate the book or leave their comments about the book. This is also great to find out how much your readers are enjoying your work.
3. Start an e-zine or e-newsletter. This is a great way to inform readers about your book and future books to come. E-mail it to friends and family and ask them to pass it along. Before you know it, many people will have read your e-zine or e-newsletter. A word of caution: some Internet service providers consider mass e-mailing to be SPAM and will discontinue your service. The safest way to avoid this is to sign up with a free e-zine or e-newsletter service. These sites are also great because they help you keep your subscribers organized, they keep archives of past issues, and people can directly subscribe to your e-zine or e-newsletter through them.
4. Sign guest books. Take out some time just to surf the net. Visit other websites of interest, other author's sites, and/or sites relating to the subject of your book. Most personal webmasters have guest books on their sites where you can post comments about their site and leave your name, e-mail address, and website address if you have one. If there's no guest book, look for a feedback link. Send them your comments and tell them who you are. Even if only one person reads your e-mail, that's one more person who may not have known about you and your book any other way.
5. Set up a signature line. It should be short but informative. Include the title of the book, the ISBN number if it has one, and where it can be purchased. Now, whenever you send an e-mail to someone, make sure that line is under your signature every time you hit the send button.
6. Chat with other cyber folks. List groups are a great way to do this. Some sites host list groups on many different subjects and offer searches to help you find the ones for which you are looking. Find list groups for writers, readers, and/or groups relating to the subject of your book. For example, let's say you've written a book about dogs? You would want to find a list group for dog lovers. This is where your signature line can come in handy. You don't want to join a list group and talk only about your book. You join in with current conversations and before you send that e-mail, add your signature line to the bottom.
7. Request to be interviewed. There are many sites on the net that interview authors. All it takes is an e-mail to the webmaster telling him/her who you are. If the webmaster is interested in interviewing you, he/she will e-mail you a list of questions where you plug in your answers and send the answers back to him/her. Then the webmaster posts it on his/her website, and you have your interview.
8. Request book reviews. This will cost you a copy of your book but if your book is an e-book or if you have your book saved as an electronic file, it won't cost you a dime. There are dozens of sites on the net that review books. E-mail the sites both a request for a review and a copy of your book as an e-mail attachment. Not only will you get a review that you can use for other promotion purposes, but that review will also be seen by everyone who visits that reviewer's website.
9. Volunteer to do book reviews. How can reading other people's books help you promote your own? It's simple: when you review other people's books you have your name and book title, e-mail address, and/or website address at the end of the review. Now every time that author promotes the review you wrote, he/she will be promoting you and your book as well.
10. Put a sample chapter or chapters in an auto responder. Perform an Internet search for free auto responders, and you will come up with dozens of sites that offer them. An auto responder is simply an e-mail address but when someone sends an e-mail to that address, he/she automatically receives an e-mail back from you. This e-mail can contain whatever you want. Sample chapters or excerpts and purchasing information are great to include in your automatic response. The host companies of the auto responder also run ads in each author response for other clients. Therefore, every time someone sends an e-mail to your auto responder address, an ad from you is also sent out in someone else's auto response.
All it takes is a little time and imagination and you can promote your book to millions without ever leaving your computer chair or opening your pocket book. Good luck!
