Marketting Methods for Self Publishing

[Addison]

I'm currently leaning toward Self-publishing my work. Whether completely e-book and kindle or going to a publisher that will do both e-books and print on demand. During my research I found that most of the publishers offer little help for marketing. They have connections to Barnes and Noble, Amazon and those places, but not a whole lot else. So I started making a list of ways that I can market the story.

1. Facebook/Twitter/Myspace etc.

2. Writer's Blog. Or platform if you prefer.

3. Friends and Family.

4. Leaving Fliers at local businesses, libraries, schools and notice boards.

5. Leaving bookmarks with picture on one side, log line on the other, at restaurants with your check.

6. Buy an ad in the paper or a magazine. This is the more pricey option, but it's still an option.

So this thread is for marketing ideas. Whether they're sane and used or completely new and untried, or plain crazy like making a costume of your main character and dancing around with a sign advertising your story.

 

[Graylorne]

- Book Tours bring your books to bloggers' sites
- Goodreads or Booklikes Giveaways
- put your books on Shelfari, LibraryThing, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Freado
- if Y.A., put your books on Y.A. Books Central
- be active on Reddit
- your own website is a 'must'
- have a booktrailer
- Google+ page

 

[deilaitha]

Ads in newspapers are a good way to start, but they can do a lot more for you too.

Many small-town newspapers are always on the lookout for copy. Because of this, a lot of them will do book reviews for their rather scant entertainment section. Even medium papers--not like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch or New York Times--but say, the Topeka Capital will. You have to be willing to take a hit by sending them a copy of your work for free--and you will more likely succeed by sending a physical book--but then you can ask them for a copy of the review. I used to work for a small town newspaper and in the eight months I was with them, I reviewed two books. Then one of the authors actually came through our town and we published another article on that. The lady ended up selling quite a few books, as I recall.

So, there you, for what it's worth. You can also write press releases and send those to papers of your home state, etc, as people like to be able to claim an author from "their" state. Papers love press releases because that's copy that they don't have to write. Just be sure it's well written.

 

[Addison]

Yay! I live in a small town. Seriously small; there's one traffic light for the entire population which is so small they closed the junior high because there weren't enough students.

So what would be the difference between the blog and the website? I'm a serious techie rookie here, help me out.

 

[Devor]

So what would be the difference between the blog and the website?

A blog is a website that's more or less a running list of new posts. A website can have any number of other format types. But people use them interchangeably because of how many top websites use a blog format.

 

[wordwalker]

Local businesses, flyers, and the like are very hit-or-miss. The odds that someone who comes across it will be a proper fantasy fan are (at the risk of sounding anti-geek) a bit less than if you were writing spy thrillers or comedy. For that matter, I bet the spy writers wouldn't like the odds either.

Really, the other half of promotion is finding the right people to promote yourself to. Blogs and other internet work do that, if you can find the right ways to set it up; leaving flyers at an SF convention works. But setting out material everywhere people gather sounds like less than focused.