Ebook Promotion To-Do List

A good post about promoting self-published books was just passed on to me, and I think it is one of the more useful of a large number of them. It is a list of thirty pieces of advice, and I am not going to go into all of them, just the ones that jumped out at me.

The number one piece of advice is to set up an author website, and I could not agree more. Promoting through Facebook and Google+ is creating content for other people. Creating your own website and allowing Google to bring people to you is creating content for yourself, and that has to be better.

Hopefully the website will become good enough, and will be updated often enough, that it will be the first place people will go to when they want information on you and your work. I am already following the advice to have my own site, and I have many of the pages that are recommended, but not yet an author bio or contact info, including email and social media. Getting those two pages up and running just went onto my to-do list.

My site is based around a blog, which is the article’s second piece of advice. As the article says, a blog is a great way to communicate with your audience.

Something the article recommends, but which I had never heard of is offering free copies to Amazon “Top Reviewers”. The article says to:

Reach out to Amazon users with a “Top Reviewer” badge who’ve reviewed books similar to yours. They’ve proven themselves to be experienced reviewers — they know what makes a good review, they’re willing to take the time to write a truly helpful review, and they will likely have a quick turnaround on reading and reviewing.

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The books I write belong to a series called Dark Galaxy, which starts with Galaxy Dog. Here are the first two lines of Galaxy Dog's blurb, so you can get a feel of the kind of thing these books are:

What starts as an ordinary invasion of an alien planet brings to light an ancient archeological site of huge importance. A young man called Knave makes a life-changing discovery there and rises from a lowly position as an infantry trooper to become a player among the powers of the galaxy.

The entire series is ripsnorting space opera in the style of Doctor Who and Blake's 7, and they are available to buy from Amazon. Just click the link and take a look.

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Another idea, which I am doing, is to put together a book trailer. I’m working on my site right now, and the damn links keep changing, so I will link to my post about how I have created a book trailer as soon as that is all worked out.

Another thing suggested in the article is to take part in book cover contests. Again, this is an idea that was completely new to me. I am quite proud of some of the spaceship covers I have created, and I will investigate how easy it is to enter such contests. The sites the article recommends are, 50 Books, AuthorsDB, and The Book Designer.

Out of thirty suggestions only these four or five, and maybe a couple of others, really resonated with me, but that probably says more about me, and my lack of time, than it does about how useful the article is. I’m sure different readers will be attracted to different pieces of advice to me.

So, my to-do list just grew by a few items after reading the article, now I just have to actually get round to doing some of this stuff.