Book Promotion 101

You are a self-published author and you have published your first work. Unfortunately, it is not flying off the shelves at Amazon.com. You are selling some books and getting some great reviews, but real success seems to be so slow in coming. Establishing yourself as an author takes time and hard work. Now, is when the real work begins. You have to begin promoting your book. There are a lot of ways to do this. Amazon.com offers promotion tools. You can join Goodreads, BookBub, AuthorsDB and other online book promotion communities. I am sure you have a website. a Facebook Fan Page, and a blog. You do book signings when you can.

What else can you do to promote your book?

Have You Thought About Promoting Your Book Through Libraries?

People who read often go to libraries. I have been donating copies of my book to any libraries that are interested and so far, they have all been. What I am after here is name recognition. You want people to check your book out from the library, read it, and enjoy it. Then you want them to tell their friends how much they enjoyed your book. This library idea is something i am currently trying. And, to be honest, I am not sure how well it will work. But, it certainly can’t hurt!  If anyone else has tried this, I would be happy to here their comments or suggestions.

So far my book, Serpents Underfoot, is in four libraries and will very soon been available in several more. It is currently available at the Inlet Public Library in Inlet, NY, the Raquette Lake Library in Raquette Lake, NY, and the Old Forge Public Library in Old Forge, NY. It is also in the Southern Regional Library in Durham County, NC. In addition, it will soon be available in the Wake County Library system, the Knoxville Public Library system in Knoxville, TN and the Clinton, Oak Ridge, and Norris public libraries also in Tennessee. Getting your book placed in the “Local  Authors” section of your local library can’t hurt either!

Another Benefits Of Using Libraries

Another benefit I can see is that many libraries purchase books through Ingram Spark. I used Ingram Spark to produce the hardcover version of my book. If your book gets good circulation, I think you can be pretty confident that these libraries will be open to purchasing future works by you as they are published.

Any Experience With Libraries You Want To Share?

Again. this is basically an experiment on my part and I am not sure how well it will work, but I believe it has real potential if you can handle donating a few books now for success later. I will keep folks posted on whether or not this works out for me. Also, I am interested in hearing of your experiences if you have tried this and you are willing to share. Promoting a book as a self-published author takes time and effort. Anything you can do to help is probably a good thing. I believe it is a lot of trial and error to find out what works for you. You try a lot of ideas over time and some of them work. If you throw enough mud at the wall, some of it surely will stick!