It’s important to link to your book’s web page as much as possible.  This isn’t just to get traffic from the pages that link to the book, but to increase the likelihood that your book’s page will come up in Google when someone plugs in a search – as inbound links increase a page’s rank.  If your book’s page is housed within your website, this additional link will increase the page rank and traffic to your site.  So ideally you want an author’s site to look like this:

Authorsite.com
Authorsite.com/bookpage
Authorsite.com/blog

The last two open up new ways to bring links to your domain.  The point of doing this isn’t always immediate sales, but visibility – they say people might not buy a book until they’ve seen it mentioned at least 5 times.  This includes posting in the Self-Publishing Review forum, which allows you to link to your book within the forum (hint hint).

Some of these listing sites won’t allow an external link, or will link to an Amazon page, which are both useful for visibility.  If you can’t get into the newspaper, as is the case with most self-published writers, you need to be creative about how you market a book, and the web is opening up new marketing avenues every day.  Here are websites that allow you to place a book/description/and reviews (updated 10/11/11).

  1. Published.com
  2. Book Hitch
  3. Authors Den
  4. Slake
  5. Writers.net
  6. Sharing-Books
  7. We Read
  8. Discover a Book
  9. Writers Cafe
  10. Nothing Binding
  11. Reader 2
  12. Goodreads
  13. Bibliophil
  14. Shelfari
  15. Library Thing
  16. The Polka Dot Banner
  17. Red Room
  18. GuruLib
  19. Shelf Centered
  20. aNobii
  21. Internet Book Database
  22. The Shared Self-Publishing Experience
  23. Axis Avenue
  24. BookRix
  25. Authors Bookshop
  26. Jexbo
  27. Breakthrough Bookstore
  28. Coalition of Independent Authors
  29. Self-Publishing Review

Who said there weren’t avenues for a self-published writer to promote a book?  There are plenty, but you’ve got to put in the time – to register, but also to participate, especially on the library-based sites, like Goodreads.  In this case, you want to link to other books in your library, not just your own, and add friends just as you would with any social network.  Many of these sites aren’t just about adding a listing and leaving the site, but actively networking with other readers.

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