If you read the post about search engine optimization, 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.  Additionally, if you’re 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.  Really, this is what you should be thinking about in addition to whatever traffic or sales might come from the different book listing sites.  This includes 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.  That’s useful as well because it’s been shown that people won’t buy something until the fifth time they see it, so anything that increases the visibility of your book is useful.  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.

1. Published.com
2. Book Hitch
3. Authors Den
4. Slake
5. Author Tree
6. Writers.net
7. Best Self Published
8. Sharing-Books
9. We Read
10. Discover a Book
11. Writers Cafe
12. Nothing Binding
13. Edit Red
14. Reader 2
15. Goodreads
16. Bibliophil
17. Shelfari
18. The Internet Book List
19. The Polka Dot Banner
20. Book Tour
21. Self Publishers Place
22. Red Room
23. Chain Reading
24. GuruLib
25. Shelf Centered
26. BooksWellRead
27. aNobii
28. Lit Pitch
29. Booklicker
30. Internet Book Database
31. The Shared Self-Publishing Experience
32. Axis Avenue
33. BookRix
34. Authors Bookshop

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.

January 15, 2009 in Resources by Henry Baum 5 Comments »