How to market your book online

[Emm]

Hello,

I actually sent you the e-mail about bookhitch (it is amazing how quickly google picks up forum comments these days). I will be more than happy to answer any questions you have. bookhitch is a good marketing alternative that does not have any hidden aspects. You can list your book for free and have it show up on the site immediately. We do have a premium listing, but there is no annoying ads to upgrade etc, just a choice between the two. The site was designed to give authors another means to reach their target market, it is simply a place for you list your book. I think of it as a mini search engine for the book industry as readers can search for any book listed, and visit a site (provided by each author/publisher/agent) to buy the book. It is a new site so many people have not heard of it, hence the effort to raise awareness.

As for other means of raising awareness of your books, I would try free press release services (found throughout the net...you can also send these releases directly to newspapers), discussion boards, and free online article services. Hope that helps a bit!

[Steve Jordan]

Although I agree with the aversion to joining a forum just to say "buy my book," joining a forum is still one of the best ways of finding out more about your target audience, and how to reach them. I've found that, just participating honestly (and intelligently) in a forum can be enough to get some notice for your work, though admittedly, not much. But that can lead to good word of mouth, so it's worth taking the time.

At any rate, if you look around, you can find some forums that give aspiring authors an acceptable place to advertise their work in a separate section... so others don't need to go there if they don't want to. This has garnered most of my e-book sales thus far.

And Stuart's suggestions about SFF conventions is something else I'm looking into... and which I learned of in a forum! In short, forums are always good ways to research, participate, indirectly promote, and sometimes to directly market yourself.