On Publishing…6 Free Things That Promote The Shit Out Of Books

In a year when a lot of writers saw their paychecks decrease, Ink Monster has been fortunate in that we’ve moved more books than ever. Some of our most effective promotional tools are social media, and they are FREE.
In the interest of sharing best practices, here’s some of our secret sauce. Like all things that actually work (for me, anyway) the sauce may look free, but involves a shit-ton of hard work. Huzzah!
Here goes…

Tip #1. Get a blog and a URL for that blog.

OK, I don’t know how exactly our web site guru did this, but we got set up with blogs on wordpress and special URLs for each one. Mine is http://inkmonster.net/blog/category/christina. I know what you’re thinking…hey, I blog. But…Unless you have that magical URL and put it places, then you’re doing it wrong. Sorry. More on that later.

Tip #2. Get an author page on Goodreads

So millions of people go to Goodreads. It’s awesome. If you don’t have a page there yet, get one. It’s also free. OK, here’s the part where your blog URL is important. Load that puppy here:

Now, we get to the good stuff. When that URL is loaded into your profile, your blog posts are automatically shared with all your friends and followers on Goodreads. Sweet, right? It shows up in their update feeds and they get an email, too. How cool is that? And did I do dick to make it happen after I set it up? No! Here’s a sample of how sweet it looks…

Look how pretty! Look how free!

Tip #3. Get your profile on Author Central

You can do the same damned thing at Author Central for Amazon. More pretty!



Free Amazon promotion to their millions of readers. Nice!

Please note the ‘follow’ button on this page. The idea is that your followers will get alerted to updates, but in practice, that doesn’t happen unless Amazon invites you to do an update for some reason. Whatevs. People still check out author pages all the time and the blog posts get lots of views for free. Free, I tell you!

Tip #4. Put that blog URL in both those places

Did I mention that you need to load your blog in both places? You do. Also, you need to actually write in your blog. This is harder than it sounds. I do once/week.

Tip #5. Link new books to both of those places

Both Goodreads and Amazon won’t automatically link your new books to your author page. You need to do that manually by searching on the book and linking it in. Once your publisher puts through the cover and metadata, the books should show up automatically…for you to link manually. Clear as mud?

Tip #6. Get twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts

These are also free. And guess what? If you blog once a week, you have at least one Facebook post, tweet or instagram thingy to go around. And make sure you always ask to get emails for your newsletters on all your stuff.

PROTIP: You’ll also need the ‘get short URL’ feature from WordPress to use when you’re posting blogs or the URLs get long.

And one last best practice that definitely costs you money…

BONUS TIP. Lazy? Get Hootsuite and Campaign Monitor

Posting all this stuff to social media is still a huge PIA. I suggest hootsuite to schedule posts on Facebook and Twitter. Basically, when you’re in the zone, you load up all your posts and let them run later. Campaign Monitor makes it easy to publish good looking newsletters, too.

Bottom line? Setting up all the ways to share your blog is a pain. But once it’s done, all you have to do is come up with weekly blogs and hey, it’s like free marketing money!

More publishing blog posts:

Why we love iBooks
We’re getting a CRM!
Ink Monster in Publishing White Paper
What I know about being a data driven publisher
What I know about ebook Publishing

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