The New Community: The Blog

Creating a personal blog to promote your book online is one of the best ways to market yourself and your work. Not only are most blog hosting sites free, they offer so much more than just space for information on the internet.

If you create a blog, you are automatically entered into an online community, a network of people all over the globe who will see your posts, photos, and whatever else you can imagine to enhance your blog space. With a variety of blogging hosts to choose from, you could enter a community of people of all ages and interests, or you can find one that is slightly more focused in what brings its users to the network. Being connected to others offers a wealth of advantages: think job opportunities, links on their blogs to yours, international interest, perhaps even helpful pointers from people who have been where you are in the book selling or publishing process.

For blog visitors, you have many options on how to entice them and keep them coming back for more. People who have really been captivated by a book usually want to find out more about the author, the book itself, or about other writings the author has done. A blog can keep organized and archive all of this and whatever other categories of information you wish to make available to your readers. Also, blogs that are updated frequently are more likely to be found by major search engines; it is fortunate that it is easy to compose and edit your posts, so that you may contribute as often as you like. As in many well-regarded journals and magazines, you could feature excerpts from your book serially to keep yourself posting regularly and to keep readers wanting more.

Other helpful features are things like visitor counters to monitor how much traffic your blog has received; the capacity to send and receive comments about a particular post; you can also set up a PayPal account to sell books personally through your blog rather than having a chunk of your profit taken through selling with an online retailer.

Blogs are a simple and very effective way to gain exposure to a wide audience.

If you have published through us, visit www.millcitypress.net to find out how we can help you set up a blog.

Self-publish, Then Self-Promote!

If you've published your book, you are aware of all the costs involved that ultimately cut into the profit you make, and that's only one end of the process. The other is creating exposure-- getting your book out there for people to read. It is recommended that you sell through one of the big online retailers to establish consumer credibility, but often they will take upwards of 50% off the top from each sale. Many online retailers require trade discounts as well; based on a range that you the author set with the retailer, a percentage of these trade discounts are offered online as bargains for the consumer. (But be warned, not all publishers allow you to set your own trade discounts, and some retailers will not push your book less fervently the lower you have set them.)

For legitimacy, sell through an established online bookseller; for profit, sell your books through your own website. Though you will have an added cost of advertising online in order to entice people to your website, you will still fare better since many methods of setting up a personal page on the internet are free. A blog like this one is a great example of a way to sell your books. Blogs have come into their own as more credible sources of news and culture, while being user-friendly for both the one running the blog and the reader. Most blogs are easy to update, archive past posts well, and have enough storage to upload your work in text, audio, even video clips. Perhaps you want to post excerpts or serially post chapters of your book online to captivate the reader; you may want to take advantage of the platform given you to speak to the research you did and the experience of writing your book. The content is up to you, and most blog hosts give you plenty of freedom in determining the look and feel of your site. Blogs offer a great way to connect with your readers in a personal way, faster and farther, around the clock.