No matter who you are, or how big you become, you need to advertise. This is both to get your name out there and promote your work. For the purposes of this post we are focusing on you and your first books.
There are any number of ways to advertise and promote your work. For your first books you need to find the free sites that you can join and post on about it in the coming weeks and days leading up to the release. If you are not independently wealthy, these sites are your friend. Facebook has tonnes of them. But make sure you read the descriptions before joining to ensure you are in the right ones. Some are for all genres and others are very genre based. In other words, posting fantasy in an erotic site when your book isn't classified as erotic, will have the owners likely giving you a smack on the knuckles - not always but be wary. If you're unsure ask.
Yahoo! Groups are another way to do this, there are some great sites out there for you to utilize where, for the most part, genre plays no part. Just make sure you are on sites for promoting and NOT RPG advertising, nothing pisses those mods and owners off more than you posting about a book on their RPG based sites. On these promo sites you will get an email or ten from them, it's an automatic thing, with things like rules, posting days and so forth. Pay attention to their rules, some mods and owners are big sticklers while others are a bit more relaxed about things. And definitely don't forget to check out Google Groups and, we think, there might be even a few on Wordpress and other such sites as well.
Blog spots are another way to get your books out there to a different audience. This is where a fellow author or blogger for authors does an "interview" about you and your new work. They post it up a few days before the book is to come out. Not only can you send your readers over to read all about you and your book but the author or blogger's audience is also getting to learn about you. This is, most times, a free thing as well.
There are also, for when you can afford it, sites out there that will do the promoting for you for a fee. They hit all the hot spots as well as put you and your book into their newsletters or popular newsletters out on the Web. These are great because you hit a wider audience than most of us of semi-fame could ever manage. Yes we all have our following, readers who love our works and will pretty much buy anything we put out. But it's great to hit a wider range of readers, readers you might not normally have caught the attention of. And, potentially, bring more readers into your particular fold.
That's it for this round, hope we've given you a few more things to think about. Remember, if you have questions shoot them off to us. We do check the site regularly but we might miss a question in the comments section so feel free to email us.
The Moderator
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