This group focuses on book marketing, promotion, and publicity. In other words, How do authors go about finding readers and building their fan bases?

This is an international group of authors, publishers, editors, publicists and other involved in the book industry. Posts primarily deal with the final stages of book production and pre- and post-release marketing strategies. All questions relating to traditional, self-published print or ebooks are warmly encouraged.

Feel free to post tips, innovative promotions, new marketing avenues and, by all means, share your successes to inspire others. Please do not post excerpt texts, instead post a URL where your excerpt can be found.

Debate is a great thing provided we all remember that we're on the same side. Flaming is not allowed. We're all here to learn.

You are smarter than I was!

Do NOT follow up on that invitation. It is bogus and is the product of a spammer.

Here is the article I wrote about it yesterday:

SPAM WARNING - BEWARE OF QUECHUP
UPDATE: My inbox is full of email from people on my contact list who have received these bogus invitations from Quechup. I apologize for the inconvenience. See the story below:
The latest scam to hit the Internet is Quechup.com. 
They are generating spam that supposedly comes from your friends.
If you receive an email from me or anyone else inviting you to join Quechup, delete the email and DO NOT Sign UP.
I received an invitation supposedly from another blogger and while I was checking the site out, Quechup has mailed an invitation from me to everyone in my email address book, even though I expressly requested that they should not do so.
Quechup claims to be a "social network."
It is owned by iDate and is actually some sort of dating service. 
Don't go there and don't bother to check it out.
You will definitely regret it.

So, if you too have received multiple Quechup invites, don't bother following up, unless you're planning on spamming all of your contacts.

One of the best things you can possibly do to get exposure for your book is to make it available on the free website we provide. I know that this sounds strange - why would readers buy your book when they can read it for free online? Allow me to elaborate:

1. Reading huge amounts of text on a computer screen isn't fun. While it's ok to read a blog, or a website online, reading a book is a different matter altogether. It's difficult to curl up with a good laptop.


2. You don't have to make everything available at the same time. Release a chapter a week, a page a day, whatever suits you. That way you'll build up a regular readership. Also, google loves few things better than a website that is frequently updated. The more often you post a new page, or chapter, the higher your chances that your book comes up as a search result on google and other search engines. And that is a very good thing.

If you have any questions about your website, just ask. We're here to help.

This Girl with a One-track Mind, who called herself Abby Lee, had for several years written a very popular blog, journaling her sexual adventures as a single girl looking for Mr Right, living in London. A publishing contract soon followed (sex sell, after all) and Abby was offered a healthy advance on her book, rumoured to be in six figures. I read some of her blog entries and all of a sudden it clicked, or so I thought at the time.

In 2004 a young woman from London, who called herself Abby, had published four books of erotica with us. They were semi-autobiographical. The style these books are written in is very close to Abby Lee's book. The 'adventures' described are almost identical. Could this be the same women? And if so, why hadn't she told us? I shot off a mail to one of my colleagues who deals with our submissions to amazon and other book traders. Here's her response:

I hate to burst your bubble but this isn't our Abby, different woman with the same name writing the same material but not our lady.
Amazon mixed up the two authors last year and I had to sort it out. So unfortunately, no, they aren't the same author.

I still think that the similarities in writing are very, very close. So you might want to take a look, especially if you enjoyed Abby Lee's book. Here's a link:

The final pdf of my book is attached, it already has an isbn but I need someone to distribute it and submit it to the bookstores. It is already available on amazon and the online book stores as I self published it with lulu.com (I am the publisher) but I want someone to distribute it to bookstores, while still retaining all rights and be able to back out of our agreement at any time. I don’t want to pay the initial 400 or whatever dollar fee you have as my book is good enough that you should want to take it on without that.
 
Please consider
 
-          Name removed to protect the innocent

"Duncan Gillespie has been contributing a weekly column to the "Strathspey and Badenoch Herald" as the Man in the Manse, for the past 14 years. With his spell at the "Strathy" now drawn to a close, I'm delighted that he has chosen to publish a selection of these columns as a "best of " collection.

Duncan has an innate ability to write illuminating prose on most subjects under the sun - and indeed beyond. As the title of his column suggests, religion is a recurring theme in his writing, and he is a man of religious convictions, but his columns have a much wider appeal than that - there's something for everyone.

In more than fifty years of journalism, his inkwell has seemingly never run dry. His talent and passion shine through, whether he is writing about ghostly visitors, Robert Burns, the Newtonmore Haggis Hounds, the Pearly Gates, or the sins of the past.. I hope that these "Man in the Manse" columns, brought together for the first time, are received by readers new and old with the same enthusiasm as went into their making."

Gavin Musgrove, Editor "Strathspey & Badenoch Herald"

ISBN-10: 1897312431

ISBN-13: 978-1897312438

The catastrophe plunged the world back into a new Dark Age, where six months of summer light followed six months of winter darkness. It brought Mankind to the brink of extinction.

The cataclysm unleashed chaos but it also released Merdynn from his long spellbound imprisonment and for millennia he struggled to help keep the flame of Man alive while he searched for the ancient bloodline of legend. As the increasing threat to Britain grew he despaired of ever finding the link to the past until the day he came across the remains of a raided village. There were only two survivors, a boy and girl.

Forty years later Britain stands against the darkness and that boy leads the strongest war band in Britain. His name is Arthur. The Arthur of Celtic legend returns at the time of Britain's greatest need to unite the warriors of a divided land in this dark and compelling tale of heroism and despair where conflicting loyalties and outright betrayals are played out against a bloody war that threatens to overwhelm and destroy everything Arthur's sworn to protect.

ISBN 1897312350

ISBN-13: 978-1897312353

• Vastly simplified book submission process. Rather than sending our authors to an automated submission page we have now made submitting a manuscript part of author support. This means one of our author support staff will be able to help you from step one.


• New help system. We have made changes to our author help system, integrating it with this site and running it on our own servers. This means no more archived project, all sections will stay live, all of the time.


• Green servers. All of our files are now hosted on carbon neutral servers. This is reducing the level of environmental impact our books have even further.