I'm just finishing a very good book about how author's can market their books, and I thought I'd pass on some details about it, and some the pointers it's given me.

Steve Weber's "Plug Your Book: Online Book Marketing for Authors, Book Publicity Through Social Networking" to give its full title, has been quite a revelation. The previous "how to market a novel" type books I've read have mostly felt like they had at least one foot, and possibly two, in the last decade. They were full of advice about going on local radio and getting into the local press, and then perhaps talking to the manager of your local Waterstones. But Weber's book is set firmly in the 21st century.

I won't try and explain too much of what he says, partly because it would be too difficult, and partly because if you need to know you should go and buy the book. But he explains a lot about how Amazon works as well as giving really useful pointers to resources available online.

So far I'm implemented four things based on what he's suggested:

1) I've reorganised my online presence to make it more coherent (with a new, very simple, main page at www.jonnynexus.com, which I will slightly jazz up at some point) in order to put this blog centre stage.

2) I've reorganised and rebranded the blog to try and make it more appropriate as an author's blog (while still hopefully keeping the good bits). You can see the blog as it now looks by going to jonnynexus.livejournal.com/.

3) I've gone to www.feedburner.com and "burned" my feed. What this means is that I've set it up so that this blog's RSS feed goes to them, and then they put out a new RSS feed, which is the one I'll give to new subscribers. (The old raw feed is still available, and is probably worth sticking with until I make sure the FeedBurner feed works). Doing it this way gives me three main advantages:

a) When a reader clicks on the "Subscribe in a reader" link, they get taken to a nice, user-friendly page which - as well as the raw XML feed - offers easy one-click add links for many popular RSS readers.

b) I can find out how many people are subscribing via RSS. (And if I want to, I can add a little widget showing that to the blog page).

c) I can offer a "subscribe by email" option. If you go to the right hand side of the main blog page (see link above) you can see there's a small box where you can enter your email address and click on a submit button (there are also a few simple confirmation checks after that). Then, on each day where I've made at least one post, you'll get a nicely formatted email containing just that day's posts. I think is very cool. (Weber suggests it for the 80% of people who don't use RSS readers).

4) I've gone to ww.titlez.com and registered Game Night on there. From now on it will continuously record Game Night's Amazon.com sales-ranking (which is a pretty key metric) allowing me to see what effect various promotional activities might have (and saving me from obsessively checking it, several times a day).

That's it for the moment. Hope those links are useful for anyone else out there with a book to market.

Tags: book marketing