I love the image to the left. It’s a hand holding carefully stacked stones. Trust me – stacking stones in your hand like this is a lot harder than it looks. It’s kind of like bing an author. As an author, you absolutely HAVE to take the promotion of your book seriously – and the foundation of it all is your author website.
There’s a great article over at Fast Company by first time author Joel Stein on how to be the world’s best self promoter where he writes:
?I do not like being a self-promoting whore. In fact, one of the reasons I became a writer was to avoid being a businessman, and one of the reasons I didn’t want to be a businessman was because I didn’t want to deal with sales. That was before I knew that every job, everywhere, largely consists of being a salesperson.”
He confesses in the next paragraph that he didn’t want the responsibility of promoting and selling his book – he wanted his publisher to do that for him. However, he also confessed that the fear of failure over road his fear of shameless self promotion so he threw himself wholeheartedly into promoting his book via social media. The article outlines all the things he did to promote his book and Joel shares what worked – and what didn’t.
One of the things he truly “glosses over” in the article is how he launched his own author website to promote the book. Joel has an author website – and he includes links to it everywhere he can – including in the article referenced above.
Yes you can purchase his book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and just about anywhere that books are sold – but even with all of those “giants” selling his book, he still has his own author website. It’s a website he has maintained since 2001. (Take a look at how the site looked in years past here.) It’s taken many different forms over the past decade – but today the entire site is devoted to the shameless self promotion of his first book.
If you would like to use Twitter, Facebook or other social media marketing tools to promote your book, remember that all of those promotional tools function better when they are built with your author website as the firm foundation.
