Promoting Your Book on the Web

The web provides you with free publicity that reaches the entire world. It of course offers for-pay publicity :) Your budget will determine how you balance these out.

First, definitely set up a website for yourself as an author, and for each book you write. If you get free space with your AOL or Earthlink or other ISP account, then you might as well use it! Even if you have to pay some tiny fee to have a website run at a professional server location, it could easily pay back in book sales. For example, I have a website set up for my Weddings & Courtships book - Weddings & Courtships. It gets a fair amount of traffic, which is all free publicity. Well, I pay for that server, but I pay for it anyway to run sites like this one you're on right now :)

On my other sites, I have banners and links that promote those books. That way if someone's on my Wine site or Romance site, they see little blurbs about my books and perhaps click on them.

You can of course pay someone to run your banners on their site, or pay Google to run links to your books in the Google network. That gets into the gigantic world of for-pay advertising, which would take me years to cover properly. There are many good websites out there that talk about how to optimize your Google ads, so definitely read those to spend your money wisely if you want to head in that direction.

From Susan - SusanKramer.com
About advertising. I added a buy books banner at the foot of the top viewed 100 pages at susankramer.com and my book sales went from 10 to 50 a month the first month, showing that advertising is necessary, as you pointed out.

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