Promotional Tips for Authors

So, you have your contract in hand and a release date set with your publisher. Now comes the scary stuff: Promotion. When you're first starting out and money is tight, it helps to focus on establishing an Internet presence. All the sites I've listed below are free, and they're ideal for the new author keen on jumping into the marketing and promotion game.

1. MySpace: The ultimate networking tool. Numerous authors have joined MySpace over the past few years, and by doing a simple search, you can find some of your favorite authors and begin making new friends. Also, by joining romance friendly groups, you can find people with similar interests and perhaps even potential readers.

2. AuthorsDen: "Where authors and readers come together." You can upload your bio, add news and stories, and include links to your other sites.

3. Bebo: A cool new site I recently found out about. Again, it's a wonderful networking tool, and it allows authors to register their books on the site.

4. Blog: Blogger is a user-friendly way to set up a blog, and I've also heard positive remarks about Wordpress and Livejournal. The only downside to blogging is you have to be willing to invest some time into posts; ideally, you should post new material about 2-3 times per week.

Happy writing!

Authors' Websites

If you're an aspiring author and are wondering about websites and promotion, check out the dearauthor.com article "What Every Author's Website Should Contain." On the sidebar, you'll see numerous comments by published authors, including Nora Roberts.

Once I had completed my first romantic short story and was halfway through my novel, I began considering the issue of the website. Should I have a website? Should I hire a designer? Who would be the potential audience for the site? I think it's important to consider these types of questions before making the investment of time and money because as I've found, a lot more goes into building and maintaining a website than I had anticipated. At first, I did contemplate hiring a web design finally decided to hold off until I have a book under contract. So, in the end, it took about a week of training with much trial and error to get my site up and running.

I recently revised my website, and I've found the best way to make my website as professional and attractive as possible is to gather ideas by visiting as many author websites as possible (read: hundreds). Since I already knew who else was writing in my genre, it was easy to visit the RWA and the Beau Monde websites to find links. One tip that I've found especially useful is to join webrings that share similar interests. Once I started browsing through websites, I discovered several webrings in my genre and promptly applied for membership.

More later on the Internet presence and the author . . .
Happy writing!