Book Promotion Tools That Come Directly From Your Book

You may remember that not long ago I was talking about Karen Wiesner's First Draft in 30 Days. Well, she has a new book coming out in September, and I wanted to share a few of the tools she's using for online book promotion during the pre-launch phase. The book is called From First Draft To Finished Novel.

As far as I'm concerned, from the buyer perspective, one of the best things an author or publisher can do to get me to buy a book is to give me some kind of preview. The back cover info isn't enough. I want to get a feel for the author's style. If the book revolves on worksheets or templates, I want to see them.

At the same time, I rarely physically go to a bookstore anymore, so paging through a book isn't an option. When I buy from Amazon (and yes, I'm aware that it's somewhat taboo at the moment with their author issues), I rarely buy a book that doesn't take advantage of their "search inside" feature to let me see the TOC and an excerpt.

Karen's taking full advantage of some simple, built-in marketing tools to promote her new book, and I wanted to point them out here as examples of things most authors can similarly do to give their potential buyers a taste of a book to entice us to buy online:

The Excerpt

Any author or publisher can post an excerpt of a book online. In Karen's case, you can read the excerpt from From First Draft To Finished Novel here: Principles of Building a Story

Book Details

There's no excuse for you to not have basic book details published online well in advance of the release date. In this case, both the publisher and author each have a page up devoted to background on the upcoming book.

Author Q&A

Whether done through your publisher or up on your own author site, it's a good idea to have a Q&A sample available. This works well not so much for direct sales value, but from a media relations point of view. You want journalists to interview you or review your book. Having an author Q&A set online gives them added background, sample questions they may want to expand upon with you, or answers to common questions that you don't want to be asked repeatedly (you'll get more value out of the interview if they ask you ten deeper questions than the surface things everyone needs to know).

Worksheets

This won't work for every type of book, but if you have some kind of addenda, consider making it available online prior to the book's launch. In Karen's case, she's published worksheets and checklists from the new book online. You can find the PDF downloads at both the publisher's and author's book profile page listed a bit earlier in this post.

What other tools do you easily have access to prior to a book launch that you can use in your online book marketing efforts?

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Jennifer Mattern is a professional blogger, freelance business writer, consultant, and indie author. She runs numerous websites & blogs including All Freelance Writing, Freelance Writing Pros, NakedPR, and Kiss My Biz.

Jenn has 25 years' experience as a professional writer and editor and over 20 years' experience in marketing and PR (working heavily in digital PR, online marketing, social media, SEO, new media, and thought leadership publication). She also has 19 years' professional blogging and web publishing experience (including web development) and around 18 years of experience as an indie author / publisher.

Jenn also writes fiction under multiple pen names and is an Active member of the Horror Writers Association.

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