You may acquire a chance to compose a work of beauty and release it into marketplaces around the world, making it available to people whom of which have never seen the likes of your work ever before, but how exactly are going to promote this event?
Even though independently published authors may submit their work to major online retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony and Kobo for inclusion in their virtual catalogs and are somehow accepted, there is no guarantee that the book’s listings will go any further.
A social presence must accompany every book an author decides to launch, regardless of how unknown or renowned they may be, for social networking is the ultimate key to a book’s initial success. Self-published authors commonly mistake the concept of “internet marketing” as something that requires monetary means of sustenance when really it is tethered to multiple venues that are entirely free.
Networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn are great sources of social media that can definitely expand any self-published author’s career within no time. I remember when I established a Facebook Page for each one of my published titles and in the following two weeks they were drawing in attention from countries such as India, Germany and the United Kingdom. Pinterest was another big leap for my career, for I was able to upload photos of all my book covers and screen-shots of all the websites that were promoting my books and made them available for public purchase.
Thousands of visitors would find their way to my Pinterest Board and would inevitably click on most of the images I had uploaded to my profile, which lead to an increase in book sales and unique traffic to my official author website. LinkedIn and Twitter allowed me to reach out to celebrities across the United States and proximities throughout Europe, including Shark Tank’s Daymond John and prominent poet Laurie Wagner Buyer Jameson.
It is good to diversify your social media portfolio and be involved in multiple online communities throughout the internet instead of just one, for it is vital to expand into different networks if you wish for your book to survive.
Wattpad and StoryMash offer sociable tools that can be utilized by any self-published author looking to publish individual chapters of their book and receive authentic peer-to-peer feedback. Never in my career as an author have I created a pseudonym for myself, but when I first began to publish my poetry I went by the username “Inferno,” which led to the naming of my published title “Celestial Inferno: Poems of Another Realm.” StoryMash was the perfect place to test this obscure identity. At first, the comments made about my writing were moderately bright, but sometimes included dark and heinous slurs that diminished my image, but it did give me a strong taste of the writing world.
Wattpad was another big contributor to the criticism that I received in my early days as a poet, for each time I posted a new poem to my public profile, in return, I had groups of Wattpad users directly message me and explain how obscure and worthless my writing was to them. Though I did have large amounts of readers dislike my work I was never discouraged from writing poetry and whenever someone said that they hated my creations, I respectfully complimented their critique and learned from my mistakes.
It is quite astounding how much the internet has to offer self-published authors, for I think in today’s society if social media didn’t exist, I and every other independently published writer on Earth would be doomed. It doesn’t matter how prominent or well-known traditionally published authors may be or how great of an influence they may have online, we too can rise up from the shadows and take a stand right beside them.
You see, I barely had any money to put towards my writing in the beginning and held absolutely no experience in the self-publishing industry, but with the aid the internet and all it provided me with, I am now seen as one of the “most prominent poets of the 21st Century.” If I can do it, so can you.
Article is Copr. © 2013 by Aaron Ozee and originally published on PublishersNewswire.com (a publication of Neotrope) – all commercial and reprint rights reserved. Reproduction or republication in whole or in part without express permission is prohibited except under fair use provisions of international copyright law. Article cover illustration is Copr. © 2013 Christopher Simmons.
