Sound Online Marketing Advice For Authors

Steve Weber is a seasoned author and over the years has learned a great deal about marketing online. In Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors, you gain the benefit of his years of trial and error. In the early portion of this book he "explains the basics of online book promotion techniques that provide the most bang for your effort."

I love the realistic counsel in Plug Your Book! such as when Weber says, "Perhaps not everything discussed in here will be practical for your book. Your job is to select which promotional techniques might work best with your audience, and then use them aggressively and tirelessly. Online publicity works particularly well with nonfiction, but can be applied to fiction too. The more techniques you try, the better your chances of success. A single strategy won't work, but a combined effort will produce results, and the effect will be cumulative."

Many authors ignore online publicity for their books (and reap the poor sales results). Or they try one or two techniques and give up quickly (and again wonder why their book has few sales). Throughout this book, Weber gives clear examples of online marketing success then points the reader to how they too can use the same technique for their book. Whether you want to know more about effective word of mouth campaigns, Amazon Bestseller Campaigns, Blogging and Blog Tours, the merits of social networking with places like MySpace, or many more techniques, you can gain valuable insight from this book.

I like what Weber says in the early pages where he encourages the reader to quickly read the book once, then to read it again "selecting and prioritizing what you'll tackle first."

Finally, this book has wisdom scattered throughout the pages. For example, "This book is not a quick-fix plan; there is no such thing as overnight success. It might require a year or more of steady work to see appreciable results. If that seems like a gamble and lots of work, it is. But I assure you, it's nothing compared with what it took to write your book."

I learned a great deal from these pages and believe any author (new or experienced) will also gain from this title. From Weber's experience, I selected a few key techniques that I'm eager to try with my own books in the coming days. I recommend every author get this title, study it, then apply it to their own online book marketing efforts.