Promote Your Books Online

Author and online book promotion expert Patrice-Anne Rutledge shows you how to Focus on Your Audience, with the following tips from her blog: One of the most important rules of online book promotion — or any form of promotion for that matter — is to focus on your audience. Here are three tips for developing a reader-focused online book promotion campaign: Develop an audience profile Knowing who might potentially buy your book and the sites they visit on the web is your key to success. Naturally, this is easier if your book is on a tightly targeted topic. But even if you’ve written a general interest book or novel, you can still develop some form of profile. Focus your Efforts Once you have that profile, focus your promotional efforts on the sites your audience frequents and the type of content to which they would most likely respond. For example, let’s say you wrote a book about skiing. Your audience could potentially visit websites devoted to skiing or to travel areas frequented by skiers. They could also respond favorably to your own site full of skiing advice and short ski-related video clips. Pick the Proper Tools and Technologies Remember to focus on the interests of your audience, not your own personal interests. Many authors focus on online promotion techniques that interest them rather than their audience. Cool new technologies like video book trailers, multimedia, and podcasts work great for some books, but not so great for others. Pick the tools and techniques that will make your audience respond. =============== Patrice-Anne Rutledge is a bestselling author, successful technology journalist, and online book promotion expert who has authored 24 nonfiction books for leading publishers including Pearson, Macmillan, Prentice Hall, Random House, and Ziff-Davis Press. Her most recent book is The Web-Savvy Writer: Book Promotion with a High-Tech Twist, which shows authors how to profit from new technologies such as blogging, RSS, and podcasting.

Visit Patrice-Anne Rutledge online - the Websavvywriter.com

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How Can Business Books Keep Pace?

The High-Tech Solution to the Business Book High-Tech Problem
While reading some very insightful and helpful books as a judge for the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards, I was struck by this one powerful thought: Of all the things I wouldn’t want to do in publishing, writing or publishing a business book is near the top of the list.

Not that there’s anything wrong with business books, their authors, or the companies who publish them.

It’s just that it must be maddening knowing that because high-tech marketing methods appear and change so often, business practices become incomplete and even practically obsolete at least once or twice a year.

And that means that business books do, too.

About 12-18 months ago, publishers contracted for most of the business books that were published this week. But, in the last nine months, YouTube has become the hottest way to market just about everything and everyone. Business books that have been published in the last few months and will come out in the next few months – unless they were crash-produced – had no chance to detail YouTube’s enormous impact on marketing, promotion, and public relations, and how business book readers could use that internet phenomenon to their business advantage.

That’s just one example of the speed at which high-tech marketing opportunities change and how difficult it is for business book publishers to keep pace.

As a big fan of paper, and the traditional book-reading experience, I’ve never been a fan of e-books, no matter what names the technology is given or how it’s delivered via computerized gizmos, even those designed to resemble books.

But, even I can make a case for business books to be made available ASAP via said gizmos so that they’re not incomplete or obsolete before they even hit bookstore shelves.

Business book publishers may also want to cut the lead time back from the usual nine months or a year (or more) between contract and publication. Sure, it means that those publishers wouldn’t be able to rely on the traditional seasonal paper catalogs to make sales to booksellers six months before a book is published. But, they could, instead, market to bookstores via e-mailed and online catalogs a month or two before publication.

If technology is giving them this problem, publishers might as well take advantage of technology to solve it.

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Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.

Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction.


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