Adventures in Writing & Publishing

Does this image make you more likely to buy my book Fright Flight?

We’ll see…. Fright Flight is now listed on askdavid.com, a community review site. There are so many sites to list one’s book on. How does an author know which are worth the time? And beyond being listed, which sites should one promote?

My criteria for discerning how much time to allocate looks like this:

• Book buying sites: Amazon. It’s the biggest, the most well known and it drives sales. I make sure I have my author page and book information (i.e. tags) up to date and I ask reviewers to post here. There are many other book sites including BarnesandNoble.com, iTunes (for ebooks), etc. I admit, I stop in occasionally, but I don’t revisit these often.
• Reader review sites: Goodreads, Shelfari. I spend a fair amount of time on each, building my own bookshelf, author information and book data. I also try to find friends, reviewers and groups in which to build awareness around me and my book.
• Other listing sites: after an initial listing, I don’t return often. These types of sites include askdavid.com, authorsden, youtube (book trailer, author visit videos), etc. No offense meant to these sites. With these I just figure that they help in having my name and book out there on the big bad internet. I do usually check out a site using alexa traffic rank before investing any time.
• Blogs: pretty much any listing is a desirable listing. Again it gets the book name out there, hopefully raising search listing ranking. It reaches new readers – sometimes not very many, sometimes more. Most of these are too small to register with alexa. But the target audience, people who subscribe to the blog, is narrow and that’s a good thing – people who like books enough they’ve subscribed to the blog. Finding appropriate blogs can be challenging. Keeping track of blogs contacted, answers received, dates, follow up, etc. is something I need to be better at.

I spend a lot more time thinking and working on book promotion than I ever thought I would. It’s difficult too because one never knows what yields results. Usually I just chalk it up to “it’s all good”. But maybe the well-dressed man will yield beyond ‘good’ results?