It’s important to link to your book’s web page as much as possible. This isn’t just to get traffic from the pages that link to the book, but to increase the likelihood that your book’s page will come up in Google when someone plugs in a search – as inbound links increase a page’s rank. If your book’s page is housed within your website, this additional link will increase the page rank and traffic to your site. So ideally you want an author’s site to look like this:
Authorsite.com
Authorsite.com/bookpage
Authorsite.com/blog
The last two open up new ways to bring links to your domain. The point of doing this isn’t always immediate sales, but visibility – they say people might not buy a book until they’ve seen it mentioned at least 5 times. This includes posting in the Self-Publishing Review forum, which allows you to link to your book within the forum (hint hint).
Some of these listing sites won’t allow an external link, or will link to an Amazon page, which are both useful for visibility. If you can’t get into the newspaper, as is the case with most self-published writers, you need to be creative about how you market a book, and the web is opening up new marketing avenues every day. Here are websites that allow you to place a book/description/and reviews (updated 10/11/11).
- Published.com
- Book Hitch
- Authors Den
- Slake
- Writers.net
- Sharing-Books
- We Read
- Discover a Book
- Writers Cafe
- Nothing Binding
- Reader 2
- Goodreads
- Bibliophil
- Shelfari
- Library Thing
- The Polka Dot Banner
- Red Room
- GuruLib
- Shelf Centered
- aNobii
- Internet Book Database
- The Shared Self-Publishing Experience
- Axis Avenue
- BookRix
- Authors Bookshop
- Jexbo
- Breakthrough Bookstore
- Coalition of Independent Authors
- Self-Publishing Review
Who said there weren’t avenues for a self-published writer to promote a book? There are plenty, but you’ve got to put in the time – to register, but also to participate, especially on the library-based sites, like Goodreads. In this case, you want to link to other books in your library, not just your own, and add friends just as you would with any social network. Many of these sites aren’t just about adding a listing and leaving the site, but actively networking with other readers.
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Great list!
And, (sigh), great list. Thirty-four places to list a book! Now that they’re all on display with links and everything, one can’t help but feel irresponsible if one doesn’t spend the twenty-thousand hours it’ll take to register with each one.
Thanks.
A lot.
Really.
Yep, that’s the life of a book marketer. Never feeling like you’re doing enough.
Hi!
I just want to thank you for the great resources. You website is
very inspiring to writers, publishers and me!
Thanks again,
Thelma Harcum
Publishing.com seems to be experiencing some difficulties…
Thank you for these great resources (including yourselves!). So glad to have found your site.
Thanks, now I need to get busy and post to more sites. Good to have this resource and I’ll make sure I hang onto this page.
Thanks for this exhaustive list – great site and resource.
eden