Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest !
Interact on all of the other major social networks.
I often post my blog posts on Facebook first. This helps me see which ones will get the most engagement. Create a fan page for your blog. If people like them and that draws them to one of my fan pages, then all the better.
Never buy Likes. But when you can get Likes organically by using your content, then that is value you grow forever.
With Twitter, it’s hard to non-stop engage in conversations. You would never have time for writing.
This entire strategy: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, guest blogging, is about building your name to an audience that might be unfamiliar to you, as well as driving distribution to your posts while at the same time delivering real value to your readers. You have to do all of that: distribution, name-building, value, at the same time, to make these platforms work for you.
Marketing
Note that publishers do zero marketing for you. This is not a knock on publishers. The great thing about publishers: they will write you a check and get you into bookstores. These are two really good things. But they will not do marketing.
If you don’t do your own marketing and promote yourself, then nobody else will. This should be your mantra. The one area where I will fault publishers is that they will claim to do marketing for you.
Self-publishing
You can craft a Microsoft Word file of your book, upload it to Createspace, and they will format it for you, publish it to Kindle, and you are now a published author on Amazon. You will get 30-70% royalties depending on how you price (above $2.99 you get a 70% royalty) and you can do paperback and Kindle version.
This is not a bad choice. I did this with several of my self-published books. I’ve sold more copies of those books than my five books published with traditional publishers combined. Createspace even helps you design a cover, and you can pay for copyediting.
By Shashikant Nishant Sharma
