Online Community for Authors

There are literally hundreds of tactics an author can use to promote his or her book.

Once you have your Goals, Target Audience and Strategy in place, you are ready to choose the tactics that best fit your plan. While some tactics cost little or nothing, some tactics do incur expense. Carefully choosing which tactics to use will help you maximize your investment in your book. Once you register, you can go to the "Promote Your Book" section and click on the Tactics button. When you do this, you will see several sections: Blog Sites, Online Book stores, Driving Traffic, Online PR and so forth. Each of these sections discusses these tactics in detail.

Once you've decided which tactics you will use, you can build your action plan. For example, if you plan to start a blog, you can spend week 1 building your site. You can watch the videos in our Author Tools section that give detail instructions on how to start your free Wordpress blog. In week 2, you might focus on Online PR and have the goal of sending out your first press release by the end of the week. In this game, the tortoise approach works best - slow and steady. As you implement each tactic, you are creating more opportunities for people to find your book.

If you look over to the sidebar on the left, you will see the main categories of online promotional tactics. This list of tactics is by no means an exhaustive list and as Authors On The Net grows, so will this list of tactics, both online tactics and offline tactics that can help with your book promo plan. While offline tactics like attending book shows and doing book signings can be effective promotional techniques, Authors On The Net - as the name implies - is focused more on helping authors use the internet to promote books.

I wrote a book called Fast & Furious Book Promotion and the concepts in the book form the underlying structure of Authors On The Net. The problem with writing a book about promoting Online is that the internet changes so quickly, by the time someone reads the book there might be 15 new ideas on how to use the internet and a tactic that works today may not work tomorrow. So the strategy was to write a book that gives authors an overall structure to build their promotional plan, and back the book up with a website that can change on a daily basis to keep the content fresh.

When I first contemplated writing a book and building a community-based website for authors looking to write and self publish a book, the idea was to have 1001 ways authors can promote their books online. There probably are 1001 ways or more to promote your book online and over time these tactics will all be listed on AON. At AON, we encourage authors to take a little time on the front-end and develop goals, research target audiences and invent strategies. If you choose to self-publish and self-promote, your book is your business. While many online tactics are free, many others cost money. Whether you have money to throw at your book promotion or not isn't important. I know of authors who have spent tens of thousands of dollars self-promoting their books and never made a dime in return. This is what Sun Tzu meant when he said, "Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."