What Every Author Should Know About Book Marketing.

Writing a novel can be a long grueling and exhausting process, but the work doesn't stop when you've written the last word, in fact writing the novel is only the beginning. You could argue that a book without readers is not a book at all, so in this article I will explain the steps you need to take to successfully market your work of fiction.

The first thing you need to do is see the big picture. Get a white board or the biggest piece of paper you can find and map out all of the activities you need to complete to successfully market your new book. This could be from finding a publisher or a reputable Print on Demand company to book signings at popular retailers.

If you have already started working on some of the activities then note the outcomes and think about how successful they have been. Looking at the activities from this high level can highlight any gaps in your marketing campaign and also show you whether you are spending your time wisely. Let's say you've spent a lot of time sitting in book stores but haven't signed a lot of books. Perhaps you're actually too far ahead in your plan and need to go back a few steps. Think about spending that time doing radio interviews or speaking events to actually spread the word about you and your book.

When you have your high level plan mapped out you should think of it as your flight path. This is how you will go from writing a book to being a successful author. Now in order to get there you need to actually take some action, so your next step is to write a to do list or an action plan.

Break down each of the high level steps into smaller pieces. Let's say you have promotion as one of your steps on your flight plan. This could be via radio interviews, and speaking events, but have you thought about guest blogs and interviews with book bloggers? A positive review spreads like wildfire in the book blogging community so make some connections and send out Advanced Reading Copies of your book.

Don't forget that a book isn't a good book until someone has read it, so review your flight path and work out what actions you need to take to achieve your goal of being a successful author.

Clare Swindlehurst has been writing articles for nearly eight years and manages a successful book review blog at http://www.bluearchipelagoreviews.com/. If you are an author and are looking for a book blogger to review your latest novel please contact me.

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