I am a author with a new book out called Brutus the Swamp Man and was wonderig the best way to market my book?

[T. Nielsen hayden]

I'm sorry, but there's no effective way to do it. People fib a lot about the wonders of self-publishing. The overwhelming likelihood is that a self-published work of fiction is going to sell somewhere between seventy and two hundred copies. Seventy is the average friends-and-relatives sale. Two hundred is about as much as you can sell if you work your hiney off doing self-promotion.

Tightly targeted nonfiction can do better than that if it's aimed at a well-defined audience that wants to buy a book on that subject, and the author knows how to reach that audience and market the book to them. Touring speakers can also do better than that if their book is basically a souvenir or memorandum that's sold at their appearances from a table in the back of the room.

Right now, the most productive thing you can do does *not* involve spending all your time doing low-yield self-promotion that doesn't pay off. Instead, use that time and energy to write your next book, and send it out to publishers and agents.

My hand to God, I'm telling you the truth. I've seen literally hundreds of self-published authors in your position, and there's no clever trick or technique of self-promotion that's ever gotten them out of it. Writing another, more successful book, one that will get you picked up by a real agent and placed with a real publishing house, is the only way to do it.