How to market books online ?

[Zoesha]

What would you say is the most effective way to market books online?
to give it maximum visibility and to draw people to it..

[sohabranbugs05]

laucnh a new site.
make a profile on some social networking sites like facebook and orkut.
put up some advertisements on major sites like google,yahoo and all.

[Kathryn W]

The obvious choice is to sell it through amazon.com. Also, consider designing your own website.

Self published books are very difficult to market, as the author is left to market the novel alone, without the support of a publisher and their marketing department.

[yachna]

I believe the best to market books online is to create widgets for your books and spread them across social networks and blogs. Other users can easily add your widgets to their social profiles and/or blogs and enable all people on their respective networks to access your content samples. This will help you in spinning out a viral web of individual content nodes without having to spend time, effort, and money to contact these readers and their networks directly. Generally widgets offer book previews also that help users to browse through the sample pages before buying the book. This increases the chances of users actually buying the book. This really helps in enhancing the visibility of your books.

Hope this helps.

[gnana]

Hi,

have a look into this http://www.1shoppingcart.com

[Kiran]

There is no single point answer to this question. To market a book online, there has to be a sustained and concerted effort across various tools on the web. Yachna has mentioned some of it in her comment, but to elaborate further:
1. The first thing is to have an online presence for your book and make it discoverable. There would be no point in marketing your book if readers cannot look it up online, would it.
2. Provide sample pages for preview. There are many researches that have proven that preview pages help a great deal in influencing a buy decision by the reader.
3. Book Widgets: Use services like http://www.ipubliscentral.com to create attractive book widgets for your books. These widgets can be shared with friends, put up on blogs, social networking sites, etc. But the best thing with widgets is, it allows your readers to market the book for you by spreading it around.
4. Social Media: A judicious mix of social media marketing can do wonders to your book marketing campaign. Make your presence felt at sites like Twitter, Linked In, Face Book, MySpace, etc, and don't forget to put up your widgets there.
5. Manage a blog site that includes book reviews from your readers.
6. Lastly, having a book portal, backed with an Commerce functionality will enable readers to buy books instantly.

You may want to check out http://www.ipublishcentral.com, which allows publishers to put up books online and start marketing and selling them instantly, without any upfront investment.