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

[dillinger]

if you have published a book and you were sucessful in selling it please let me know how should I proceed with my new fiction book. I am asking for some experience authors. I have tried forward magazine with my publisher Xlibris and I don't even know if it ever made it to the magazine yet.

This is my first time with xlibris has anyone else had any experience with this publishig company.

[Darren Barton]

Buy not calling it brutus the swamp man.

[Amb_writes]

I'm sorry I'm not an experienced author, though I wish I was. But hopefully, I can help you more than the first answer
I suggest checking out some websites - just google ways to market your book. Google has never failed me.
There are also tons of great books out to help you - like Writers Market.
Talk to your agent or publisher, get into advertising, and contact other authors through email. Good luck with your story

[Ω Liam Ω]

Although I have not yet published a book of my own, I know various people who have.

It is the work of Xlibris advertisement team to market the book, but if you do not feel that they are up to scratch then you may wish to self-market, at your own will be it however. Self marketing can be expensive. You could design 'posters' for your book and ask local library and book stores to pin them up for a while, create voice advertisements that can be sent out to local radio stations (This will cost you for advertisement space), contact various local magazines and book magazines and pay for advertisement space, contact music programmes such as 'Spotify', with millions of 'free users' who get voice advertisements. You can record one and pay for advertisement room. Then you could also take advantage of iPhone and other various iPad applications.

[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.

[S.K.]

T. Nielsen Hayden is telling you what I would have, only with greater eloquence. Lister to her every word.

Marketing a pay-to-publish book is damned difficult. Many of the avenues open to traditionally published authors are not available. Chain bookstores won't host signings or carry copies (although they will order them for customers). Newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio don't want your press releases and won't do interviews. The library system won't accept free copies. Writing- or book-related conventions won’t let you set up a sales or autograph table, don’t want you on their author panels, and forbid you giving away promotional material.

The author's website, blog, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other electronic self-promotion efforts seem to have little effect in terms of increased sales.

About the only marketing I've seen have any effect for self-published authors is active participation at forums and chats dealing with the subject of your book. Find your niche market and determine where online they hang out. Some sites may allow you to discuss your book *if someone asks about it* (but will ban you for bringing it up more than once). Some may allow a link to a point of sale in your profile, or to your blog or web-page which in turn links to a point of sale.

You'll sell a few more copies than you might have, but overall, like most self-published books, regardless of quality, total sales will probably remain below 100 copies. More often, the number hovers somewhere around 2/3 to 3/4 of your total number of friends and family members. This compares pretty unfavorably to the thousands of copies a moderately-selling book from a conventional publisher can anticipate.

I’m sorry not to be able to offer much real hope for promotion, but I figured you’d rather hear the truth than sugar-coated lies which might cause you to waste your time or money.