I wrote a book entitled The Mean Streets of LA:(amazon.com) What is the best way to sell it?

[Roger]

100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the novel are solely dedicated for Tree of Life Orphanage in Buriram, Thailand. Any suggestions on marketing it to a larger potential audience?

[aine]

You can publish your work cheaply at
www. lulu.com
You can order as many or as few copies as you want and each copy will cost you about £7.15. You can opt to distribute your book privately or you can put it online. If you want to promote your book on lulu, well, that is more expensive.

[S.K.]

Self-published books do poorly on ebay, amazon, the publisher’s website, and the author’s own website.

Marketing a pay-to-publish book is damned difficult. Many of the avenues open to commercially 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 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 continued 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, especially in light of the charitable nature of any proceeds.