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AFTER PUBLISHING COMES MARKETING

Once you've uploaded your manuscript it only takes about 12 hours after you've hit the publish button for it to appear as an offering at the Kindle Store. But, you're not really done. You've just started to make the sale, and now you have to learn how to market your work to close the sales.

In times past, all you had to do was get a literary agent and they would get the publishing house. The publishing house would then do all the marketing for the book in order to make the sales. This doesn't happen anymore. They either want known authors who have an audience already or they want you to do your own marketing. This can be quite a hat switch from author to marketer, but it's pretty much expected even if you publish and ebook or get a publishing house to publish your book for you. You will still have to bear the brunt of doing most of the upfront marketing work.

The nice thing is though that you can build your audience for yourself and once your name is known, you can go anywhere and that audience will follow you. You will know how to generate more interest for your work and you won't be dependent on finding a literary agent or a publishing house that is willing to publish your work. In a lot of ways, it offers you a lot more creative freedom to see what the market will accept versus what a publisher may deem to be unmarketable. And, it doesn't cost too much in money, although it can take quite a bit of time to keep an active marketing campaign going.

Lucky for you, the Internet has made marketing online a very simple matter. You aren't going to be wasting any gas, you won't have to pay anyone unless you want to, and you can reach thousands, if not millions of readers, through very simple online marketing practices. Here, we will discuss some of the strategies to expose your work to more readers, not just the ones who go the Kindle bookstore already, and thus make more sales.

ONLINE INTERNET MARKETING

Believe it or not, you've already learned some online Internet marketing from this ebook. Once you started learning about keywords and how to get them, you've entered the world of Internet marketing. Those keywords can be used in multiple ways to help increase your exposure on the Internet, so keep them handy.

When we get into the subject of Internet marketing, it's inevitable that we need to discuss the many forums and areas on the Internet where people congregate to talk, learn, and publicize themselves. So, here we are going to categorize those Internet activities by the type of group that you might want to join in order to start getting the word out about your book. They may be blogging communities, social networking sites, discussion forums, and other types of media groups like YouTube or podcasters.

YOUR AUDIENCE MATTERS

However, before we get to these, let's take the time to examine the audience you are trying to attract. If your book is about toy trains, the groups that you want to access should have toy train enthusiasts and hobbyists in their ranks. No matter how large or popular a forum is, if they don't have the

audience you need to sell your book, then, they're simply not worth the effort. What is going to sell your ebook is to connect the audience demographic that likes your topic to the ebook on the Kindle Store. If the two don't match, the odds of a sale are very low. So, stick with those people you know will be interested in your topic to begin with.

PLACES YOU WANT TO JOIN TO MARKET YOUR EBOOK

BLOGGING COMMUNITIES

Many blogs offer places to comment on the posting. This affords you a great opportunity to find blogs associated with the topic of your ebook and then comment on the posting. At the end, you can add a link to your ebook URL. Just be careful how you do this, as no one wants to see a fluff comment on their blog with a link back to some merchandising. That's called spam. Instead, address the post thoughtfully and mention your ebook when it applies.

Now, if you want to do a number of these at one time, check out the keywords the blog is using and insert that into the search engine for the blogging community. That should pull up associated blogs also talking about the same topic. Now, add your comments there too.

You can even trade with bloggers to get some exposure to your ebook. You can contact the blogger and ask them if they would like a free copy of your ebook in exchange for a review, if they like the ebook. Obviously, if they don't like the ebook, you don't want them writing a negative review about it. So, this will help to spur sales from that bloggers audience too and give you an air of credibility because you've associated yourself with them.

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES

This is one of the most underutilized areas right now in marketing, so the field is much less competitive than other strategies. All you need to do is add some profiles to places like Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and, many, many more. In fact, there's so many of them and more coming out each day, that we won't be able to go over all of them. But, we'll give you a sampling of how to use some of the more popular ones to help you get started. This topic is so vast it would really pay for you to buy an ebook on this subject alone, and get started before everyone else saturates the market.

Twitter

This is one of the most unusual social networking sites in that they allow you to "tweet" people in messages of 140 characters or less throughout the day. People listen to these tweets and try to follow you around as your being active in your life. So, in a way it's like blogging, but in microbursts.

The whole idea behind twitter is that if something really interesting is happening in your life, your updates may end up getting a massive audience. People have generated a large audience through simply detailing how they are laid off and the process of leaving their job, being present during a newsworthy event, or simply having interesting personalities that make the day unusual.