Good and bad author promotion

John Blossom has an interesting editorial on Shore.com called Book Publishers Seek Out Fresh Inroads to Online-Driven Markets worth reading. "Book publishers are working hard to improve their online marketing channels for their titles, but ironically they receive the least help in many instances from the authors of those books. Most book author Web sites are weak marketing tools that are designed to do little to help build a reading community or book sales."

I don't agree with all his points, but I do agree that authors can use their Web sites to help promote their work, and that the degree of effectiveness varies widely depending on the Web site and how it's designed and used.

I covered some points several years ago in my author promotion column for Writing-World.com, but technology has improved since then, as have opportunities for writers, so I figure some of these topics are worth covering again, as well as addressing new potential marketing tools that weren't available when I wrote that column, such as blogs.

I'll be posting some of these articles here as well as in Inkygirl, and you'll be able to access the posts in this series through a new category on Inkygirl; I'll post the URL when it's available.

And of course I'll be talking about how NOT to have an author Web site like Mimi's.

:-)