Promote your Book ...Ten Great Ways

So you have written a book and had it published. Congratulations. Now you face the challenge of what to do next. Many authors think that marketing is a job for the publisher so they sit back and wait for the royalties to roll in. You might have a very long wait. The market for books is extremely crowded and most books do not sell well. However, there are a number of things that the author can do that will really help to promote your book. so make the move from writing to marketing and take these actions:



1.Promote your Book by Sending review copies to all the journals and magazines that review books in your genre. This is something that most publishers do for you but there is no harm in sharing lists and helping out. If you have self-published you will certainly have to focus on this. Don’t forget the many online sites that review books.

2. Promote your Book by Getting friends, colleagues, clients or anyone who likes your book to place reviews on Amazon and other online book stores. Amazon is highly influential and the reviews matter so encourage anyone who says they enjoyed your book to place a review.

3. Promote your Book Offering yourself for interview on radio stations. Most radio stations are looking for interesting interviews and the author of a newly published book has a good chance of getting on air. You need a publicity letter which says something interesting or controversial about the book and off you go. If you have the budget you can use a professional PR company to target radio and TV programs.

4. Promote your Book Creating a web page for the book. Ideally you should have a separate website with an address that features the book title. Now you can exchange links and drive traffic to the site with comments, blogs, quotes and extracts. Be sure to show people how they can buy the book. Encourage user feedback, comments and reviews.

5. Promote your Book Offering sample chapters as free downloads. Take a couple of your best chapters and turn them into pdf files. Let people download them for free. Think of this as the equivalent of letting people browse through your book at a bookstore.

6. Promote your Book Using material from the book in your blog. Start a blog and quote from the book. Lift sections and acknowledge the book as the source. Build a community of interest around the topics in the book.

7. Review other books in this field. Promote your Book by Become a reviewer on Amazon. Use your own name accompanied by ‘author of the book……’. Review other books and when people read your reviews some will click through to your book.

8. Promote your Book using an email newsletter. Encourage people to subscribe on the website and then send out an occasional newsletter with interesting new material in this book’s field. But you cannot just plug your book – you have to add value with new information and comment.

9. Promote your Book by Give away copies to the right people. Use the book as your calling card. Give copies to potential and existing clients. Encourage them to read it and pass it on.

10. Promote your Book by Offering books as prizes. Local radio shows, magazines or societies will often be interested in running competitions and will give you valuable publicity if you give them a few books to give away as prizes.

Some authors do book signings in local bookstores but, unless you are very well-known, this activity is unlikely to produce worthwhile results. Finally, you could consider using the book as a platform for launching your speaking career. You will need a different set of skills to succeed here but the book can make an excellent starting point and every talk will help sell more books.

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Google Mobile App for BlackBerry Allows Search by Voice, My Location

Google Mobile App for BlackBerry now allows users to search using their voices and with Google's My Location application. Google has been making substantial inroads with its mobile apps, even as a number of mobile device makers gear up to produce Android-based smartphones.
Google Mobile App for BlackBerry now allows users to reduce typing on the Research In Motion smartphones by carrying out mobile Web searches for a location using their voices or the search giant's My Location application, or both.

"If you're like us and hate typing on that tiny keyboard, you'll be glad to hear that Google Mobile App on your BlackBerry will let you search with your voice and with My Location," Luca Zanolin, a Google Mobile App engineer, wrote in a Google Mobile Blog post March 25.

Say you're looking for the nearest bookstore. By inputting "bookstore" with My Location enabled, you generate a list of bookstores nearest your location.

Users also now have search-by-voice functionality for their BlackBerrys, a feature already available to users of the iPhone and the Android platform. Say the word "bookstore" and Google will generate local results and a corresponding link to Google Maps.

"Searching by voice can be used in combination with the My Location feature, and it works well with standard Google searches, such as currency conversion and weather," Zanolin wrote.

Google Mobile App will run on all versions of the RIM BlackBerry running on O/S 4.1+. The search-by-voice feature is supported on O/S 4.2 and above, with support for the BlackBerry Storm coming soon.

Google has been seeking to expand its mobile device-based services lately, as well as refining existing ones such as Google Maps for Mobile.

On March 20, the company announced that Google Voice would include an updated Phone Spam filter. Google Voice provides services such as automated voice mail transcription and grouping a user's phones with a single number.

More mobile-device makers have been committing to Google's Android mobile operating system platform. Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC, which drew buzz at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona for its devices, announced on March 17 that it could produce three more Android-based smartphones in 2009.

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Google Ventures Looks to Invest Millions in Software, Green IT, Health Care

Google is setting up Google Ventures, a venture capital fund with the capacity to invest in consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care, and whatever other areas that might harbor the “next big thing.” Although Google claims its new fund is not an acquisition vehicle, the company has a history of purchasing startups such as YouTube and then integrating them into its core businesses.

Google announced the creation of Google Ventures on March 30, a venture capital fund designed to invest in startups across the technology spectrum.

By doing so, Google joins Intel and other companies in establishing a venture-capital arm for investment in smaller firms with potential. Google already has a philanthropic arm, Google.org, that has focused on investments in global health and clean energy.

"We'll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven't thought of yet," Rich Miner and Bill Maris, managing partners of Google Ventures, wrote on the official Google blog. "If anything, we think the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies that have the chance to be the ‘next big thing,’ and we'll be working hard to find them."

Rich Miner helped develop Google’s Android platform and ecosystem; before joining Google, he was a vice president at Orange, overseeing research and development activities in North America.

Before joining Google, Bill Maris founded Burlee.com, a Web hosting company, and was a portfolio manager for Investor AB, a Swedish industrial holding company.

While Maris and Miner will judge and manage the investments, The New York Times reports that David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer at Google, will oversee the project.

News reports peg the amount of money Google Ventures plans to spend in its first year at $100 million.

On its new Google Ventures Website, the company suggested that it would be willing to invest up to "tens of millions of dollars" in startups, "depending on the stage of the opportunity and the company’s need for capital." Google also held open the door to co-investing in opportunities with other venture firms.

On the same site, Google also asserted that its new venture – so to speak – wasn't merely a new acquisition tool: "Acquisitions by Google of portfolio companies are possible, but this is not the goal or focus of our investment activities. Our focus is building great companies and generating long-term financial return."

However, Google has a long history of purchasing startups and then integrating their technology into its core businesses. As far back as 2005, with its acquisition of Dodgeball.com, Google was building its portfolio of social-networking technologies; a year later, it purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion.

On March 11, Google released Google Voice, an updated version of GrandCentral, which Google acquired in July 2007. Google Voice allows users to condense his or her various phone numbers into a single one, among other phone-related services.

"The $100 million or so is not the type of funding they would need to go out and make acquisitions of major companies; it’s basically seed money," Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, said in an interview. "I would expect them to proceed in much the same way as Intel Capital and IBM, in that they’ll find interesting companies and throw them a financial lifeline in order to help them survive, and then have a seat at the table."

Google Venture’s public stance against being an acquisition vehicle, King continued, "may be a matter of political expediency."

"There are any number of startups whose main reason for existing is to be acquired by a larger organization, but that’s not always the case," he said. "So from a socio-political standpoint, it’s better for Google to say they’re heading out there simply to provide guidance. If eventual acquisition was an explicit goal, they might risk scaring off more companies than they would attract."

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Earth Hour ignored by internet user

While nearly 1,000 global landmarks went dark for Earth Hour and uncounted individuals turned off lights in a symbolic gesture endorsing climate change action, Internet usage continued to suck down power with no slowdown before, during and after Earth Hour. Power for servers and associated cooling equipment took up 1.2 percent of the entire U.S. power consumption in 2005 at a cost of $2.6 billion.

The much ballyhooed March 28 Earth Hour called for individuals, businesses and governments across the globe to turn off unused appliances and computers for 1 hour as a show of support for climate change action. The World Wildlife Foundation, the sponsor of the event, went so far as to call Earth Hour "the world's first-ever global vote about the future of our planet."

Internet users, it seems, could not have cared less.

The monitoring service Pingdom, which tracks 35,000 sites and servers across 125 countries, measured Internet activity during the Earth Hour time range. Compared with the same period for the three previous weeks, Pingdom found no decrease in Internet use.

"There was no noticeable difference, which means that Earth Hour had no impact on the Internet," Pingdom wrote on its blog. The company was disappointed with the results.

"The Internet today takes up a significant amount of the global power output and considerably more of our collective attention," Peter Alguacil, a Pingdom Web analyst, said in a statement. "All servers and web sites are not business critical, and we sincerely wish more companies, organizations and individuals will join us in pledging to shut down any infrastructure they can spare next year to make Earth Hour 2010 a virtual event as well as a physical one."

According to an AMD-sponsored study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, power for servers and their cooling equipment took up 1.2 percent of the entire U.S. power consumption in 2005 at a cost of $2.6 billion. The numbers don't include power for data storage and network equipment.

Pingdom promised to shut down as much as possible without compromising its main monitoring and notification services for Earth Hour 2010, and urged individuals and Internet companies to do the same.

"Earth Hour is intended to mobilize and manifest support for action on climate change. What if Facebook, after notifying users, decided to shut down for 60 minutes next year? That would be an unprecedented global manifestation in itself," said Alguacil.

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