Year in Review: Promoting My Novel Using the Internet

This will be the last part of my series dealing with the year in review, looking back at the release of my novel; Legend of the Mystic Knights

This adventure to get the book published has been rewarding and very informative.  I must say that Safkhet Publishing was, and currently is, very helpful in this process.

At the time of publishing, I did not have the Internet at home.  I utilized many sites at work, but some were not accessible to me.  I did have a tablet which I could use where there was Wi-Fi, but it is difficult to create pages with it.  William Banks Sutton, founder and director, of Safkhet Publishing took the time to set up a Facebook and Twitter account for me. 

Facebook and Twitter are wonderful for promoting. I knew little about these sites, so I obtained copies of “Dummy” books for each; these books are very valuable for someone with limited Internet experience such as a Luddite like me.

Another two sites which are very useful are Goodreads and Pinterest.  You will find these sites will help you to promote your novel or stories.  Again, always read their FAQ and requirements about promoting; you never want to violate the sites rules about self-promoting. 

William Banks Sutton also had me reach out to other authors of Safkhet Publishing. These people are listed on their Safkhet’s author's page. They are a great bunch of people, and wonderful authors and I encourage everyone to read some of their works.

I cannot emphasize how much help these people were to me.  I also learned a powerful lesson from them; if someone reaches out to me for assistance; take the time to help them.

The promotion of my novel has had success and some failure.  The sales of the book looked like a yoyo, going up and down.  You will find that the initial promotion of your writing may seem difficult, but it is not as challenging as maintaining the interest in your book.

If you have limited resources, or ideas on promoting, you must make a hard decision. Should you do all your promotional ideas up front, before or right after you are published, or should you stagger it out.  

There is not a simple answer to this for both have advantages to each.  It is the age-old story of the Tortoise and the hare.  If you rush out to get great initial sales, you then hope that word of mouth from your novel will maintain constant sales. Conversely, you can take the strategy of slowly putting out promotional material, building up a following over a period of time.  

So now we come to the end of my year in review concerning my novel.  There are additional items I will be completing this year to help promote my novel. I am in the process of creating several movies for my novel.  One will be me reading a section of my novel; another will be an advertisement showing some illustrated scenes from it.  Creating these movies will be another skill I need to learn, and I will describe this process in future blogs.

I have not mentioned much about the creation of this blog, this is because I am going to do a series later about the advantage of blogging and book promotion.
I hope you have enjoyed looking in the past year in reference to the publishing and promoting of my novel. As always, I would love to hear from you, so please leave a comment.

Next time we will get in our time machines and head back to medieval times