The Personal Approach to Marketing Your Self-Published Book

Because self-published authors don’t have a publishing company to help them promote their work, it’s important to take the initiative in marketing. Connecting with your fans on a personal level is a great way to market. This can be done through attending conferences as well as interacting with them through your blog, facebook or other social networking.

Face-to-face interaction, however, is one of the most effective ways to market. If you have the budget, time and freedom to do so, I highly recommend attending conferences as a vendor and/or book seller. Readers and potential customers appreciate the opportunity to speak with an author and to have their books signed by the author herself.

For the first six years of my career as an author, most of my book sales occurred at live conferences (see photo) I attended as a vendor. (Now, Kindle sales make up 80 percent of my writing income). I typically attend four to five conferences a year. I normally sell anywhere from 30 to 100 books per conference (depending on the length and attendance of the conference.)

The goal of any author is to find those readers who will not only buy your first book, but will keep coming back for your future books. Attending conferences is a great way to have interested readers coming back for more.

For example, I have attended the Journey to the Father Youth Conference as a vendor every summer since 2005. The JTTF attendees, workers and volunteers know me and most importantly, there are many at this conference who will not only buy anything I write, they will buy excess copies.

Another approach to personal marketing is to always reply to a comment on your blog, on Facebook and/or Twitter. This develops a rapport with your readers and you can also make a lot of great friends too!

One last approach to personal marketing is to participate in Skype or teleconference calls with book clubs. This is a fairly new (and ideal) way to connect with many readers at once.

The personal approach to marketing can help to promote your books to those readers who will return time and again to purchase your books.

copyright 2011 Ellen Gable Hrkach

Ellen Gable Hrkach is the vice president of the Catholic Writers Guild. She is the award-winning author of In Name Only, a Catholic historical romance and now an Amazon Kindle bestseller (top 100 Religious Fiction). Her new book is Stealing Jenny, which is a contemporary pro-life suspense novel. She can be found blogging at Plot Line and Sinker. She and her husband and five sons live in Pakenham, ON Canada.