Marketing 101: How NOT to Promote Your Novel

Things that every self-promoting writer – myself included – will do well to remember.

So, you’ve completed your first novel. Now what? Publish it, duh. Did you really spend three years and countless hours creating this thing just to keep it to yourself. No. You want to share it and hopefully make a little money as well.

So, how do you promote a new novel? Do you spam your followers on social media? Pay for expensive ads? Write the title of your novel in the sky?

Not unless you want to turn off readers. Of course you don’t.

Here is a list of things NOT to do when promoting your book:

1. Tweet ads and links to your novel incessantly (on the hour every hour). Author platforms are for building communities and for sharing content, not for spamming.

2. Redirect every conversation (on WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, ect.) to your novel. Interaction with other bloggers and writers should be genuine, otherwise you will lose credibility…

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