The first thing you need to promote your book is a
website. There is no substitute for this, because most of your marketing
will be accomplished via the internet. By far the best way to accomplish
this is to buy your own domain name and maintain the website yourself using
specialist software. If you are not computer literate, learning how to use
the software is going to be a significant task, but there really is no
substitute for doing all of this yourself. If you need to refer every edit
of the website to a webmaster, tasks in sections 4 and 5 will be virtually
impossible.
It is possible to do everything suggested below using a
free site, but it is unlikely that you will be indexed or ranked as
thoroughly if you use a free resource. This is because you will be
registered as a sub-domain, rather than your own domain name. For instance,
I registered my own domain name and the url looks like this:
http://www.philipspires.co.uk. I also have a free site on Lycos.co.uk
and its url looks like this:
http://www.members.lycos.co.uk/philipspires/. If you see a / character
in the body of the address, it’s a sub-domain, and many search engines
refuse to index such sites, because they are really lower level pages of
someone else’s domain.
Software
The best known web creation packages are Dreamweaver
and Frontpage. You will have to buy these and learn how to use them by
working through a tutorial. If you are used to word processing or, even
better, desk top publishing, then you will find these packages easy to pick
up.
It is possible to get free web design software. Type
free web software or free web design software into a search engine and
follow some of the links. I cannot recommend anything, but it does exist.
Word – html
Web pages and indeed whole sites can be created in Word
by formatting the text and then saving it in html format by choosing the Web
Page option from the document type in the Save As.. command. It works and it
can be effective, but in general you will spend a long time formatting the
pages and still find that you cannot really control their appearance. Also,
it will generally take much longer to do things in Word than in specially
designed software.
Autobuild sites
Try typing “free autobuild web page” into a search
engine and examine some of the links. I cannot recommend any of them,
however. If you sign up for a Yahoo Geocities site there are tools that
allow you to build pages directly on your site. Other free websites offer
similar arrangements. Using these free systems, however, will make the steps
outlined in 3, 4 and 5 below very difficult and in some cases impossible. It
is also worth remembering the point about subdomains in the next section.
I have indicated at the start of each section roughly
how long it might take. Please do not regard these sections as in any way
representing equal amounts of time or work.
What I have not done, except in a few areas where I
have included examples, is try to recommend particular websites, hosting
packages, directories, etc. In most cases I have indicated how to search for
such resources, but I will leave it to you, the author, to choose which
particular sites and resources to use. Clearly, books from different genres
need slightly different approaches and different focuses for their
promotion, so the detail will always be your own choice. In certain cases
the resources are so important and so general that I have referred to
particular products, such as Web CEO
