Internet Promotion

By Rebecca Talley

I also attended the LDStorymakers Conference. I enjoyed a class taught by Tristi Pinkston and Candace Salima on Internet Promotion.

They taught us that blogs are important tools to establish a web presence. It isn't enough to maintain a personal blog, we must also visit other blogs to establish blog relationships and build a readership. We must always remember to use common courtesy when we post on someone's blog and not use it as a promotional opportunity, but rather use it to establish friendships and mutual respect.

We also learned about podcasting and how doing a regular podcast can help book sales. Candace Salima interviews different people for her podcast and taught us how to easily download the software needed to produce a podcast. She's also offered to help people set up a podcast.

We were shown the future of book blurbs--book trailers. A new company is producing what they call Book Screeners which is a comparable to a movie trailer, except it is for books. They showed us what they produced for James Dashner's book, "The 13th Reality" and for Candace's book, "Forged by the Refiner's Fire." It's quite an interesting concept.

It looks as though the Internet will become even more important in book promotion.