This post by Saundra Mitchell originally appeared on her Making Stuff Up For A Living blog on 1/13/14.
So, I’m reading this absurd article on all the things you need to spend money on to market your own book. Oh noz, you have to pay a zillion dollars for a website, for a mailing list, for copy and editing for your website, wtf? I’m not even going to link to article because, seriously, WTF?
Here’s the deal. If you’re willing to put the time in yourself, you can do almost all of your book marketing for free. It may be worth it to you to pay for someone else to do everything- and if you’re in a position to do that, awesome! Go for it! But if you’re not, or if you’d prefer to have strict control over everything, here’s a brief guide to doing it yourself.
Blog/Website: More and more people are using Blog software to host their entire websites. WordPress is fantastically flexible, free and your URL can be an easily memorable yourname.wordpress.com. WordPress has about a zillion free themes so you can customize like whoa, and because it’s an integrated service, it shares your links on other blogs like yours to drive traffic. FOR FREE.
Blogger is another free host and software package that’s easy to use and customize for your needs. And you know what drives even more traffic to websites? Twitter. ALSO FREE.
Graphics: Graphics for your website, your bookmarks, your postcards whatnot- you can create them yourself for free, from the bottom up. Download a copy of GIMP image manipulation software, and play with it.
Click here to read the full article on Making Stuff Up For A Living.