selling my book

When you say that you have published, I'm assuming that you mean that it is self-published. If you have a publishing house behind you, they help to promote the book. Give some copies to bloggers who write book reviews. Obviously, make sure that the bloggers are ones who have a reasonable following. If the book is any good, they will tell their followers. Of course, this approach could work against you if the book really isn't as wonderful as you think it is. Another approach is to give a free copy to your local newspaper to get a review if they do such things. Or you can approach them about doing a story on "local author publishes first book." I will say, though, that it doesn't sound like writing is your passion. If you go to the work of putting together and publishing a book, don't you then want to get it into people's hands? Instead, you are saying that you're just looking to "sell a few" (presumably, to break even on the costs of paying to be self-published) and will then just leave it to Amazon--where the book will languish as #1,000,002 amongst the site's numerous books. If you are serious about being an author, you are looking to build yourself up as such. You want a mass following. You will have your name out there as Person X, author, on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Well if you have an ebook do everything online. Yes it is harder cause you have to promote yourself, but that is what people do every single day. You can even make a facebook fan page in honor of your books and do it that way as well. I am writing my book now and using lulu it will be an ebook for now and later may be a hardcover book, but I also do music and yeah you have to promote yourself especially if there is no one else behind you. Good Luck. Oh and you can use bloggers like me to help as well with promoting and getting your book out there. :)

If you have a Twitter account, try posting there. Not just once, but at different times of the day for a week or two. Do the same for Facebook. Use any forums or groups that you belong to that will allow that sort of posting or links in signatures. Put a link in your email signature. Put up a special page on your website for just that book. Link to that page from everywhere you can. Tell everyone you talk to about it, both online and off. Start a blog and talk about it and other books, linking to it. Join author's groups and get ideas from them.

Well, with the self-published children ebook that me and a friend recently created (Trutle Monkey) and published though Smashwords, we started a fanpage just a few days after we decided to do the project. Basically, what we could afford was free. So she did the daily TM status updates (typically something crazy that her daughter said or did that she monkeyified), and I posted pictures of the artwork as I did them. (Yes, I ended up doing the artwork, and not the writing--strange, isn't it?) I also blogged about it some on a couple of the blogs that I maintain. Whether or not, this will help us sell more copies is something that we will have to wait and see, but at least we knew that we were producing stuff that people showed some interest in (based on comments and shares on FB).

Hello ecaron, I have published several books, and every time the publisher/editor promoted and distributed the book. Does your editor has no circuit to distribute your book or are you your own editor ? What you need is more an independent distributor than a promotion, because the promotion of a book costs often more than the printing. However, if a lot of books are returned and not sold, you will earn very little or nothing. 8 copies sold are probably not enough to decide a distributor to take your book. If you are living in a large town/city, can I suggest you to offer your book to booksellers ? They generally easily accept to take books for 3 or 6 months and to pay what they have sold less their profit -- usually 30% of the global price in my country -- after this period. Doing this you will be able to know if your book is successful and if it is, you will be able to find a distributor by showing him the amount of your sales.

Have you tried www.lulu.com and sites like that? It's free and you can get a isbn number and they can sell through amazon and other booksellers. I believe lulu actually promotes to those sites as well. I just wrote a small book and put it up on lulu, and it's free. You can make a blog about it on tumblr. Hope this helps you. good Luck1 also, I am an illustrator and still in college, so if you need help illustrating a childrens book, let me know!

I really don't have idea on publishing a book. However, I would like to congratulate you for having written a book. Tha's a good job. Good luck on its publishing.

To sell the books need a media. Now it so easy to do it and cheap. By using internet, sites, free advertsing, etc. will help increasing the selling. For example, facebook and twitter, just put your texts and images on them. Do it many times in many social media. You will get advantages by selling books.