After three novels and many short stories that failed to make me the wealthy writer, I set out to learn about marketing. Hiring a firm to do PR for the novel is out of the question for me and I suspect most of us, but buying pieces of the marketing is not. Some of what I found is below.

I started by, of course, googling the idea on Firefox to check the Alexa rating of the various offerings. For those who don’t know, lower is better and means more visitors to the site.

AskDavid.com Alexa rank 95,082.A free service for listing your books and promoting them on twitter. . The site starts with 5 free tweets and a further 30 are $10 dollars, and expands the reach of your own twitter account, at least for me.

1888PressRelease  Alexa rank 18,430. I’ve used this one twice at the 50$ level. It performs as advertised. They vet your release and send it out when you want. Many levels of distribution including Free.

Book Buzzr Alexa rank 130,343. I set up my free site on BookBuzzr this weekend. It includes a number of goodies including a flip-book feature for the my page on their site as well as on my website. Check that out at virginiawinters.ca. I haven’t added a subscription as yet but I may when my new book, The Child on the Terrace is released.

Books go Social Alexa Rank 569,998. No Motive for Murder is listed on this site(for a fee). The Facebook group is active and after the first book, new ones can be added for $39. Owner Lawrence O’Bryan tells me there are more than 300,000 followers now. He’d like three reviews and then he will promote on the site. A good site to look for books from indie authors.

Enchanted Book Promotion Alexa rank 910,437. This site sets up blog tours, release parties(on-line), writes press releases, develops full marketing plans: all for different fees. One author I contacted said that he had signed up at the Princess level($100) and the site performed as advertised. He didn’t know if it increased sales or not. Levels start at $29 and go up from there with additional tour stops or services at increasing cost.

If you have any other sites, strategies or comments, I’d love to hear from you.