Marketing for Writers – Book Reviews Part 2

More book reviews! See yesterday’s post for the previous list.

12 Strategies for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by Jeff Finkelstein

FREE!

On Twitter, folks were chatting about how important this is for authors. Apparently, we all needed to stop what we were doing, download this book from Smashwords and read it.

So I did. And I gotta tell you, I’m even more confused. I feel like an idiot admitting this, but I seriously don’t get it. Perhaps this really is important. Lots of folks keep saying it is. Yet, I still don’t understand what I’m supposed to be doing beyond blog more and use tags. Perhaps I’m trying to make this a lot more complicated than it needs to be? Perhaps this guide is making it more complicated? Who knows?

Apparently, if you understand what SEO and agree that it’s the most important thing you should be doing as an author, this is the guide. For me, I’ll stick with using marketing tools that I understand.

20 No-Cost Marketing Ideas By Keith Monaghan

FREE!

First, the formatting is messed up on the pdf version, so I’m really happy that I didn’t pay for it. It’s annoying to read due to this issue, but at least it’s short and, again, free. (I find it hard to complain about free stuff).

This book isn’t really geared towards authors, however you can grab a few idea nuggets from it. It’s a good choice for people who want to see an overview of ideas and are web-savvy enough to go out and figure out how to do them (i.e. your own podcast).

There was nothing earth-shattering in this. However, it’s free, so worth reading to make sure that you haven’t missed anything that could work for you.

The Savvy Book Marketer’s Guide to Successful Social Marketing by Dana Lynn Smith

$24 USD for the ebook copy (ouch)

I doubt there could be a worse fit of a reader and a book than this book and me.  The majority of the book was dedicated to screen shots of walking the reader through setting up a Facebook account, Twitter account, etc. Having had all of that done (I’ve had a Facebook account for several years), it was quite a waste.

However, I would recommend this book for someone who is completely and utterly new to the world of internal social networking. It assumes that you have no knowledge whatsoever, which is what some people need. For me, it was definitely not worth the money.

Smashwords Book Marketing Guide by Mark Coker

Free!

Stop reading my blog. Go download the book.

Ok, back? This is an extremely useful guide for e-published authors. In fact, I’d argue that it’s the only proper guide out there so far, which is a rather sad statement.

It doesn’t promise millions of dollars in sales (unlike many of the other marketing books out there, I might add). Instead, it gives several ideas on how to get started. A must for fiction authors, especially those who are solely e-published.

Tomorrow? Blogs and folks to follow!