Free Marketing Idea for Fiction Novels

Don't leave it up to chance

So you've written a novel and you've went through the process of self publishing.  You've spent the past months or even years racking your brain, pulling your hair out, and pacing the floor trying to put together all of the different elements together and make them work in harmony so that people will actually want to read what you've written.  The question now is, "how do I get people to want to read it?"

It's a good question that many Indies ask, and there are a lot of opinions on the subject.  I've researched the topic myself, and I think that the answers that are out there, for the most part, are spot on.  I do, however, think that there is a choice that isn't being talked about much.  For some reason there is one idea that looks like its been left under the rug like a forgotten dust bunny.

I've seen many blogs, articles, and forum posts that talk about all of the traditional methods of marketing.  They cover everything from Facebook and Twitter, to reviews, to calling up your dear old grandma to let her know that you are now a published author.  These articles tell you many different ways to let people know that your book is out there and that it is good.  I won't suggest to anybody not to follow the traditional ways of marketing.

What I will suggest could also be considered a traditional marketing technique.  I'm not going to try to convince you that I have reinvented the wheel.  I haven't.  All I'm suggesting is that I don't see anyone else telling you about it as a marketing tool.

What is that idea you ask?

Short story sites!

There are quite a few of them out there that are good.  I'm not going to tell you which ones to choose.  Do a search, check a few out, and see which ones are the best fit for you and your stories.

Here's what I did.  After a few years of fine tuning my skills by writing fiction that wasn't very good I finally decided that my talent had improved enough that I might just be a good enough writer to pull off a novel.  The title of the novel is Twinfinity: Nethermore.  I finished the novel, self pubbed through Createspace, and then was met with the challenge of how to get the word out.

I could see right away that if I did nothing that nobody would ever know that I had even published a book.  I saw that I could browse for hours on end and never ...  I repeat NEVER ... find my title by chance.  The only way that I would ever have any chance of finding it is if I typed in the title of my work.  Doing that would bring it up, but other than that my title was buried beneath the rubble so deep that none of the millions of book buyers out there would ever find it.  I needed a way to market my work.

The question became how do I find a cheap, or better yet, free way to get the word out?  What I chose to do right away was to write a short prequel to my novel.  I did that and entitled it Twinfinity: The Arena.  Then I chose to find a good place to publish it.  Any place that I felt it would get reads was good enough for me.  I found one, submitted it, and presto!  

Within a few short hours I had hundreds of people sampling my writing ability.  The bonus to that was I also received, free of charge, an author page where I could tell people a little about who I was.  On top of that I was also able to suggest to those that read that I also had a novel out there with the same characters.

I'm not going to try and convince anyone that I'm tearing Amazon up, or that I'm breaking sales records.  What I am suggesting is that I went from selling zero copies per day to selling copies, and that my work seems to be building momentum as I continue to submit more installments to the sites.  I am not just marketing to people.  I am marketing to readers and I am giving them free samples of my work so they can see for themselves that I write what they like to read.