Today we have a collection of great ideas from around the web to help you market your self-published book.

Here are some of the best recent thoughts from around the web on marketing self-published books to help you plan your marketing for the year.

You have probably seen every marketing, promotional and sales trick in the book in the run up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As an author, particular a self-publishing author, you may be asking yourself, how can I make my campaign to sell my book stand out in the blizzard of marketing messages? Here are ten great tips from around the web to help you do just that.

Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) are a routine part of a traditional publisher’s process for launching a book. The should be something you use in getting your self-published book off to a good start as well. The idea of an ARC is to get a copy of your book into the hands of opinion makers – reviewers, media contacts, influencers – prior to the launch of your book. These readers can help create a buzz about your book as it is becoming available.

Looking for a literary agent for your book? The conventional route involves creating a list of agents who handle books like yours and contacting them. You can look in the acknowledgements of recently published books comparable to yours. Then use Jeff Herman’s Guide to Publishers, Editors and Literary Agents or The Writer’s Market to learn more about them and their submission guidelines. We described the whole process in our post How Do I Find a Literary Agent? Let’s look at some online tools you might want to add to your agent search toolbox.

Your book is written and on its way to the printer. What’s next? You need to get people talking about it. A recent study by the Keller Fay Group, a marketing consulting firm, titled Finally Proof That Word of Mouth Isn’t Just Nice to Have But Drives Measurable ROI, reports that word of mouth is responsible for as many as 54% of buying decisions. So let’s look at some tools to help you create a buzz about your book.

I was drinking my coffee this morning and perusing the Times Book Review. Flipping to page seven, I found a full page ad titled Brilliant books for your bookshelf! Normally I skip over the ads, but as I did some logos caught my eye – AuthorHouse, Trafford, and iUniverse. Going back a page I saw Xlibris with a full page under Fresh Ideas. Unforgettable Stories. Wow! Penguin’s new subsidiary Author Solutions out there at work for “self-publishing” authors. Having followed the tactics of Author Solutions (which includes imprints for AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris, Trafford and several others), I was interested in what I saw. A quick look at the Author House site indicated that the authors whose books had appeared paid $5,899 for the New York Times Media Marketing Package. What does that buy?

Anyone offering making suggestions to authors about how to sell their books includes the advice to exhibit at trade shows and book festivals. That can be a great idea. Or not. Nancy and I have attended two this year, the Tucson Book Festival and the L.A. Times Book Festival, and we’re gearing up for the Sonoma County Book Festival , Wordstock in Portland, Oregon this weekend and the Miami Book Fair International in November. We really enjoy the events and meet a lot of wonderful people, many of whom eventually become Stories To Tell clients. At the same time we have the opportunity to observe a wide variety of authors who are on hand to sell their books. The results appear to be all across the spectrum. Our advice to authors is simple: If you are going to market your book at events, do it right. Here’s how.

For self-publishing authors word of mouth is the most powerful tool in building an audience. That’s no news to anyone. Nor is it any surprise that positive reviews online are the key to triggering that positive buzz. What authors are looking for is a way to make sure that they have those positive reviewers to get the ball rolling. Many are shy about asking people to review their books in the wake of the pay for positive reviews controversy exposed in the articles like the N.Y Times piece The Best Reviews Money Can Buy. But the mistrust created by the exposure of this practice didn’t make positive reviews any less important to an author’s sales. So let’s look at some ethical ways to obtain positive reviews:

You sit down to plan how you will market your book. (Last week’s post 7 Things You’ll Need For Your Marketing Plan discussed some things you’ll want to have ready when you do.) It’s likely that one of your first thoughts is that this is a big job, maybe too big for one person. A lot of authors who have never marketed a book think about hiring a publicist or a book marketer to do it for them. That can be expensive. Let’s look instead at how you can tap your personal network to help you create a buzz about your book.

“All writers think of what they do as an art,” said novelist Barry Eisler. “Smart writers understand that writing is also a business. Really smart writers see themselves also as entrepreneurs.” That means you need to approach your book as a business person would. You have a product to sell – your book. How will you get the maximum number of potential readers to buy it? That will take some thoughtful planning. You’ll need a good marketing plan for your book. Today we’ll focus on seven things you should think about before you formulate your plan. (Creating the plan itself will be next Monday’s post.) Several of the things we’ll cover today are resources you’ll need to create and use as you put your plan into action.

Bookstores are disappearing for two: they can compete with Amazon.com, and print books are being replaced by ebooks. These two threads are part of almost any discussion of book publishing and the book business. However, recent trends suggest that both beliefs may be wrong. Kristine Rusch in an excellent post on her blog The Business Rusch, describes The Changing Playing Field. First, she finds that the bookstores, rather than dying are experiencing a resurgence. She cites a recent report in National Real Estate Investor titled Brick and Mortar Book Sellers Gained Shopper Traffic in the First Three Months of 2013 which says: In spite of the intense competition from digital book sellers, bricks-and-mortar bookstores were among the top gaining categories in shopper traffic in the first three months of the year, behind financial planning shops and bars. Bookstores as a group experienced a 27 percent increase in shopper visits during the period and moved up six spots in Placed Insights’ ranking, to number 46. Barnes & Noble in particular moved up eight spots on the list of the most visited stores in the U.S., to number 17.

If your self-published book is going to be a commercial success, one of the things it needs to be is eye-catching. That begins with a great cover. Chip Kidd, of Alfred A. Knopf, who designed the iconic cover for Jurassic Park among other bestsellers, explained the goal of a book cover in a recent TED Talk. He said, “I want you to look at the author’s book and say, ‘Wow! I need to read that.’” “It’s a billboard,” said Peter Mendelsund, Kid’s colleague at Knopf who designed the cover for the Stieg Larsson novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels. “You hope yours shouts the loudest or entices the most intriguing way."...Making sure that title is eye-catching title as well as readable is essential. Author’s often struggle with that. Would you read a novel titled Trimalchio in West Egg? That’s what F. Scott Fitzgerald titled his third novel until his editor Maxwell Perkins convinced him The Great Gatsby might work better.

Do you want to promote your book to a huge audience for free? Of course you do! The Google Books Partner Program allows authors and publishers to do just. You send Google your title or upload a PDF of your book and it will be included in the Google index for free. Google Books will then match the content in your book with user searches. This is the same sort of process uses in delivering personalized search results or targeted ads with Google Ad Words. When Google Books displays your book, it does so for a targeted audience which will be most likely to buy it. Here’s a quick summary of how the process works.