As a book author, just reading the statistics on the sheer number of books published over the past few years illustrates the competition you face. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd, particularly if you’re the author of a midlist book whose publisher offers little promotion for your title. If you self-published, the entire promotional effort is up to you. This means that today’s authors must self-promote to ensure the success of their books.

One of the easiest, most lucrative ways to promote your book is through an online book promotion campaign. There are many reasons why online book promotion makes so much sense, but here are the three most important:

1. Online Book Promotion Reaches a Worldwide Audience

One of the major advantages of online book promotion is that its reach is worldwide. If you’re lucky, a signing in a local bookstore could attract 20 people. An online campaign has the potential of reaching anyone with an Internet connection. More than one billion people worldwide use the Internet and over 200 million of them have bought a book online. Many more have learned about a book online and purchased it in a local store.

So you’ve been building your platform, and now it’s time to use it. You’ve got a book deal. You’re going to be published. Now what?

There are authors who hire expensive publicists to ensure word gets out about their books—and there are authors who never spend a dime and get the same amount of publicity. There are authors who hire top-notch design firms to build $5,000 websites to entice readers—and there are authors who use free templates, put up rudimentary sites and get the same number of visitors. There are authors who blog and post on Twitter for hours every day (eating into their precious writing time, I might add)—and others who think Twitter is something Tweety Bird does. And in both sets you’ll find bestsellers and modest sellers.

I could go on and on, but I think I’ve proved my point: There’s no one solution to being a successful author. No one trick. No one effort guaranteed to work. The bad news is even if you do everything possible and spend $150,000 of your own money, you still can’t guarantee success. (And I know an author who did just that last year, and the book didn’t sell more than 5,000 copies.)

As an author with a book to sell, I decided early on to learn as much as I could about the marketing aspect of the writing and publishing business that most authors know so little about. After all, we like writing and that is what we do. If we liked marketing, we would have gotten into that line of work, right? Well, the truth is that you may have written an incredible book, but no one will know about it and will not buy it unless you take steps to get the word out.

Whether your book was published in the traditional way or is self-published, it is your baby and no one other than you can speak as effectively regarding all aspects of it. No one will know as much or will be as passionate about it than you are. Luckily, there are relatively simple things you can do to publicize your work yourself. Furthermore, with technology being what it is and continually evolving, authors have more resources than ever at their disposal. Below are just six of the resources available to assist you:

1. Get a Website: In this day and age, it is important to establish an internet presence with a website or blog. In this medium, content is king. Utilizing your website to provide information about your book and area of expertise will help you to more quickly and easily connect with your audience.

“If you really want your book to fly, you need to know that the reality of the publishing business is that publishers print and distribute,” says David Chilton, author of The Wealthy Barber. “The author has to be willing to promote the book, because no one else will.”

1. Create a brand name. Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen is The Adventurous Writer (that’s me!). Jack Canfield is Chicken Soup for the Soul. What’s your handle, your shtick, your brand name? Pick something that appeals to you and projects the image you want for your writing career or company.

2. Repeat yourself. “Repetition is key to creating a brand names,” writes Kremer in 1001 Ways to Market Your Books. “If you decide to try to establish your company name as a brand name, repeat it in all your ads and feature it on the covers of all your books.”

You might already know that the word blog is a slang term created by combining the words web and log. In other words, a blog is an online journal. Sounds pretty personal, doesn’t it? Well, that is what they were designed to be—it’s why people read them!

If you’re an author and don’t have a blog, you’re missing out on the opportunity to reach national or international audiences with the press of a button. Your blog is perhaps the most prolific way to establish yourself, defining who you are to your growing audience.

Many blogging sites offer the most colorful variety of design themes and content you’d ever dream of, ranging from business and sports to shopping and style to career and relationships. Amateur bloggers often share simple reflections on their everyday experiences in standard posts. But professionals like you write blogs that are more like entertaining essays or relevant articles – with the understanding that blogging the smart way can lead to big business!

Walking in my neighbourhood, I slow down to read an intriguing poster glued to a telephone pole. I often scan the clamour of posters as I walk: You see interesting stuff there, particularly the names of visiting musicians you might want to see, or local announcements. This poster looks like a warning: It has a scary command on it, something about all childless women over the age of 50 having to report to a medical unit. Turns out it’s an ad for a science-fiction book, a dystopian Swedish novel called The Unit .

Huh, I think, clever. I may not read this new novel, but now I have heard of it. (And now, so have you.) I don’t read a lot of science fiction, nor do I virtually frequent blogs and news sites on the subject, so this is probably the only way I would ever have heard about this book.

The question of how to market books – particularly fiction books, which few people want to read – is one of the most hotly discussed in publishing. And it is the subject on which the most grandiose claims and predictions are made about the value of online social networking and blogging. The party line – now religiously repeated by the business people one is forced to sit next to at dinner parties, the kind of people who very confidently know everything – is that conventional advertising, such as posters, is a waste of money. Book reviews are a waste of time too, as nobody is going to read newspapers any more.