Once upon a time, authors thought all they had to do was write a book and readers would magically find it. Don't we wish that was true?

For those who love to be contrary, yes, we could purchase a bunch of copies of our books and hand them out to people and then they would find our books.

When that's not the case, we must promote our books. Writers with publishing houses aren't exempt from this either. The harder authors work with their publishing house, the more results they will see.

Indie authors must be their own publicists, marketers, and sales teams. They have to learn their market, promote their books, and even determine sales methods and pricing.

This blog discusses the need for free promotions. It begins with providing free Advance Reader Copies of your book so readers may write reviews for your book and have those ready upon publication of your book (for those of you who are new to this--look up ARCs on Goodreads and the Goodreads Giveaways, which allow you to provide ARCs to up to 100 readers).

I did a Goodreads Giveaway and 249 people signed up to get a copy of my ebook. 100 won and Goodreads handled the distribution. It's because of ARCs that I have reviews for my new release before a month has passed. My latest book Birth Right: Galak's Rising is 380 pages long, so it takes some time to read.

The next free promotion for authors is possible with either giveaways through various sites or by becoming a member of KDP Select, which gives you the perks of having some days you can offer your book for free and also some days you can offer it for less than $1.99, I believe.

For my first published book, GoldenHeart: How to Love Humanity, I didn't go with KDP Select because I didn't understand it. Giving away a book for free seemed like crazy business to me. Now that I see how things worked for that book, I realize that free books help you find writers and get reviews, both of which an author needs.

To begin with, most of my ebooks were sold through Amazon, so joining KDP Select--which only allows me to sell my ebook via Amazon--isn't cutting away business for my ebook. In the meantime, it doesn't restrict your print books, just the digital ones.

This weekend, I'm offering Birth Right for free some days and for 99 cents other days and am happy to do so. I'm building a readership for a series, so it's important to develop a ground base of readers for the Birth Right Trilogy.

You can read in authors' comments in the marketing and promotion boards about how they use free books to boost the sales of their series. Once they have written subsequent books, offering the first book for free results in residual sales of the other books.

Each person must choose his or her path, but this time, I chose KDP Select. It will last for 90 days, at which time I decide to continue or not.

Besides giving away books, there are many other options for getting the word out about yours. I'll discuss those in future blog entries.

Birth Right: Galak's Rising

GoldenHeart: How to Love Humanity