book review: Red Hot Internet Publicity: An Insider’s Guide to Marketing Your Book on the Internet

RED HOT INTERNET PUBLICITY: An Insider’s Guide to Promoting Your Book on the Internet

by Penny C. Sansevieri
Cosimo Books; Revised edition (Sept 2009)
ISBN-10: 1605207241, ISBN-13: 978-1605207247

Source: Author-donated copy for an unbiased review.

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Hundreds of thousands of books are published each year. To get readers to pick up your book, you have to help it stand out. More and more, book promotion is becoming an important part of the writer’s job. I have been reading about and researching author methods of book promotion for at least ten years–as long as I’ve been seriously trying to get published–because I don’t want my books to just disappear off the shelves after they’re published.

So I read Penny C. Sansevieri’s RED HOT INTERNET PUBLICITY: An Insider’s Guide to Promoting Your Book on the Internet with interest. Authors often have limited incomes, and their book promotion budgets can be pretty small. But there is a lot that authors can do online, mostly for free, to help promote their books. Sansevieri covers–in clear, easy-to-understand language and steps–extensive ways that authors can promote their books online, from the basic but very important step of having an author website, and actually getting your website out there (what’s the point of having a website if no one visits it?), to email, blogs, podcasting, social networking (including Twitter), virtual book events, and more.

I love Sansevieri’s conversational tone, her clear way of explaining things so that nothing sounds too hard, and her extensive knowledge about tools that can help authors promote their books. I think online book promotion is very important in getting your book out there.

If you don’t know anything about websites or blogging or social networking, Sansevieri will help guide you through the process. But even if you know tons about it, you’re sure to find more that you didn’t know about and that you’ll find useful. I did. There is a wealth of truly useful information here, and Sansevieri goes into depth and explores layers that other books miss out on. This book is worth the purchase price and more!

I highly recommend this book to every author and book publicist.

January 26th, 2010