The odds of selling

Wellll....

Promotion is an important part of marketing a book. After all, if no one knows about your book no one will be able to buy it. Your analogy about a pebble is a good one. Amazon carries more than 32 million titles, so you need to do something to make your book noticeable among the crowd. Reviews are a really good way to get your book known. And the reviewers themselves don't necessarily need to have big names...just who they write their reviews for.

Something that is almost as good as a glowing review are blurbs from well-known people. These don't need to be more than just a sentence or two (since a lot of people might balk at the thought of writing an entire review). These people don't have to be super-stars, just people whose opinions would matter in the subject that the book is about. For instance, a Harvard law professor saying something nice about a crime novel or botanist with Greenpeace waxing poetic over a book about the environment. In this case, it's their association that would be important. So maybe the easiest thing to do would be to get your book into the hands of people whose credentials or associations would be meaningful to potential readers rather than their names themselves. These blurbs would look great on the book's Amazon page, as well as on the cover of the book itself.

It's entirely possible that the reader would be impressed enough with your book to mention it on their own website, or via whatever social media they might prefer.

In fact, there may be instances where no one's name is attached at all. Instead, an organization posts a review or notice of your book on its website.

Ron is giving you good advice. The back cover of a print book can be used for not only an author's blurb about the book but any blurbs by others. The same thing can go into the promotional copy for the ebook and print version.

You could always steer someone working for a local paper to the book.

That's actually a good idea, Ron. And it inspired me; my friend, Lesley, had mentioned she has ten thousand Twitter followers. I will ask her to post. It's something to start. Thank you.

Husley, does Amazon Prime promote for you or just offer free shipping to buyers so they are motivated to buy? That would be amazing if Prime offered something like that. Promote my books for me. For $7.99 a month.

When anyone sends a book out into the world they are a publisher. Publishing a book doesn't end with just getting one written or getting one printed. It also means promoting, advertising and marketing the book. People need to be aware of your book's existence, they need to know that it is there. Otherwise, why not just keep it at home to occasionally read to yourself?

Sure, it's a scary thing! No one can predict what the reaction to a book will be. I have had great reviews (hoorah! hoorah!) and I have had scathing ones (boo) and I have had reviews that I thought were unfair or mistaken (grumble grumble). But that's the chance you take. And even a bad review doesn't mean you are a bad writer. The person reading your book might not have liked it for a dozen different reasons, none of which have anything to do with the quality of the writing. Someone who is not into lesbian vampire romances may not find much to like in Olga, Blood Slut of the Gestapo, but that might be the reviewer's prejudices getting in the way, not the author's abilities. Besides, any reviewer worth their salt will explain why they don't like a book or where they think it went wrong. That sort of thing is really useful. Even if you don't agree with what they say, they at least have given you something to think about. And if you do agree, then you know how to make your next book better. The main thing is to have a thick skin about reviews and to not take them personally. Besides, even though some of my books have received bad reviews, not all of them were bad. I cling to those.

Blurbs are great! While someone may hesitate taking the time to write a full-fledged review of your book, they may be perfectly willing to give you a pithy sentence or two that you can use on the front or back cover. I've done this a squillion times and while I have no way of judging the actual effect the blurbs may have had on sales, they are certainly gratifying to me, at any rate. A couple of the ones I have gotten are even general enough that I have used them on more than one book!

Something else that might be worth thinking about is getting someone with a recognizable name (ideally associated with the subject of the book) to write an introduction This can be as short as just a few sentences---again, something that may take only a few minutes to accomplish. But it lets you get this person's name onto the cover of your book: "Introduction by Leslie J. Famousperson." This, too, is something I've managed to do a few times. While, again, I don't know how it may have directly affected sales it is something often mentioned by reviewers and I think it does add a cachet of respectability, a sort of seal of approval. The potential reader thinks, "I have never heard of this writer before but Leslie J. Famousperson did write the introduction..." And the writer of the introduction need not even necessarily have an immediately recognizable name. Their association with a company or institution may be enough. For instance, your book might be about, oh, the discovery of aliens on another planet. Your book might have an introduction by Waldo M. Slimp of Harvard Observatory. No one may have ever heard of Prof. Slimp, but they will have heard of Harvard.

For instance, a few nice words from a respected clergyman or a clergyman associated with well-known church (oh, I dunno, something like someone from Notre-Dame Basilica, Snowdon or St. John's) could do no harm to What Would Jesus Do?