Mailing lists

Creating a mailing list goes hand in hand with telling people you are writing novel. I have been amazed at the number of people who have asked to read my book when I've finished and have given me their email so I could send it to them.

This included people I met:

* at work
* on the Internet through different groups
* at parties and over dinner
* at workshops

All you need to do to get started is to create a group in the Address Book of your email application.

Mailing lists are also useful if you decide to go down the Newsletter path later on. You have a ready made audience.

Now I'm not dumb enough to think that every person that has given me their email really wants me to send them my book to read, but hey you've got to start somewhere.

Free promotion tips

You don't have to spend money to find good ideas for promoting your novel. You can find plenty of web sites, blogs and newsletters about book promotion published by public relations and marketing professionals, and published authors on the Internet.

You can visit these sites individually, or you can use a blog tracking site such as Technorati or a social bookmarking site like del.icio.us to link to and access your favourite sites from one spot.

To get newsletters, all you need to do is to subscribe and they are generally mailed to you periodically.

The most useful promotion tips for the unpublished writer I have found are at:

Book Promotion Tips
Inspired Author

Promotion for the unpublished

I'm stuck. I haven't been able to write for the last two weeks. So rather than waste my time watching Oprah, Dr Phil or Star Trek, I've been working on the promotion side of my writing.

This lead me to the question:

If you're an unpublished writer, when do you start using each of the promotion tools to promote yourself and your book?

After all I don't want to rush out and spend a whole lot of time and money promoting something that doesn't actually exist yet. Well in its finished form.

I read somewhere (don't ask me where, I've read so much about this topic over the past year, I really can't remember) that a writer should start promoting their book 2 years before they plan on sending it a publisher.

I'm a least 18 months away from a finished product, so I've come up with a list of promotion activities that are easy for the unpublished writer to do that are free.

* Read blogs and subscribe to newsletters that give free promotion tips
* Start a blog about your book
* Create your own web site
* Create a mini movie
* Start building a mailing list
* Put the URL to your blog and web site in your email signature

Got any more ideas? Let me know.

Good luck.