Get your book noticed!
Wouldn’t it great if you could just write your book, put it up on some online stores and people would find it easily? Yes, it would. But we all know that isn’t the case. There has to be a proactive, time-consuming marketing plan in place to help you get noticed amongst all the millions of books out there already and all the new ones being written every day.
One tool we like and use in our marketing toolbox is Scribd. Scribd claims to be “The World’s Largest Online Library.” I’m not 100% sure that’s accurate but you’d be hard pressed not to find something of value in any topic you search for, a lot of times for free. Authors put up books, excel worksheets, recipes, how-to guides, presentations, and more.
While a lot of authors put up their work for free, they can also charge for it – just another source of revenue for your book. According to Scribd, an author would receive 80% of the revenue.
We use Scribd for several main reasons.
- To increase awareness of our books, we upload an excerpt of our books in PDF format – usually the first chapter for interested readers to peruse. At the back of the excerpt, we have links to online stores where they can purchase the full version of the books.
- To embed our documents in our own site, we use Scribd’s very simple embedding functionality to allow people to read an excerpt of our books in a simple viewing window. At this bottom of this page is the embedded excerpt for our newest book – The Doomed Colony of Mars.
Another nice thing is that the admin tool is very easy to use and it’s very much a real time system. There are times where we had to make a book temporarily private and it’s instantaneous. There is no intervention by a real person on Scribd’s side.
So try it out. It’s quick and easy to get a free account and upload a new document for others to read. There is a counter so you can see how many people have read your document and there is an easy way for people to comment on it as well.
Lastly, if you don’t want to look like a fool, you’ll want to know that Scribd is pronounced as ‘scribbed,’ (rhymes with ad libbed).