Book award contests can be a great promotion tool for authors. When your book wins an award, you can promote yourself as an "award-winning author" and the book as an "award-winning book."



In addition, the award organizers often promote the winners and they usually provide some kind of a graphic (such as the one shown here) that you can use for promotional purposes.



For example, my book,…

When consumers shop for books on Amazon.com and other online bookstores, many of them read the book reviews before they make a purchase. Even if they came to the site to buy a particular book, they may read the reviews to verify that they are making a good selection.



Positive reviews are a great selling point for all types of books, but they are especially important for nonfiction books, where consumers often compare several books on the same topic. Amazon actually encourages…

The author website (or blog) is an essential book marketing tool, and authors often ask how they can get more traffic to their website. To answer that question, let's first think about the ways that people land on websites.



As an example, I'll discuss sources of traffic (according to Google Analytics) to my Savvy Book Marketer website during a recent month:



Search Traffic:  About 47% of visitors found my site through a search engine like Google. Most of…