Starting out as a writer is always a difficult thing to do, not necessarily the actual writing, but certainly trying to get exposure on a wide scale. This comes down to the way in which you market your work and there are numerous ways to build awareness of your work with your target audience, so here are some examples:
Get Out and Meet People in the Local Community
While your overall ambition might be to sell your book via a major publisher and global distributors, you need to start somewhere and where better than the place that you live. Get out into the community to meet new people and market your work.
Raising awareness of your book in person is perfect as you’ll be able to convey at first hand your narrative, key characters and interesting plot twists (assuming, of course, that your book is a work of fiction!). You could hold readings in your local community to give people a flavour of what they will get if they buy your book. A reading would also provide an opportunity for people to ask questions about you and your work.
After the reading, you could hand out promotional items that have your name and website address emblazoned on them to remind people of your work. 4imprint has a large array of promotional products including items like t-shirts that could help raise awareness.
Get Online and Talk about Yourself
It is always a better choice if you can create a website which consist all the detailed information of your work and a synopsis of your own life – a mini biography if you will. You could even ask your visitors to register on your website so that you can send them details of any forthcoming books, or reviews you’ve undertaken for other authors. In this way you can engage with your interested audience and they will also help you to get traffic to your website.
Another simple and easy way to engage with your audience is a Blog. For one, readers can use the blog to comment on your work and ask questions. Alternatively, you could use the blog to review works in similar genres or famous books that have wide appeal. It could be a great way of raising awareness of you, your writing and any recent works.
Social media is another good way to get audience. Social Medias like- Face book, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ etc. are a cost-effective way to raise awareness with your target audience. Most of the internet users are attached with any social media, hence it would very effective it you can also get your work attached to social medias and promote through them.