Smashwords this week announced that they have reached an agreement with ScrollMotion to convert their 33,000 title Platinum catalog into individual book apps, which will be available on all the major phone and tablet platforms via a growing host of app marketplaces.
This brings yet another level of marketing clout to ebooks distributed through Smashwords' already impressive list of retail outlets, with no additional effort required on the part of the author. Indeed, Smashwords is rapidly becoming the digital distributor of choice for many self-published authors.
Still, while this inherently increases the visibility of an author's work, promoting those books remains mainly in the author's hands, for tips on which see today's other post.
Here's an informative video featuring a talk given by BookBaby president Brian Felson at the London Book Fair about how to promote yourself as an independent author. BookBaby offers both ebook publishing and web hosting services, which the lecture promotes to some degree, but all of the strategies given are useful for any author, from self-published to traditional, since these days it's incumbent upon the creator of a book to sell it as well.
This is one of the foremost reasons to forgo trade publishing in lieu of an independent approach, since traditional publishers require you to establish a platform before they'll even take you on, and if you have a platform, you already have your target market. With all the tools and retail avenues available today you can reach your readers without the need of intermediaries, and consequently make more for your efforts. So promotion is really just a question of how to build a platform, and that's what Brian Felson talks about in this video.
An interesting note you might catch is a passing mention of Kindle book apps coming soon, which may be a reference to the next gen Kindle, which will very likely be a 7" tablet like the Nook, with the ability to read book apps that Amazon will sell in its new app store.
