"How do I let potential readers know this book exists?"
With bookstores sprawling over many acres and publishers large and small flooding the market with new books month after month, simply getting your book noticed by the right readers has become a major hurdle. In the world of print, advertising is expensive as well as ephemeral; online, promotion can be done at reasonable cost, can be targeted to exactly the right audiences, and (depending on venue) can remain available and working for you week after week or month after month with no additional cost. The goal of online promotion should be to make as many connections as possible between the book and potential readers.
Two-phase online promotion strategy
Many publishers have tried to make their sites online destinations, but the number of potential customers who will set out to visit a publisher's site is small. Online promotion must be more than creating a feature promotion for a publisher's site. That's like creating a print ad...and then pinning it to the bulletin board or perhaps the outside wall of the building. Once the feature promotion has been put online, connections must be made between it and the book's market: links, banners, mentions, text ads, offsite content, and so on. These are the equivalent of ad buys--but online, they can often be had for little or no money.
If targeted correctly, advertising becomes news
When information about a new book is presented to an audience known to be interested in the book's topic, the information is often treated as news, or content, instead of as advertising. Web site maintainers and producers--the editors or gatekeepers to the myriad online communities of interest--are often eager to include book information on their sites if it will interest their site visitors. This is what gives online promotion its incredible potential. First publish a good book; then identify its audience; find the online venues used by that audience; create online content that presents the book in a compelling and honest way; and get that content in front of the audience as news, information they can use, rather than as advertising.
Making the connections for you
Only about half of the effort of an online campaign should be spent on the feature promotion; the rest is all about creating those connections, in venues large and small, between the book and its potential readers. This is where many publishers go wrong: they devote 90% of their effort to the feature promotion and hope that potential readers will beat down an electronic path to their door. A better strategy is to follow the two-stage approach: first the feature, then the effort to make connections.
But two-stage online promotion requires not only Web-development skills (HTML, graphics, etc.) but also knowledge of what's available online, familiarity with the conventions of the online world, expertise with a wide range of online promotion tools and techniques, and contacts at online venues large and small. As a consultant, I can work with you to choose the books on your list that can be best promoted online, craft an individualized promotion strategy for each one, and execute that strategy, whether it be a feature site with all the bells and whistles and a full-fledged promotional campaign across many venues, or a selection of text advertisements in a few electronic newsletters whose subscribers exactly fit the profile of your potential readers.
Explore the possibilities of marketing directly to communities of interest that fit the topics of your books--and put the Internet and online services to work for you!