Create a free author's website

Your book is published, but you can’t sit back and rest on your laurels.  In fact, there won’t be any laurels unless you take an active role in connecting your book to readers.  Your publisher may help with this, but there are many tasks you’ll need to do on your own.  If you self published your book, you’ll be promoting all on your own.  Here is a list of suggestions for promoting your book along with some technology tools to help you accomplish them.

·         Create an author’s  website—readers like to know something personal about the authors they read.

Technology tip: The Wix website at http://wix.com  allows you to make a free Flash website using text, graphics, links, music, video and more. The tools are easy to use and the sites look good if you can stand the ads. 

Unfortunately, WIX websites were not viewable on iPads and other mobile devices, but I recently learned that soon the problem will go away when Wix moves to HTML5.

Finding images for your historical fiction

Recently, I was looking for some public domain images in the National Archives that I might be able to include in my book about Marie Peary, daughter of the Arctic explorer.  There, I stumbled across a tool called Pathways Challenge that allows a registered user to create posters or videos of material in the National Archives digital vaults.  The free tool was probably created for educators and their students to teach and learn about primary resources and history, but writers of historical fiction (and nonfiction) will find the tool useful as well. Users can search by title or tag and they can make lists of their online collections.  I found the tool a useful portal for discovering images of the people about whom I am writing .