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.

Send personal documents to your Kindle Library

I have completed a first draft of a historical manuscript and have let it sit long enough so that I can look it over with a fresh eye.  I could print it out of course, but I am a big fan of the Kindle as a reading device.  I also have a Kindle app on my iPad and iPhone, so I can read my Kindle collection anywhere, anytime. So how to get my Word manuscript to my Kindle device?

Send to Kindle is a free Windows program from Amazon that lets you send a document from your computer to your Kindle Library.  First, you install Send to Kindle on your computer.  Then when you click on a saved document, you have an option to “send to kindle” so that you can read it on your mobile device.  That is what I did with my story draft, and I was able to read through the ms without having to sit at my desk to read it on the computer screen.