What you do after you have written your book is as much, if not more, important than the actual writing of it. You can take a great book and poor marketing and have very poor results. Conversely, I believe you can take a mediocre book, market it well, and make very good sales from it. The only limiting factor is you. You probably think, "I'm a writer, not a salesperson." That's true, but there are some very simple things you can do to create a website that sells your book.

1. Create a direct-response sales page for your book.

This doesn't need to be an extra site, your home page, or anything extravagant. Devote your home page to information about you or your most recent work and a subscription form for a newsletter for your fans. Create a secondary page, linked to from your home page, that sells your book. But instead of simply stating a few sentences about your book, either put up a full book review or a direct-response sales letter. Either way, at the end of the review or the letter, you must ask your readers to buy your book. Put a direct order link at the bottom of your page. Simply asking for your readers to buy your book will increase your sales.

2. Create a newsletter for your readers.

On your home page, and on every page of your website, create a newsletter subscription form for your readers to join. You don't need to send something out every day, or even every week. Once a month, send out a new "flash fiction" or microfiction story, or a new essay. Keep in touch with your readers. Send out a special notice of a discount for your subscribers. But in each communication with them, provide a link back to your sales page and ask them to buy. Don't worry?they subscribed because they like your work and are open to buying it!

3. Write some articles or short stories and give them away.

You can give these away from your website as a gift for joining your newsletter group, or you can give them away from other people's sites as a way to get more awareness of your work. Do a search for "article sites" and you'll find many sites you can submit your work to. These are great for two reasons-1) More people will be exposed to your writing (which means more potential buyers); and 2) Others may take your article or story and run it in their newsletter, giving you even more exposure. Writing and distributing articles or stories is a great way to build traffic to your site and confidence in your writing.

Follow these three steps and you'll notice an increase in sales of your books.

If you have any questions about this article, please email me at jeremyhoover@gmail.com.

Jeremy M. Hoover helps authors market their books. His book marketing plan is a simple, easy, and step-by-step way to drive more traffic to your book site and make more book sales.