As a writer who is considering self-publishing, you have probably heard or read that you need to promote your book on the book promotion websites. Unfortunately, a lot of the lists circulating across the Internet are for PAID book promotion, even if they advertise FREE in their meta descriptions and tags. In the worst case scenarios, they’ll let you promote your FREE Amazon book for FREE…. Um, free books don’t really help you. They make up about 2 percent of book sales and the momentum doesn't last...

Going through all those paid book promotion lists is a waste of time. I even got caught up in one so far that I filled out all the information, created the account and then got to a paid wall. Now, imagine how irritated I was. So, let me cut down the time and frustration you spend on this task by giving you the actual sites that will promote your book for free.

This is a question I have been trying to answer for the last six months. There’s a lot that goes into promoting a book, even if you plan to only use free options. If you want to win, you don’t want to publish your book, put a pinned post at the top of your Twitter and Facebook accounts and forget about it. You want to put some thought into marketing, even if you have no marketing money.

1. Create Your Cover – get your copy of GIMP or Photoshop and get to it. You need your cover for promotion, and you need it as soon as possible. You really want to have this finished two to three months prior to the publication of your book so that you can do some advanced marketing.

2. Choose a Pre-Order Date – If you plan to do pre-orders, choose a pre-order date that is ahead of your publication date by two to four weeks or longer, but keep in mind that your book will need to be finished so that you can upload it.

3. Choose a Press Release Date – Your press release date needs to be ahead of your pre-order date by at least a week.

4. Choose Your Publication Date – You want to have this planned out well in advance.

5. Get Your Author Website – If you do not have a website, you can get one for free. I currently use Weebly, and you can have as many of these as you want. I have an author page, a wannabe writer page and a freelancing website on Weebly. Once you have your website, get some content on it. At a bare minimum, you want a Home page, Author Blog, About the Author and a Contact Page.

6. Get Your Social Media Accounts Sorted – If you don’t have Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Snapchat, Instagram, ect, you need to get them. If you have them, you need to reconfigure them around your new author persona. This probably means changing your website addresses to reflect your author webpage and changing your profile pictures to yourself or your book cover. If oyu need step by step directions, Twiends has recently created a comprehensive guide on how to maximize your Twitter.

7. Get Hootsuite – Hootsuite has done some major limiting of the free account these days, but it is still usable. Your limitations are that you can only have 3 social media accounts linked to it, and you can only do a maximum of 30 posts across those 3 accounts, so 10 each. That is enough to get you 2.5 days of scheduled social media posts. You can’t be online 24 hours a day, so this is better than nothing. Hoostuite will push your posts for you whether you are at your computer or not.

8. Locate Book Promotion Groups and Webpages – There are a ton of them out there. However, you have to be vigilant. Some of the sites require you to pay a fee. Others require that you have X amount of review on Amazon and a certain star rating before they accept you. You won’t have either one of those things prior to your publication date, and you may not have them for months afterwards. If you plan to look on Facebook, the keywords you want are “Author Book Promotions”. Once you get into a few of these Facebook will feed more of them down your right sidebar, and joining becomes a breeze after that.

9. Get Spammy! - If you aren’t used to advertising or are completely against advertising, you are going to have to get over it quickly. The only way people are going to know about your book, is if you get up and scream the title along with your name and provide the links to your published book. You can get creative with it. I’ve gotten creative with it. There are things you can do to make it look less like an advertisement, but the word about your new published book is only going to get out if YOU tell everyone you know and everyone who walks by you and everyone you don’t know.

Now that you have all the information you need to get started promoting your book, sit back and relax with a different good book from author Stacey Carroll. (See what I did there.)

The short answer is – No. The thinking here is that an editor will be able to spot mistakes you did not see so that you can turn in the absolute best manuscript possible, and this is absolutely true. An editor can help you clean up any mistakes and spot glaring errors, but this does not guarantee you acceptance by any agent or traditional publisher. If they do not like your story or your concept, you are still screwed, and if you paid money to have it edited, you are also out that money. Keep in mind the listed rejection rate for editors and publishers is 97 percent. ​The other thing to remember is that if you are accepted by an editor/agent, they will suggest changes and edits to your manuscript, and the edits could be extensive, undoing everything your paid-for editor just did.  You will also be edited again by the publisher's editor, if you are lucky enough to get accepted by a publishing house.  All of this editing could result in between 50 to 75 percent of your book being completely rewritten.

Yes. When you’ve stopped submitting to agents and decided to self-publish. This is when you should hire an editor. Once you’ve decided to go it alone, go ahead and hire that editor. You really want to make sure that your novel is cleaned-up and ready to go before you self-publish. This is when you start throwing your own money into the project. Per sale, you are going to earn more as a self-published author than a traditionally published author, so you will be more likely to make up that money. However, on average, self-published authors sell fewer books.  The good news is that you can publish as fast as you can write, so you'll be able to write and publish more books in a shorter period of time.

The price of editing depends on the type of editing.  Developmental edits tend to be the most expensive which prices reaching as high as $5,600.  Proofreading tends to be the least expensive, ranging from a few hundred dollars to a couple thousand.  Line editing tends to fall in the middle.  Of course, you have to think about the fnancial aspects.  Most authors don't like thinking about the business side of the book industry.  Unfortunately, as a self-published author, you have to be both the creative side and the buisness owner.  This means that you will have to think very hard about whether or not to hire an editor.  If you can't afford it, there are plenty of self-editing books available to help you polish your novel and get it ready for publication.

Also remember that anything you spend goes against your bottom line, and you are starting at $0.00. If you spend $2,000 on editing, you are now -$2,000 before you earn a profit. If your book earns you $3 per sale, you will need to sell 667 books before you break even. Do you know 667 people that want to buy your book?

Yes. This is the most affordable option. It is also the most time consuming. If you are going to do your own editing, put your manuscript away for three or four days and clear your mind. If you’ve gone through the manuscript several times over the last month, put it away for a week or two. You need to forget what you wrote and give your brain a break.

Once you’ve forgotten what you’ve written, pull that bad boy out of the drawer or boot it up on your computer and read it like you are a reader. Anything that catches or is off or doesn’t feel right, mark it, but don’t change it. The highlight feature works well for this. Once you are finished reading it, go back and make the changes.