Sandy Nathan's YOUR SHELF LIFE

Book contests are advertised everywhere. Book publishers, publicists and promoters, marketing agencies and other book professionals offer contests. What will winning a book contest do for your book sales and author platform? Will winning a contest increase your book’s visibility? Create a competitive advantage in today’s burgeoning self-publishing and independent press world? Bring you money, publicity, and other goodies? How hard is it to win a contest? What do you have to do to win?

Writing a book was hard. Editing it was harder, and finding a publisher even harder. Waiting for it to be released after acceptance was murderous, and now promoting the book is . . .

Ha! Bet you thought I was going to say it was hardest of all — most authors find promoting to be an arduous task, but not me. I enjoy it. What’s not to like? I get to meet wonderful people and have wonderful conversations. I get to write articles about anything I want and post them all over the internet. I get to . . . well, those two points are enough. Or should be.

Goethe wrote, “What you can do, or dream you can, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” So, gather a bit of boldness and begin. Join sites like Facebook and Goodreads. Add friends. Take the time to get to know people by commenting on your new friends’ content, by sharing with links to some of your new friends’ articles and content. And bit by bit the magic happens.

Let me share some of the magic that has happened to me.