One thing that was crystal clear during my research into publishing was that regardless of the channel through which my book would go to market, the onus of promotion would be on me. Publishers have very limited promotion budgets, especially for new authors, so if you want your book to do well, you need to tweet, blog and talk about your work to get it out there. Knowing this, I started to build a platform from which to promote Legacy, alongside the editing process.

I started with a website and blog as this seemed like a good centre point for the campaign. I looked around other authors’ websites for inspiration, however it’s surprising how bad some exceptionally successful authors’ websites are; I guess when your books are that successful a good website is neither here nor there. Anyway, I trawled all manner of sites and jotted down a few ideas before designing my own, trying to keep it as clean, simple, visual and as easy to navigate as possible. Luckily my husband can code, so he set up the initial style sheets and taught me some basic html (I’m pretty handy with divs these days) and then I set about building my pages as I wanted them. This took quite a while by the time I’d created the design, images, copy, etc and I still had to rely on Mr Moore for the more tricky Java script and PHP / MySQL elements.

Alongside setting up the website, I set up a Twitter account. I had no idea how to use Twitter (I know, shameful for a then 25 year old), but luckily I had my little sister to guide me. It felt very strange tweeting out to the world - I used to barely even put up Facebook status updates - but I’m getting used to it and it’s forcing me to be more up to date with what’s going on, so that can’t be a bad thing!

Once my website was finished, I set up a Facebook page. This in itself was very simple and not at all time consuming, but telling all my friends I’d written a book and asking them to like my page was exceptionally daunting (for all the same reasons outlined in Chapter 8), what if they thought the whole thing was ridiculous?! On the other hand, once the likes started appearing, along with a load of supportive messages, it was great - so exciting for the book to be out there and for people to be talking about it.

Next I set up a Google+ profile, chiefly so I could use Google Author (I read a blog post about authors not owning their content unless Google says they do and also liked the idea of my photo appearing next to my search results - more likely that people will click on something with a face), but I didn’t do much more than duplicate some content on there to start with (and still don’t really), as Facebook, Twitter and my blog are time consuming enough!