Online Marketing for Busy Authors by Fauzia Burke

I requested this book because it's a topic that I'm very interested in. How can I, as a full-time student who also happens to be job hunting, do online marketing without burning out?

The book is basically divided into three sections:

1. Know yourself
2. Know your audience
3. Ways to reach the audience

Or at least, that's how I see it. The book itself says that it's divided into three phases:

1. Getting Organised
2. Turning your thinking into action
3. Staying the course.

Either way, it's the same thing.

What I liked about this book is that there were concrete exercises on how you can define your author voice and how you can narrow down your target audience. The advice on how to promote pretty much corresponds to everything I've heard and read from self-publishing advice podcasts and books. Actually, I think The Creative Penn, Rocking Self Publishing and the like may be slightly more advanced with the type of marketing they're trying.

Most of the advice seems to be more suited for the non-fiction author, although I think that fiction authors can probably adapt the advice.

The only thing I didn't really agree with was the line "if you are self-publishing your book, you will probably get fewer reviews than if you were published by an established publisher." If you're talking editorial reviews, then I can see how this is the case, but if you're talking about customer reviews (aka Amazon/Goodreads/Kobo/etc reviews), then I don't see how being traditionally published is going to automatically get you more reviews. I think your marketing is going to play a bigger part.

All in all, the advice seems pretty solid and aimed at the beginning author (like me). But, if you're willing to listen to the various podcasts, read blogs, you can probably get much of the same information for free. The next step would be putting it into practice (which I am admittedly lagging behind on)

Disclaimer: I got a free copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for a free and honest review.