When promoting your book, you always should have a website, send out press releases to bloggers and mainstream media, and arrange book readings/signings to ensure the title is properly promoted. But those aren’t the only things you can do. In fact, they may not be enough.

A great way to attract readers to your book’s website is to offer on it free samples of your unpublished writing. For example, a novelist might include a short story or novella they’ve written but have been unable to find a home for. This offers a double benefit: You’re not giving away the book you want to sell, and readers get to sample your writing style while meeting your characters. Particularly effective for fiction writers is offering a backstory or prequel to your published novel, writing a short story about what occurred to your characters between two novels, or providing a story about an interesting secondary character who appeared in one of your published books.