Free Sample Menu from Emma's Pennsylvania Kitchen

As any author eventually learns when publishing books independently, eventually you have to learn some marketing. I choose to look at that as an exciting opportunity, and I want to share what I'm learning with my fellow authors via this blog.

One good source of marketing tips is the Smashwords page on facebook.

The other day, they posted a link to this article by Michael Stelzner, which lists 9 ways to use social media to market a book. They all sound potentially useful, but I decided to start with one: creating a sample of my book in PDF form, and embedding a retweet button within it, so that people who like the sample can easily tweet about it. To learn how to do that, I followed the instructions in this other article. The only instruction there I didn't follow was to get Adobe Acrobat Pro, because actually, I found I didn't need it. I was able to embed the prepared tweet URL in a Word document, then save that as a PDF.

Here's the finished free sample chapter. Pretty cool!