Becoming a self-published author doesn’t mean you have to navigate the self-publishing world alone. One of the best things I have found is all the wonderful support from other indie authors. They can help you promote your book, give you encouragement, discuss current publishing trends and advise you on which promotional opportunities helped them the most. I belong to several author groups.
As soon as I decided to self-publish my first novel, I found the group, Independent Author’s Network. This is a group of self-published authors that support and promote each other online. Members are asked to tweet and retweet about other member’s book releases, blog postings and book tours. For a $25 set up fee, you get an author page which includes up to six books, buy links, author bio and book trailers.
I also belong to Worldwide Indie Novelist which is a Yahoo group open to all indie writers. Authors are encouraged to promote their books and blogs. It is a very relaxed group, and the other authors are always willing to offer advice or discuss news or trends in the self-publishing world.
A couple of good choices for promoting your work are Celebrating Author’s Facebook page and the World Literary Café. Celebrating Authors is a Facebook page designed to connect authors with readers. You can post links to your books and blog posts on the site.
The World Literary Café is an online community of authors and readers promoting authors, reviewers and bloggers. They offer several free programs to help you publish, market, and reach out to readers. Beyond their many free programs, they also offer self-guided writing courses as well as some paid advertisements. With their forums, you can connect with other authors, bloggers, reviewers and readers.
Now the next group that I recently joined is not for authors but for bloggers but I thought I would mention it since many authors also have their own blog. I joined Triberr, which is a place for bloggers to share their blog content through Facebook and Twitter and hopefully expand the amount of traffic to their blog. Currently, I just belong to one group of indie authors. Triberr has expanded my reach from a possible 1,863 people to a possible 118,495.
I have touched just the tip of the iceberg here with listing author groups that you can join. Don’t join every group out there as keeping up with them can severely cut into your writing time but with a little work, you can find like-minded individuals who will help you on your journey through the self-publishing world.
Into Another World 
Thanks for this post, Susan, I learned a few things. I don’t really understand Triberr, but some of the other groups (especially WLC) have been very helpful. I’d be interested to hear more about your experiences with Triberr!
Its like you read my thoughts! You appear to grasp so much about this, like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you just could do with some % to drive the message house a little bit, however instead of that, that is great blog. An excellent read. I will definitely be back.
I’m still learning about Triberr but maybe I will write a post about what little I’ve learned.
Your post is super (even though I found it 2 years after the fact…). For Meet-the-Author events, especially for Indie authors can list their event for free at http://www.thebookshelfcafe.com as another venue to promote and market books.