Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:49 — 13.6MB) | Embed

Here’s a quick interview with Vikram Narayan, President of Freado.com, which produces two great new promotion tools for self-publishing Authors. Think Social Marketing for Authors at high speed.

This 15-minute interview introduces Freado.com and BookBuzzr.com, which allow any Author to promote a book excerpt, promote how to buy their book, and almost any other marketing info you can think of. These tools make it easy for any blogger or website to pick up and display your book, plus, there is direct integration for social media tools like FaceBook and Twitter.

All Authors know how hard it is to drag traffic to your website, but these tools about outreach – it’s about pushing your stuff to where the people already are. As Vikram rightly says, “… marketing your book online consists of a number of small activities that need to be done regularly… making your book extract available on your blog or on your facebook profile is very basic… and this takes your book extract to where the traffic is.”

Recognizable Authors using this service include Dan Brown (Angels and Demons), Jodi Picoult (My Sister’s Keeper), and and Joel Osteen (Become a Better You).

There are some “blips” in this recording due to the long-distance phone recording, so just for reference, the friend of Vikram’s who wrote the book that inspired the project is Chetan Dhruve, and his book is titled “Why Your Boss Is Programmed to Be a Dictator: A Book for Anyone Who Has a Boss or Is a Boss”. Other success stories include Tony Eldridge’s The Samson Effect.

(Note: I say in the recording that it’s early June, 2009, but it was actually recorded this morning, July 10th, 2009. What can I say – I recently gave up caffeine.)

Enjoy!