Today I want to talk about a great new way to publicize your work online, one that's working very well for authors Kemble Scott, Hyla Molander, and today's guest Ransom Stephens: uploading your ebook to Scribd.com. Here, lots of readers can discover your work, "read-share" it via Facebook and generally help you get the word out.

Ransom Stephens uploaded his book The God Patent to Scribd in May 2009 and since then he's seen the book rack up over 19,000 reads and 80+ great reviews. This was enough for the book to get picked up and published by Numina Press (Vox Novus) last December. Billed as "The Scribd eBook Sensation," you can read The God Patent for FREE here.  

Looking ahead to publicizing YOUNG JUNIUS next month around its release from Tyrus Books, I caught up with Ransom to ask a few questions about how I can use Scribd to help: [more after the break]

Seth: what strategies do you recommend for an author to get optimal exposure for his/her writing on Scribd?

Ransom: There are lots of features at Scribd to help you contact the right people for your work. The first thing, as you know better than almost anyone, is to determine all the groups that would be interested in that work. Young Junius is an obvious draw for crime fiction, but Junius is a draw for brothers, Bostonians, people who've brushed the law, cops, people with "Jr." appended to their name and so on. Join every group at Scribd that relates to your work. Then "follow" the authors of similar works. When I put The God Patent on Scribd over a year ago, the day they opened the "scribd store," they didn't have a lot of these features so I used the old fashioned approach - lots of emails, readings, speeches and all the standard stuff for promoting books in print. 

S: I'd like to use Scribd to best get exposure for my new novel YOUNG JUNIUS around the October release. What strategies do you recomment?

RS: I think you should put the first several to 20 pages on Scribd now so you can point people to it whenever a question arises and embed [Scribd's] reader on your site so people can kick the tires and slam the doors right there - while looking at an image of the printed object.

Then a month or a couple of weeks before the big release, post another chapter and ask people to readcast it. Then post something like an additional page for every ten readcasts the previous day. Try to time it so that you get about 1/3 of the way through the book when it's released officially. Then give free copies of the book to the top 10 readcasters plus one to me, of course. 

SH: OK! With that said, I'm going to start giving it a shot! Results to come!

For more on Ransom and what he's done, see this longer interview with Jane Friedman on her excellent There Are No Rules blog.