Dana Lynn Smith always has great marketing advice for authors. Today, she discusses the benefits of photo promotions at Market My Novel as part of her virtual book tour for The Savvy Book Marketer's Guide to Successful Social Marketing. Read my review of her book here. You can see Dana's complete tour schedule at http://bookmarketingmaven.typepad.com/booktour/.

There are lots of possibilities for using photos and other images to promote yourself and your book:

Upload several versions of your proposed book cover, logo design, or blog header, then ask your friends, followers, ezine subscribers, and blog readers for feedback.

Upload your book cover when you're promoting your book launch, and include a link in your tweets and social network updates.

Post photos of your book signings or speaking engagements.

Post photos related to the topic of your book or the setting of your novel.

Upload illustrations, photos, or charts from your book.

Post images on your blog or ezine to add interest and illustrate a point. iStockphoto is a great place to find high-quality, inexpensive images.

Use personal photos (pets, vacations, hobbies, etc.) in personal posts on your blog or social networks. When I posted photos of my baby goats, I got a number of comments on Twitter and Facebook.

When you upload an image to your Facebook photo album, it gets posted in your newsfeed, visible to your friends. You can also attach images or videos to your status updates. Display your book cover in the left column of your Facebook profile page by using a Facebook application such as My Profile Box or Profile HTML.

Upload images to Twitpic and link to them from your status updates on your social networks, your blog, or anywhere else online. TwicPic keeps track of the number of views the image receives and allows viewers to make comments.

 Photo sharing site Flickr is a great place to post your book cover, author photo, and other images. If you have several images, you can use your Flickr page as a photo album to link to.

Flickr allows you to add friends to your account, participate in groups, and comment on photos. Users can search by keyword and add tags and comments to photos. Applications are available to display images from Flickr on your blog or feed them to your profile page on social networking sites.
Flickr, owned by Yahoo and ranked #33 by Alexa, also provides quality links back to your website. Other popular photo sharing sites include Photobucket and Smug Mug.

Dana Lynn Smith is a book marketing coach and author of The Savvy Book Marketer's Guide to Successful Social Marketing. Learn more at http://www.AuthorSocialMarketing.com. Click here to view other articles in the Successful Social Marketing book tour.