Advertising and selling

I've been uploading links and photo albums with a few of my book covers on the sites I belong to. The idea is to keep my name popping up for readers to notice and attract them to my blog or website. I don't know if it helps to sell my books. One thing I should have been aware of: Yahoo sends updates to the members of the sites and that is a good thing. Yesterday, in the update I received, my name popped up about twenty times on the same list. I guess that should grab peoples attention, but that's not how I planned it. If I would have played it smart, I would have dragged out my uploading over a longer period of time. People have short memories. If you want to sell something you have to remind potential buyers over and over again that you exist and have something to sell. Just look at the commercials on TV, the radio, in the papers, and in the household fliers filling your mailbox every day. Advertising is everything. Many bestselling books are not necessarily better than books that don't sell. They just get promoted more. E-publishing is so different from printed books. If a printed book is published, the way it used to be before computers and the internet, the publishers promote the book already before it is released to the public. That's not the case in e-publishing. It is pretty much left to the Author to promote his (or her) book. Besides, there are so many writers out there now and readers have a huge number of books from a ton of publishers to choose from. If the publishers don't get the traffic, the books simply don't sell.
Of course, publishing with one of the large, better known and highly visited e-publishers still doesn't mean a writer's book sells. What a writer can hope for is that his (or her) book gets featured and maybe offered at a discount, but that is up to the publisher. Book publishers, like any other business, want to make money. If they notice one particular writer sells more books than his (or her) counterparts, they will promote this writer's books, and it will lead to more sales. I have fourteen books out there and a few short stories in digests. So far I have 9 books scheduled for release this year and next year. I've noticed with every new book published my older books also start selling again, this means it is important to keep on writing and bring out new books to build up a large reader base. I'm still hoping for that breakout novel that will act like an avalanche and make my name as a writer known to a high number of readers. It's a dream, until then I keep on writing and hoping.