If you do hap­pened to get signed by a pub­lish­ing house, odds are you won’t get the atten­tion you think you deserve. Once you fin­ish your book and actu­ally get it out there your job is just begin­ning:

“Being an author has become much more of an ongo­ing rela­tion­ship with your audi­ence through the Web, rather than just writ­ing a book and dis­ap­pear­ing while you write the next one,” says Liate Stehlik, pub­lisher of William Mor­row and Avon Books. “You have to be out there in the online world, talk­ing and participating.”

Authors are expected to behave like mini-entrepreneurs, says Kamy Wicoff, founder and CEO of She Writes, a Web site devoted to help­ing women writ­ers pro­mote their books. She started the site in June. More than 4,000 writ­ers have joined.

For just such occa­sions, Austin Kleon sug­gests authors cre­ate a blogger’s kit:

Everybody’s heard of press kits, but the aim of a Blogger’s Kit is spread­abil­ity–images and videos that are easy to embed, post, dis­sem­i­nate on the web.

The best place I can see this hap­pen­ing isn’t on a publisher’s web­site, but on Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Flickr, unlike a publisher’s web­site, is a destination–a place where peo­ple hang out, favorite pho­tos and com­ment. Peo­ple love Flickr. They go there for inspi­ra­tion. Pub­lish­ers should go there to meet them.

Here is a sam­ple from Austin’s kit for his newly released Black­out Poems:

I pick Austin as an exam­ple because he is a fairly savvy web per­son­al­ity whose work is intrin­si­cally con­nected to paper. He under­stands that paper can be exploited in ways that HTML and CSS can­not, but sees the web’s power of “spread­i­bil­ity”, or what the social media gurus call “mar­ket­ing” and the rest of us call “conversation.”