Which are you most likely to respond to: A paid advertisement about a book, or your best friend telling you about the best book they’ve read in months? The answer is a no-brainer.

Word-of-mouth marketing is self-generating. If ten people read your book and they each tell ten other people that they have to read your book, that’s 100 people buying and reading your book. But what if those 100 each tell ten more people your book is a must-read?

Another form of word-of-mouth marketing occurs when a trusted advisor or “opinion leader” recommends your book as a resource.

Asking everyone you know who has read your book and loved it to review it at Amazon.com and other online stores is also a form of word-of-mouth marketing.

Here are three tips for building your word-of-mouth campaign:

1. Meet a felt need. Your book has to offer something that people want and need, and it must be written well. Whether it is entertainment (a good fiction book) or a solution to a problem (a good non-fiction book), it must meet a “felt-need” or people won’t talk about it.

2. Use endorsements. Collect and document all the praise reports you receive from readers and get their permission to reuse them on your Web site and in your sales literature. A success story or endorsement from a reader will sell your book much more effectively than the wittiest sales copy you could come up with.

3. Nurture influencers. Build a team of experts who endorse your book and are “on board” with you. Ask them to spread the word to their peers by writing articles for them and doing interviews. The more they recommend your book as a resource, the more others will follow suit. Seek His face as you think about who you would want on your team of experts. He may have someone in mind that you never would have considered!

Athena Dean is a Solutions Advisor for the WinePress division. She works with new authors who have a need for at least 2,500 copies printed on a traditional press.