For those of you doomsayers who declared the death of books in the Internet age, I have news for you.

Web-savvy authors are actually tapping social media to boost the sale of their books.

Some writers are scoring book deals after growing an audience through social media. Others are bypassing traditional publishers completely because they can sell enough print or electronic copies of their books by promoting them on social networking sites. The success stories are comparable to those of musicians and celebrities who gained a following through MySpace and YouTube instead of relying on agents and production companies.

Writer Karen McQuestion spent nearly a decade trying to persuade New York publishers to print one of her manuscripts. Last July, the 49-year-old mother from Wisconsin finally decided to upload a book on Amazon. After six hours, she had her first sale and a year later, she's had over 75,000 downloads of her books.

McQuestion has a website a blog a Facebook account and a Twitter feed to promote her writing, but she said talking to people on forums and bulletin boards has been the best way to get the word out.

"I concentrated the majority of my efforts by going where the readers were — Kindleboards.com and the message boards right on the Amazon website," McQuestion said in an e-mail. "I also participated in general discussions about reading, books, authors, and the new technology of e-books. My posts came up under the name "Karen McQuestion, Author," which was my low key way of letting others on the board know I had books out on Kindle. Eventually I got lucky in a big way when posters started recommending my books to others on the board."

She says the word-of-mouth campaign was instrumental in boosting book sales, and caught the attention of an Los Angeles-based production company that eventually optioned the film rights to her book, A Scattered Life, making it the first self-published Kindle novel ever optioned for a film. The publicity from the film deal led to an offer of publication from AmazonEncore, Amazon's new publishing division, and the book came out in paperback last week.

Social media can help with smaller scale book campaigns as well. This column's cartoonist, Stephanie McMillan, used Kickstarter.com to raise money to print her children's book, Mischief in the Forest. McMillan, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, said spreading the word through Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LiveJournal, blogs and YouTube helped her score 56 contributors who donated more than $6,000. She said depending on how much they contributed, people were rewarded with original drawings or electronic or print copies of the book.

Here are some tips for using social media to self-publish:

Go to the readers, as McQuestion suggests. Comment on related forums and bulletin boards. Be helpful, engage people and have fun. Include insightful and even provocative ideas on your expertise area but don't post comments that could come off as confrontational, angry or self-promotional. If people like what you are saying, they'll want to read more from you. Aside from the Kindle and Amazon forums, try special interest forums. For example, if you are writing about autism, have a presence on the various autism forums.

Build pages on social media sites that can serve as a place where people can find out about you, comment on your writing or interact with you, and buy your book. Mention in your biography on the sites that you are an author and list the books you're selling. To make people aware of you and ultimately gain a good following, you should follow other similar writers or people with interested in the subject matter you write about. Build a following on social media sites will help you easily deliver messages but again, don't be sales-oriented. You can also consider it a space where you establish personal relationships with people who share your interests.

Start a blog. A blog is also a good way to reach people but it takes more time and energy and needs to be updated on a regular basis, ideally at least once a day. If you can not commit to that, don't create a blog. WordPress and BlogSpot are free and simple to set up. You could also go to the popular blogs and leave comments, or offer to do a guest post on a popular blog. Depending on the blog style and topic, you might even be able to use an excerpt from the book as a guest blog post.

Include the URLs of your Website, blog, Twitter and Facebook fan pages on your business card and in your email signature.

Seth Liss is online content editor for SunSentinel.com. You may reach him at sliss@sun-sentinel.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/sliss33.