The new digital book readers have opened up a huge new opportunity for brand building. If you want to build a name for yourself, what better way to do it than through publishing a book – while skipping the publisher?

Getting a book to the top spots in the Kindle, the iBookstore and the Nook will help skyrocket your credibility. Your brand will be remembered and you’ll have the chance to share your ideas with hundreds of thousands of people.

Here’s how to build brand, visibility and credibility with digital bookstore platforms.

==> Try to Hit the Bestselling List

Each platform has their own set of genres and categories. Your job when you’re publishing a book is to pick one of those categories and aim to get in the bestselling list.

People often assume that getting their books in these bookstores means their books will sell themselves. That isn’t how it works.

If you want your books to sell, you have to actively promote it. The best way to do this is to focus all your energy on spiking the traffic to your books.

If you can get your book into the bestselling ten books in a certain category, you’ll get a lot of exposure to that bookstore’s audience. This is when the branding power of this medium really takes off.

==> What Kind of Promotion Mechanism to Use

You should only launch a book in one of these bookstores if you have a rock solid promotion mechanism in place.

Perhaps the best mechanism is an email list of your own that you can promote the book to. If you have an email list of a several tens of thousands of subscribers, you stand a very good chance of having your book top the charts.

If you don’t have such a list, you might want to consider building your influence in other ways for a period of time first, before launching the book.

You could also leverage the power of other people’s blogs. Get other people to write about you and your new book.

==> What to Put in the Book to Build Brand

What’s great about many of these stores is that they don’t limit what you can say. In other words, there’s no rule against using the book to build brand. There’s no rule saying you can’t put your URL in the book.

The best way to convert someone who heard about you through the bookstore into a customer or follower is to put some sort of special offer in the book.

Create a special report or two giving more details about a topic covered in the book. Then give the URL in the book for people who want to access the report. That’ll drive a lot of traffic to your site.

Using the Kindle, the iBookstore and the Nook store can expose hundreds of thousands of people to your brand. What’s more, these won’t just be exposures; they’ll be people who’ve listened to your ideas in text form. If you can create the marketing engine to make a book succeed, this can be an incredibly powerful branding avenue.