Best Ways to Promote Historical Fiction

The best advice I ever heard for how to get people to buy your books is to write more books. Every time you publish a new book, your older books get dragged along for the ride. With only one book, you theoretically can only appeal to a certain number of people (those who find the premise interesting, etc) but with every new book, your chances of hooking people goes up due to the laws of probability, and once you've hooked a reader, they will often go back and buy your old stuff. It's hard to market one book by yourself.

I'm sorry I don't have more concrete instructions for you, and this may be even less helpful, but as an avid reader, I can tell you that I often skip an author's first book and wait until their later stuff (assuming they keep writing) since first books are so rarely good. Of course there are exceptions, but most authors get better as they continue writing, just like guitarists get better the more they practice playing guitar.

I hope this isn't too off topic and I hope someone else has a few better suggestions than I do!