Thursday, December 1, 2011

Deb's Live Love & Write Best of the Blogs 12/01/11

Deb’s
Live, Love & Write
Best of the Blogs Issue 12/01/11


From  Murfreesboro Writers Group  <!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->            <!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->

Annmarie Lockhart announced last night that Susan Ashley Michael's poem "Flying on Fat Tuesday" has been nominated by vox poetica for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. The poem was inspired by memories of her late husband, Robert Michael, and will be included in the upcoming MWG anthology, Motivation.


From the Book Designer Blog

You’ve probably heard that virtual book tours are a great way to promote books, but did you know that there are several different ways to showcase authors and their books through a virtual tour?
Virtual book tours can include book reviews, guest posts on blogs, interviews on podcasts or radio shows, social network events, contests, book giveaways, and more. These tours are sometimes called book blog tours or virtual author tours, or abbreviated as VBT.
Tours are often done as part of the launch of a new book, but they can be successful any time after the book is published. They are just as effective for fiction and nonfiction books — only the venues and the type of content will vary.

Types of Virtual Book Tours

A traditional virtual book tour typically lasts about one to three weeks, with a different tour stop each day.  Original content is provided to each tour host and you can continue promoting the tour stops even after the tour is over.
An extended tour goes beyond the traditional tour and can last for several weeks or months.  One variation is to publish a series of articles on each blog you visit. Or schedule one guest blog post or interview per week on an ongoing basis.
A short “blastoff” tour of one to five days on lots of blogs at once is designed to push up the book’s sales rank on Amazon within a short period of time. One option for this type of tour is to provide all of the blog owners with standard content, rather than providing unique content to each blogger.  The content could be a book excerpt, an author interview, or a book review by the blog host.
You can design an entire tour around social media, or mix social media appearances with other tour stops on blogs, podcasts and online radio shows. Social media tour events can include Twitter chats, organized discussions on Facebook, and video chats on Google Plus.
Another strategy for a virtual book tour, especially during a book launch, is to combine a tour with an “Amazon bestseller campaign.” In these campaigns, people who buy a book during a certain time frame receive bonus gifts from the author or from JV partners who contribute bonuses and help promote the event.
<!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->No matter what type of virtual book tour you plan, it’s important to be well organized and to get started with the planning at least two months in advance.
To learn how to organize your own successful virtual book tour, check out the new Virtual Book Tour Magic

From NPR

What Sticks: Five 2011 Books That Stay With You

The True Story Of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost At Sea And Of The Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, And Fools, Including The Author, Who Went In Search Of Them

Hardcover, 402 pages
Melville's influence has run deep this year, providing, among other things, the central motif for Moby-Duck, Donovan Hohn's quest narrative about 28,880 bath toys lost at sea in 1992. What begins as a seemingly whimsical search for rubber duckies spilled overboard in hurricane-force winds in the North Pacific becomes a primer in oceanography, a whale of an adventure tale and an eye-opening inquiry into the disturbing, growing environmental effects of plastic pollution and climate change on our oceans. Carried off on the current of his own questions, Hohn quit his private-school teaching job to become a self-proclaimed "amateur driftologist." He avidly tracks the possible paths of the floatees far beyond his comfort zone. His obsessive odyssey takes him on storm-wracked voyages to Alaska, Hawaii, a Chinese toy factory and the Arctic Circle in the company of oceanographers, beachcombers and merchant mariners. While his quest, like Ahab's pursuit of the great white whale, has its excesses and longueurs, Moby-Duck has indelibly altered the way I think about the roughly 71 percent of the Earth's surface covered by our no longer so shining seas.

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