Content
Appearance
Marketing
Who you Know
The answer --in the order of importance for SALES--is
1) Who you know (all potential buyers or influences)
2) Marketing
3) Cover & Appearance
4) Content
Why?
Who you know makes a difference in finding opportunities to tell people about your book and that's where it begins --whether it is in person or online--it starts with relationships
Marketing --where you talk about the book, how you talk about it, how others talk about it, how often images of the book are seen, or descriptions of the book are heard, affects how well it is remembered and that affects purchasing
Cover and appearance---we are all drawn to imagery --it speaks to us in an immediate way that words cannot. it is the image that most often drives us to pick up the book --to read the back cover, and thumb thru the index...
Content-this is what affects how we as readers perceive value--was it everything we expected and hoped? If so, we are likely to remember the author and be interested in future works.
So, the message is that they are ALL vital--what part is most importance depends on what you are trying to accomplish, but you can't get books into readers hands without relationships....
so, the message is really that its relationships that matter---
Next book blog bit form Deb --platform--why you need it and what it is!
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Friday, February 10, 2012
Even the "big guys" make mistakes!
Today's Top Stories
1. LEO Pharma hit with sales-rep OT suit
By Tracy Staton |
The sales-rep overtime fight is spreading. Four LEO Pharma salespeople have filed a putative class action, alleging they're owed overtime under U.S. wage-and-hour laws. The reps accuse LEO of misclassifying them as exempt from overtime, even though their duties include non-exempt activities, the law firm Sanford Wittels & Heisler said in a press release announcing the suit.
I think they meant punative....
Twitter Tools for Authors
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2012/02/5-top-tools-for-promoting-your-book-on-twitter/
by Steven Lewis (@Rule17)
Today I have the pleasure of introducing readers to Steven Lewis, another great blogger and self-publisher who I met on Twitter. Steven is a prolific writer, an author and helps people publish their books to the Kindle platform. Today he’s got great tips for you if you want to use Twitter to promote your book. Here’s his article.
The five best tools for promoting your book on Twitter
Twitter is the second greatest source of traffic to my Taleist self-publishing blog after Google. As your blog is also where many of your readers might go before buying your books that promotional power makes Twitter an essential part of any author platform and marketing strategy.
Fortunately Twitter is an ecosystem in which talented developers are thriving by making useful tools. Five in particular have become crucial to me since I realised the importance of Twitter to my success and started taking my use of the network seriously.
Klout
Klout tries to quantify how “influential” you are on Twitter. There’s room for debate about how Klout measures this but it’s undoubtedly a useful benchmarking tool. I use my Klout score as feedback to gauge how useful I’m being to my followers.
Tweepi
If you want more followers and you aren’t a Kardashian, you have to go out and find them.
I use Tweepi to find people with common interests. If you follow Joel on Twitter, I think you and I might find each other interesting.
Tweepi lets me enter Joel’s Twitter handle — @jfbookman — to see a list of his followers and select which ones I want to follow. (It’s worth noting that one of Tweepi’s premium features allows you to exclude people with a low Klout score, just one indication of how Klout is becoming important in the Twittersphere.)
Naturally I’m hoping that this is reciprocated and that you’ll follow me back. I’ve met some great people this way.
Tweriod
Having made all these new friends I want to know to know when the best time to connect is. I have followers all over the world and there’s no point tweeting when most people offline.
Tweriod will give you a report of when your followers are most active so you can concentrate your tweets around those times or at least hold off the most important ones till they will reach the biggest audience.
Hootsuite
For me 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. turns out to be a good time but I’m exercising and having breakfast then, not tweeting.
Hootsuite lets me schedule tweets so I can be sure messages are going at the best time. When I write a blog post, for instance, I tweet three times in 24 hours so I reach all time zones.
With Hootsuite I can also have a column for each of my lists and columns for replies and direct messages. This is important to me because there are some people I follow especially closely and I want to see all their tweets. That’s hard to do when you’re receiving tweets from thousands of people.
TweetDeck has similar features.
Buffer
Tweeting links to content that self-publishers will find interesting requires finding those links in the first place. I do this mostly in the evening while I go through my RSS feeds on my iPad. If I tweeted all the links as I found them, I’d be sending out a burst of tweets. This would be a shell burst that might overwhelm followers who were awake and I wouldn’t reach any followers who are active at other times.
Ideally I would spread these tweet out over the day but with a focus on the times when Tweriod has told me they’re most likely to be useful. This is exactly what Buffer lets me do. I send the tweets to Buffer and it rations them out to a schedule I set.
Tweeting with Klout
You might have soldiered through all that and thought it’s too complicated. If you do feel that way, maybe pick a couple of ideas and work on those. I can tell you that my Klout score was 40/100 when I started and it’s now about 50. That might not sound too high but wait till you try it till you judge!
What are your favorite tools for promoting on Twitter?
Steven Lewis writes the Taleist self-publishing blog, where you can sign-up for his social media check-up, a free email course showing you easy ways to make sure you’re using social media to maximum effect in promoting your books.
Today I have the pleasure of introducing readers to Steven Lewis, another great blogger and self-publisher who I met on Twitter. Steven is a prolific writer, an author and helps people publish their books to the Kindle platform. Today he’s got great tips for you if you want to use Twitter to promote your book. Here’s his article.
The five best tools for promoting your book on Twitter
Twitter is the second greatest source of traffic to my Taleist self-publishing blog after Google. As your blog is also where many of your readers might go before buying your books that promotional power makes Twitter an essential part of any author platform and marketing strategy.
Fortunately Twitter is an ecosystem in which talented developers are thriving by making useful tools. Five in particular have become crucial to me since I realised the importance of Twitter to my success and started taking my use of the network seriously.
Klout
Klout tries to quantify how “influential” you are on Twitter. There’s room for debate about how Klout measures this but it’s undoubtedly a useful benchmarking tool. I use my Klout score as feedback to gauge how useful I’m being to my followers.
Tweepi
If you want more followers and you aren’t a Kardashian, you have to go out and find them.
I use Tweepi to find people with common interests. If you follow Joel on Twitter, I think you and I might find each other interesting.
Tweepi lets me enter Joel’s Twitter handle — @jfbookman — to see a list of his followers and select which ones I want to follow. (It’s worth noting that one of Tweepi’s premium features allows you to exclude people with a low Klout score, just one indication of how Klout is becoming important in the Twittersphere.)
Naturally I’m hoping that this is reciprocated and that you’ll follow me back. I’ve met some great people this way.
Tweriod
Having made all these new friends I want to know to know when the best time to connect is. I have followers all over the world and there’s no point tweeting when most people offline.
Tweriod will give you a report of when your followers are most active so you can concentrate your tweets around those times or at least hold off the most important ones till they will reach the biggest audience.
Hootsuite
For me 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. turns out to be a good time but I’m exercising and having breakfast then, not tweeting.
Hootsuite lets me schedule tweets so I can be sure messages are going at the best time. When I write a blog post, for instance, I tweet three times in 24 hours so I reach all time zones.
With Hootsuite I can also have a column for each of my lists and columns for replies and direct messages. This is important to me because there are some people I follow especially closely and I want to see all their tweets. That’s hard to do when you’re receiving tweets from thousands of people.
TweetDeck has similar features.
Buffer
Tweeting links to content that self-publishers will find interesting requires finding those links in the first place. I do this mostly in the evening while I go through my RSS feeds on my iPad. If I tweeted all the links as I found them, I’d be sending out a burst of tweets. This would be a shell burst that might overwhelm followers who were awake and I wouldn’t reach any followers who are active at other times.
Ideally I would spread these tweet out over the day but with a focus on the times when Tweriod has told me they’re most likely to be useful. This is exactly what Buffer lets me do. I send the tweets to Buffer and it rations them out to a schedule I set.
Tweeting with Klout
You might have soldiered through all that and thought it’s too complicated. If you do feel that way, maybe pick a couple of ideas and work on those. I can tell you that my Klout score was 40/100 when I started and it’s now about 50. That might not sound too high but wait till you try it till you judge!
What are your favorite tools for promoting on Twitter?
Steven Lewis writes the Taleist self-publishing blog, where you can sign-up for his social media check-up, a free email course showing you easy ways to make sure you’re using social media to maximum effect in promoting your books.Thursday, February 9, 2012
Press Kit for Authors--what to include!
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2011/03/book-marketing-your-online-press-kit/
When you’re launching and marketing your book it can be essential to get attention from the media. It may be big media, niche market media, trade magazines, book reviewers, book bloggers, talent bookers or any number of other representatives of print, electronic, or broadcast media.
It’s your job to make their job easy.
There are many times you’ll want to send information to media contacts. It’s become common for authors to maintain their own media kit on their website, on the site for their book, or on their blog.
It makes sense. You can point inquiries to your Press or Media page, and make available lots of information to make it easy for busy reviewers, editors, reporters or researchers to get basic information on their own schedule.
I’ve been putting together a media kit for A Self-Publisher’s Companion, and studying some of the others I’ve found online.
- For instance, Tim Ferris of The 4-Hour Workweek fame, has a full media kit with press release, book summary and sample interview questions. He also has a large assortment of photos of Tim Ferris to choose from.
- My doctor Marty Rossman just published a book with Crown, a major trade publisher. I took a look at his site for his new book The Worry Solution. In addition to photos of the author and a bio, this page is heavily weighted toward interviews. It features extensive sample subjects for 8 different interviews, and a list of 15 possible interview questions.
- Seth Godin’s new publishing venture, The Domino Project, has, as you might expect, a robust Press page with excerpts, Q&As, and press releases for the enterprise as a whole and each title. Their media kit is a bold and effective 9-page PDF that tells the story of Domino in a compelling style.
- For a self-published author with a lot of experience I took a look at Susan Daffron’s Publishize Press Page. Note that well after publication Susan went back to add awards her book had won so the press page was kept up to date and effective as a tool to sell her book.
What to Include in your Online Press Kit
You can get creative with your press kit, but keep in mind that reviewers will expect certain elements. These include:
- A press release, usually the one you write for the book’s launch.
- Author bio, including previous publications and qualifications to write the book. Include author’s platform information.
- Author photo, and it’s smart to include high-resolution files for print and low-resolution for online use.
- Book photo, with the same resolutions as the author photo.
Many other items can and are added, but keep in mind that throwing more information at people is not always a good strategy to get them to pay attention to your message. Some great additions might be:
- Sample review. These can be very helpful to writers who are in a time crunch, and who isn’t?
- Sample chapter
- Interview questions
- Photos that can be used in a story about the book or its subect
- Reprints or transcripts of interviews about the book
- Testimonials from early readers with authority or celebrity
The easiest way to make your press kit available is to put all the documents into a PDF or a ZIP file and put a download link to the file on your book’s Press or Media page. This page works best when it’s in your navigation, or you provide a link on the home page of your site. The idea is to make it easy to find.
I was surprised to find that a number of writers with books out right now didn’t seem to have a press kit at all. Or it may have been that it was really, really hard to find.
Since we rely on publicity and spreading the word about our work through other people’s networks, it makes sense to me to make sure your press kit is obvious and easy to download.
Where to go for writers....
Did you know?
A lot of the info you look for and wonder about is available to you free of charge on the following blogs, websites, and Facebook pages:
· 3600+ views
· 300+ postings
· News about our members
· News from our members
· News about events and changes in the marketplace
· How to critique tips
· MWG rules and meetings
· 6800+ views
· 400+ postings
· Tips on self publishing
· Tips on marketing
· Tips on building a platform
· Resources for writers
· Calls for Beta readers (and definitions of what a Beta reader is )
· Book giveaways
· QR codes—what they are and why they matter
· Setting up an Amazon Author page –how, where and why
· Ideas for getting published—Creativity Portal and more
· 2000+ views
· 250+ postings
· Tips on selecting a publishing company
· Tips on how to self publish
· Tips on issues in the marketplace for self publishers
· Resources for publishing
· A complete page on the cult, its members, the mass suicide, pictures, and more
· Info on book signings and giveaways
· Resource links for help with cults, mental illness, sexual abuse, etc
· Bibliography
· example of an author media kit
· examples of book media kits
· examples of publication listings
· links to all social media locations for the author
· author to author books reviews
· historical info on the Central State hospital (where Debs mom was) –and why it matters
· Paris pics
· Links to the MWG blog
· Anthology sales
· Sale of Debs books
· Links to resources and author websites
Facebook
· Event listings for our group members
· Announcements and news about members
· News about publishing industry
· Requests for Beta readers
· Requests for Beta readers
· Book giveaways
· Book reviews
· Author events
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
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