Writing & Marketing Books

Books Books

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Following are just some of the great tools and tips I believe could be useful to you. Let me know and also, send us yours:

  1. Wonderful, free, 30-time trial writing tool-http://www.literatureandlatte.com/index.php
  2. Jenny Blake, an author and Googler, graciously agreed to share her spreadsheet with Seth Godin’s Domino Project readers. You can find it here in Google docs format and here in Excel (as a download).*
  3. http://www.wordnik.com/ It’s an online dictionary which shows real-time, real-life definitions of words and their meaning in context. Much better than a traditional dictionary, with more than 6 million words (and counting) compared to under 1 million for a traditional single volume dictionary.
  4. A source for FREE press releases …..http://www.developer-resource.com/how-to-post-press-releases.htm
  5. www.prlog.org. (free online press release service)
  6. If you get on twitter you can send messages directing people to your release. Twitter also provides a place on your profile to give links to your website.
  7. If you are selling on amazon … send out your permalink to your book with a message. People will check it out!
  8. Check out a site called Tag My Book - If your book is on amazon, joining and participating in tagging with other authors will make a big difference in the placement of your book on the search list.
  9. Book publishing on the Kindle? Go here: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin
  10. Book publishing on the Nook by Barnes & Noble? Go here: http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/pubit_app/bn?t=pi_reg_home

Resources

From Writers Digest

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*Here’s Jenny’s description:

Thousands of books are published every year, and yet many authors feel like they have to figure out the road to promotion alone. Authors (together with their publicists and agents) work tirelessly to reinvent the promotion wheel every single time. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but there can be a more streamlined way to get organized.

I knew I needed a way to track the hundreds of book promotion action items and ideas floating around in my head — everything from website development to book tour planning to advance copy recipient lists. I created this spreadsheet as a way of organizing the hundreds of things an author thinks about on the road to book launch, in hopes of making others’ lives easier in what can be an overwhelming and stressful process.

Thanks Jenny.

Hash Tags for Books – #About

This site was inspired by a post from Ian Greenleigh which was then featured in Seth Godin’s post at the Domino Project.

The idea put forward by Ian is that all books should have an official hashtag for use on Twitter. We think this is a brilliant idea that will help authors to engage with their audience and allow people to join the conversations happening around books.

There are a couple of limitations to using the Twitter search however:

  1. The search only brings back the last couple of days results for a particular hashtag
  2. How to find the relevant or official hashtag for a book (assuming the author or publisher has not included it somewhere on the book)

Book#Hashtags solves these issues by storing Tweets which means that you can see the full conversation for a book at any time and by aiming to become the place to find the official hashtags for your favourite books.

We are aware that the list of books on the site is still quite small but that is something we are working on by reaching out to authors and publishers to provide unique hashtags for each of their books.

What makes a good hashtag?

A good hashtag tries to satisfy several requirements:

  1. Easy to use – quick to type, doesn’t use up too many of your 140 characters, basically, the shorter the better.
  2. Unique – you want to be able to create a tag that identifies your book tweets and nothing else so that people can find the conversation without having to wade through tweets about unrelated topics.
  3. Consistent – once a tag is chosen stick with it. The conversation becomes diluted if multiple tags are being used for the same topic/book.

A naming convention that works well, and is already being used by some publishers, is to create a hashtag using the first letter of each word in the book title and then adding the name of the publisher to this.

For example Poke the Box by Seth Godin at the Domino Project is using the hashtag #ptbDomino.

Calling all authors and publishers!

If you are an author or a publisher and you would like your book and hashtag included on the site then use the add book/hashtag page or get in touch.

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