Another selection of good articles to help indie authors with their publishing projects. I hope that you’ll find something helpful among this week’s picks.
Miral Sattar on Media Shift
How to Put Together a Marketing Plan for Your Book
“The first thing authors should do before doing any type of marketing is to put together a marketing plan for their book. This marketing plan will help you decide whether you’ll blog and have a presence on social media, and it’ll help you organize your outreach strategy for reviews.”
Sandra Beckwith on Build Book Buzz
Are you making these mistakes with your Amazon book description?
“What’s the first thing you do when you search for a book on Amazon and find one that could be just what you want or need? …
If you’re like most, you read the Amazon book description at the top of the page.”
John Doppler on How-to For Authors
Amazon Sales Rank: Taming the Algorithm
“We’re all familiar with Amazon’s sales rank, those tantalizing numbers that have driven authors to obsessively revisit their pages over and over in hopes of seeing their book climb through the ranks.”
Frances Caballo on Social Media Just For Writers
Social Media Basics and How to Engage
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is a series of web-based strategies designed to increase visitors to your website so that your website will place well in Google searches. Historically, SEO has been used heavily to boost traffic to websites. But guess what? Social media has become increasingly important in any SEO formula.”
Lynne Cantwell on Indies Unlimited
What I Learned as a Book Cover Contest Judge
“Art is one of those things for me. In school, I was an A or B student in everything but art. (Well, and physical education. But so far, nobody’s expected me to do pushups for my books, thank goodness.) So imagine my dismay when I realized I was going to have to design covers for my books. Luckily, I have a couple of friends who are much better in graphic arts than I am, as well as two daughters who know their way around Photoshop. I treasure their advice to this day.”
Too Good To Miss
Andrew Rhomberg on Digital Book World
It’s the Cover, Stupid! Why Publishers Should A/B Test Book Covers
“Never judge a book by its cover. So the saying goes, yet consumers do it all the time. Every publisher and bookseller knows that covers sell books. But do consumers also form expectations from looking at the cover? Well, based on the results of some of the initial reader analytics data at Jellybooks, we think they do.”
Photo: pixabay.com
You know what, Joel Friedlander… I subscribe to your blog. But sometimes I find, you are recycling articles that are old news, old attitudes and only a few suggestions may or may not work in today’s market. This may be just a quirk in my character, but I like to know who I’m listening to up front. Do you realize your photo is all over this page, but a new visitor only knows your name if one visits “About?” I clicked over to Sandra’s Blog, posted in 2010. Blamed thing is six years old. And Sandra doesn’t introduce herself in the article, either. Has her photo on the banner. That is it. I’m reminded of a work experience I had several decades ago…before the Internet, before we had words in our lingo such as social media, blogs, Google, Twitter and Facebook. The company I worked for was installing a state of the art media room. Those of us in middle management, or executive secretaries or inventory clerks were pulled into service as guinea pigs to assess sound, light, seating level, podium presentation. The communication experts told us: “This is not like writing a business letter on which is printed the company logo and a name is signed at the bottom. Everybody in the audience won’t know you. Stand behind that podium, state your name, what you do, and and what your message is–then deliver it.” Made sense to me then, and even more sense to me now. Just sayin’…
Jackie,
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “recycling articles” because there are no recycled articles on my blog. “This Week on the Blogs” articles were posted within the last week.
My photo does not appear anywhere on this page, so I’m not sure what you are looking at.
What Sandra (Beckwith?) does on her blog is her business, so ask her about her practices. Her article linked here was published on April 6, 2016.
So Jackie, I’m confused. You say the articles are old and recycled, but it’s obvious they are not. You say my photo is everywhere, but it does not appear on this page. Then you say people should introduce themselves, but I’m the author of 1,500+ articles on this site, and have a robust “About” page.