Plug Your Book! by Steve Weber (books to read to be successful .txt) π
Many of the new readers liked Touching the Void so much, they wrote rave reviews on Amazon's site. These "amateur" book reviews, written by real climbers and armchair explorers, resonated deeply with the next wave of shoppers. More sales, more good reviews.
Ten years after the book's launch, Internet-powered word of mouth did something that no team of marketing wizards could do--it landed Touching the Void on the bestseller lists. The story was adapted for an acclaimed docudrama. Simpson, his writing career turbocharged, followed up with four successful adventure books, a novel, and lecture tours.
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An easy way to automate this is to open a free account at #www.Feedburner.com# and enable its free Pingshot feature.
More blogging fine points:
Write in the first person. Never talk about yourself as a different being.
Write keyword-rich headlines. Give people a reason to start reading.
Hook your audience in the first sentence. Ask a question or pose a challenge.
Don't get too preachy. Blog communication isn't top-down, it's a conversation.
Focus on you, _ we_ and us.
Don't change your blog's domain address; it's easy to lose your audience this way.
Tell the truth.
Read lots of blogs.
Link liberally to other blogs. Your post can include an excerpt from the other blog in quotation marks, but don't include more than a paragraph or two--more than that could get you accused of copyright violation.
Link to your previous posts.
Don't be boring. Break some crockery. A good blog takes sides.
Don't rant on side issues outside your blog's focus. Your audience will tire of this quickly.
Break news.
Be authentic.
Tell stories. Have a conversation.
Vary your sentence length. Frequently.
Selecting your blog publishing tool#Most bloggers don't have special blogging software installed on their PC, but work on their blog from within a Web browser. Here are the most popular blogging services:
Blogger.com.# Owned by Google since 2003. It's free and easy. There's an add-on program enabling you to post to your blog from Microsoft Word. You can use Blogger's free Web space, Blogspot.com, but it's best to keep your content on a domain you control, like YourBookTitle.com. Do this by using Blogger's FTP feature. For instructions: #Help.Blogger.com/bin/topic.py? topic=8917.# Other blogging systems have similar options: You can publish free on their Web space, or publish on your own domain. TypePad.com.# TypePad is a flexible and professional-looking platform, but takes a bit longer to learn than Blogger. Still, you'll have many options for personalizing your blog without having to learn HTML computer code. Basic service costs $4.95 a month; the Plus level costs $8.95 a month and gives you up to three blogs hosted on your own domain. A 30-day free trial is available. WordPress.com.# Set up a free blog, or upgrade to a fuller-featured service. All that's required to begin is a user name and e-mail address. Advertising-supported blogs#A free account at an advertising-subsidized site is another option, but you'll have less control over the design, and the advertising can distract readers:
Loyal readership is key to your blog's success, so make it easy for first-time visitors to keep reading. One of the simplest ways for readers to receive your blog posts is by e-mail subscription.
FeedBlitz.com and Feedburner.com operate two popular, free blog-to-e-mail services. Both provide a snippet of code you can insert on your blog to display a sign-up box or button where readers can provide their e-mail address. Subscribers receive an e-mail digest of any new blog posts, and can click through to your site to read more.
A subscription service makes it more likely that readers will stay with you because they won't need to remember to return to your Web site. An e-mail service is a simple solution for your readers who might not understand how to use Bloglines or other newsreaders.
Only about 20 percent of blog readers understand newsreaders, "so if you're not using e-mail, you're missing 80 percent of your potential audience," says Phil Hollows, chief executive of FeedBlitz.
FeedBlitz's free service also includes some reporting tools showing how many of your e-mails are opened and which of your post headlines readers click most. Knowing which of your posts gets the biggest response is a valuable insight, showing you what content readers value most.
Some authors and publishers who used to publish monthly e-mail newsletters have abandoned their newsletters and now deliver similar content in smaller, more frequent chunks using blog-to-e-mail.
E-mail service also provides you with a valuable business asset. You'll have access to those readers directly, so you can send special messages for events like publication dates and book tours. This is why many bloggers encourage readers to sign up for e-mail delivery: It provides an automatic marketing channel for special messages about you and your book, without having to manually collect contact information by some other means.
The blog-to-e-mail services provide a fully automated double opt-in process, so there's no danger of your blog posts or occasional promotional messages being mistaken for spam.
ProfilesBlogging systems such as Google's Blogger make it simple for you to post a Profile page, where you can enter a photograph, short biography, and additional contact information. If you think your photo will not damage your book sales, you should include it on your blog. Your readers will feel a firmer connection if they can see your photo.
With the right details added, profiles can serve as a makeshift "press room" until you have one ready. Authors who already have books on the market sometimes use their Amazon profile as the profile for their personal blogs.
Author blog platforms up closeAn author with a popular blog has a valuable platform, a way of cutting through the noise and clutter. It's a direct channel to your audience, the same kind of asset that enables network TV news anchors to write bestselling memoirs.
Blogs aren't magic, though. They can't make a losing book into a winner. Plenty of blog-based books have flopped because the publishers mistakenly believed a blog audience would automatically translate into demand for a weak book.
Some publishers remain skeptical of blogs as a vehicle for book promotion. Frequent questions are:
Who would buy a book when they can read it for free?
Will blogging distract the author from writing a good book?
Could the blog exhaust interest in the book before it's available?
The reality is, online content makes it much easier for the audience to discover a book and develop an appetite for it. Is it possible for a single author to promote a single title using a simple blog? Many who have done it well have had tremendous success:
Business www.LongTail.com. # The Long Tail, a bestselling 2006 business book, originated with a Wired magazine article that grew into a blog. The Long Tail idea is that niche products are becoming increasingly important, and someday the niches might account for more aggregate sales than the occasional blockbuster books, movies and other products.The magazine article drew a huge reaction, so author Chris Anderson continued his research as an "open source" experiment in book development. He shared his latest ideas with blog readers, who responded with more ideas, tested his analysis, and led him in new directions. The blog's readership grew among a cross section of publishing, retailing and technology enthusiasts, assembling a built-in audience for the book.
Even as his 2006 book tour took him to Europe and back, Anderson continued updating the blog, where the Long Tail conversation continues today.
HumorLike most "overnight successes," this one actually resulted from years of steady craftsmanship. With no professional writing credentials or audience, Ouzounian began posting a sexist, profane, politically incorrect Web site using the pseudonym Maddox. By 2006, his daily readership reached 150,000, and a specialty publisher persuaded him to compile the blog material into a book.
When his book was ready, Ouzounian needed only to press a button to create a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon: sending an e-mail to his registered readers, telling them his book was for sale.
Maddox is one of several young amateur comedy writers who've struck gold in book publishing after proving their material on a blog. Other recent bestsellers include_ Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book_, by Robert Hamburger (a pseudonym), I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell by Tucker Max, and The Modern Drunkard by Frank Kelly Rich.
Some of the humor bloggers try to appear as adolescent and rude as possible. For example, Hamburger's book description on Amazon begins this way:
Dear Stupid Idiots,
A lot of you have been saying that I don't know anything about REAL ninjas. But that's a bunch of bull crap! You dummies don't know anything. And maybe YOU should get a life. I bet a lot of you have never even seen a girl naked!
#www.TimBete.com. # Here's a humor blog for grown-ups. Tim Bete uses this site to publish his award-winning parenting humor column, previously featured in the Christian Science Monitor _ and several parenting magazines. He used the blog as a launch pad for his 2005 book _In the Beginning ... There Were No Diapers. #Politics#
Greenwald went from rookie blogger to bestselling author in six months.
Arts and crafts# www.52Projects.com. # Arts and crafts are a natural for bloggers with a knack for teaching. Author Jeff Yamaguchi, publisher of the popular crafts blog 52Projects, translated the success of his blog into a spin-off book_, 52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity_, published by Perigee. The book's success fueled further traffic to his blog, and spawned an online community. Diaries
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