Best Seller Authors

Book Marketing, Publishing, Author Resources

Textbooks Will Lead Us Away From Books

Paper books are winding down. We’ll have them around for a long time to come, but the kids going into college now are going to bring the future faster than you think

Joel West postulated these 3 reasons why Amazon will get out of the ebook business

  • Amazon‘s (AMZN) Achilles heel is the proprietary mobi format against everyone else’s e-pub, but if college students are using a book viewer for 4 years and renting books for one semester, this becomes almost a non-issue.
  • Moving from selling dead tree books (with printing costs and inventory risk) to renting e-books will reduce the publishers’ costs dramatically. If publishers don’t share those savings with consumers — given the student and politician outcry about textbook prices — there will be hell to pay. I suspect, however, that most will play games with planned obsolescence in hopes of keeping their margins up.
  • I doubt the e-book reader is a separate category over the long term. To me, it seems obvious that the e-reader will go the way of the pocket camera and the MP3 player as a dead-end stand-alone device.

I think it’s still early. We don’t know who will win the hardware wars

However, every author and publisher needs to look at how to profit from the move away from selling dead trees

Does an Author Need to Build Email Relationships?

email_largethe age of social media, we often hear that email is dead or at least an outdated technology for connecting with your readers.

True, email mailing response is down, but unless you have a huge following online already, you need to have a mailing list and stay in touch with readers and prospective readers.

Even more.. people working in publishing, vendors, media and a large number of readers (your end customers) will still want have a way to connect with you and stay in touch that they are comfortable with. For the time being, that certainly includes email.

I recommend building a database of those that opt in to hear form  you, answering email enquiries as fast as you can, and giving readers in any medium easy ways to close the loop and stay in touch. Communicate on your blog (and others through comments), social media, and email.

To grow your mailing list with people that would like to hear from you, join my FREE Email List Buliding Network

Here’s some help managing the email overload we all face today.

  1. Read Keith Ferrazzi’s blog post on email. These 7 Mistakes to Avoid from a best selling author and master networker, inspired this post
  2. Be careful about auotmatic replies on your email. When I read a “I’m swamped and only read my mail…” message, I question whether the person has the bandwidth to take on new business or grow. A “vacation reply” politely tells others about a temporary hold on responses
  3. Nothing wrong with setting a policy that you’ll check once a day, have reader emails screened or assigned to others. Just be authentic, and remember that each writer took the time to reach out and will appreciate a human response.
  4. Use a ZeroInBox strategy. I’ve increased my own capacity to handle mail volume each time I put strategies like this in place.

Think of email as if you were are store with customers coming in the front door. A busy store will hire help, change pricing, set hours or publish guidelines on signs, but never think of closing the doors when customers are flooding in.

Like the store with vistors, buyers and VIP customers, put policies into place to handle everything.

Most of all, don’t wait till you are on top of the best seller list. Building capacity to handle the crowd will be a key asset in getting you there.

Thanks For Your Tremendous Support..

Product Details
I have a delightful business model. I get to help authors with good books to share reach new markets and readers with their message.

We have some fun, make a living and live for notes like this..

Thank-you for your tremendous support in helping in promoting Dan’s campaign last Tuesday. We reached the Amazon Best Seller list in RiskBuster’s three categories – hitting the #1 spot in Home Based.

Thanks to all our fantastic partners we had terrific campaign results, without the commitment of partners like yourself this would not have been possible!

We look forward to partnering with you again the near future and reciprocating in promotion of your product and service

Joining a book promotion is easy. Most allow just about any author to participate. The only requirement is a basic understanding of the Law of Reciprocity.. that is you will start a powerful attracting force when you GIVE without expectation of immediate return. The more you give, the more you get.

sell books, book marketing, social media promotion, cross promotion

Vegas Author Bio of Warren Whitlock

I was digging through the archives and found this video.

My friend, the late Jim Wilson of VegasBuzzz asked me to lunch one day and next thing I knew he had a camera in my face asking me what I do.

Wish I had some more video of Jim.. but this is a reminder of what he taught me. It only takes a few minutes to create content and share online.

We’ve been researching local search, and the ranking possible from videos like this one here.

Granted, the quality is much.. and on this book marketing blog, it’s a bit over over promotion. Jim grabbed 2 books I’d given him over the years to feature (both best sellers). However, I liked how he put a little music, a couple of slides and made a one take video in a restaurant somewhat interesting.

When Jim posted this on his BIO site, my search engine postion shot up and I got a little rise in traffic. Over time, as we’ve added videos from classes, interviews with best selling authors and book promotion examples, we’ve see a steady increase in traffic from the search engines. Not from one post.. but cumulative from all of them put together.

Go to a site like 12seconds.tv, Ustream.com or utterli.com Post a comment here. Share some of your expertise. You’ll soon be recognized as the expert in your field.

It’s as simple as that.

How To Turn Your Book Into An Audio CD Product

Free Training for authors.. click to register

You put so much into your book.

Not just the time it takes to write and edit, not just the publishing and promotion and marketing of your book. The content in your book represents you, your life experience and everything your had up to the release of your book.

That’s a sizable investment.

Many of our most successful authors report that an audio CD product based on their book has produced more income, created more opportunities for the author and reached people that would have never gotten around to reading their book.

I believe that any author can easily create an audio CD information product from their book, so I’ve asked my friend Mike Stewart, the Internet Audio Guy, to come on a FREE Webinar this week and show you how.

There is no charge for this event. You see, Mike has the contacts and the technology to produce instant audio and video. He has built relationships with hundreds of online entrepreneurs and supplies equipment, software and services for their studios. If you decide you want to buy equipment to make better audio and video, Mike is the guy to see.

But here’s the SECRET.

We know you you will buy from people that you know, like and trust. We don’t need to give you a sales pitch.. in fact both Mike and I have found that most of what you need is in the computer you already own, and you don’t need a high pressure sales pitch when you are ready for new stuff. We’d rather see that you are profitable from the start.

So here’s my promise to you…

Register for the webinar for free. I’ll be there with Mike and we will pour in every bit of information we can. Including STEP BY STEP instructions on how you can produce your own income producing audio CD programs. If you’d like, we’ll let you know how to get more from Mike. If not, we just hope you’ll tell your friends that Warren and Mike give real value when they teach a class.

Here’s how you register.

  1. Make sure you have a computer to connect to the webinar. A Windows or Mac will work fine.
  2. Click on this link to get your codes. We will have an interactive presentation, so seats are limited and you do need the code to get in.
  3. When you click you will see the screen below. Just give us your name and email so we know who is in the session

If you have a question about the program, you can ask in a comment here and I will personally answer.

The training is completely free. All you need is a computer with a live Internet connection.