Best Seller Authors

Book Marketing, Publishing, Author Resources

Books Will Keep Your Brain Alive

One more reason the world need  us authors.. from Utne.com

The Fine Art of Re-reading Books

by Danielle Maestretti

Reading a book

Considering memory loss in the new issue of Urbanite, Richard O’Mara stumbles upon a surprising way to drum up long-buried memories: Re-read a book (in his case, by accident), and uncover a vivid impression of your life at the time of the initial reading.

Continue reading on Utne.com

Best Selling Authors Discuss How to Write a Book That Sells

Profitable Social Media radio special edition for authors this Friday at 10pm Eastern will feature 3 authors who have best selling books, discussing the process they use to create high quality content that readers want when they write a book that sells.

lembergHow to Write a Book That Sells will be hosted by Book Marketing Strategist Warren Whitlock, best selling author of “Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online” the first book on Twitter.com with guests.

  • Lee Pound, co-author of Profitable Social Media and author of 15 books
  • Jennifer Wilkov, author of best sellers and the course Your Book is Your Hook
  • Paul Lemberg, best selling author Be Unreasonable and keynote speaker

The format of the radio show allows authors to log into chat and ask any question about book writing, book marketing, writing a book, social media for authors, online book promotion, or book writing tips and get an instant response from these book marketing experts.

Profitable Social Media airs live Friday night at 10:00 pm Eastern, (7:00 pm Pacific). Listeners can log onto the live chat or dial in to listen by phone. The show is archived and can be found on iTunes under book marketing, Twitter, or Social Media.

Show host Warren Whitlock, or Best Seller Book Marketing blogs about book marketing and promotion, current best sellers, Internet Marketing and social media trends. Bios and contact information of guests, along with additional free resources materials for authors and businesses looking for profitable social media may be found on our Facebook page

7 Mistakes First-Time Book Authors Make

Guest Post by Lee Pound
Lee will be our guest on Profitable Social Media radio on April 9th. Details on the Profitable Social Media show page

Welcome to the Lee Pound International web site.Over 500,000 books are published every year. Yet most of them will never be read by anybody. Instead they sit in the author’s garage or sit for a few weeks in a bookstore and then get destroyed.

Yes, as an author your job is to write your book. However, your job is also to get your book into the hands of your readers. Your job is also to give them a product they will want to read.

Most books fail because the author did a poor job of writing, designing and marketing. I’ve distilled these down into the seven biggest mistakes that cause this to happen.

Writing:

  1. Copying someone else’s material. This is called research. However, when you don’t talk about your own experiences with this material, you will bore your reader.
  2. No stories. Stories give a book its emotional content. They help the author sell his or her ideas by putting those ideas into a believable context.
  3. No call to action. The author must tell the reader what to do with the material he or she has presented.
  4. Poor spelling and grammar. This happens with the author does not make the investment to have the book edited by a professional.

Design:

  1. Bad cover design. If the cover is poorly designed, if it is full of clip art and weird type styles, it will look unprofessional and turn potential readers away.
  2. Bad interior design. If your interior book design is inconsistent, you will again look unprofessional.

Marketing:

  1. Waiting for someone else to market your book. First of all, your book is a marketing tool for your business. It represents you to your potential customers. This is true whether you are writing non-fiction or fiction. Your job is to get your book into the hands of your readers. You must speak, write, sign books, write blogs, send emails, and send out press releases since nobody else will do it for you.

Writing a book is a powerful way to establish yourself as an expert in your market. You are taking months to create your book. Take the time to make it professional before you publish it.

Lee Pound is a writer, book publisher, and writing coach. You can get more information about his programs at http://www.leepound.com. To get a free downloadable copy of his book 57 Steps to Better Writing, go to http://www.freewritingbook.com.

Use Your Blog To Write Your Book

Last week, we featured authors who have been successful with blogs during our Profitable Social Media radio show.

I liked the methods used by DJ Heckes to create her book and asked her to submit here story here for all to read.

How I Wrote FULL BRAIN MARKETING

by DJ Heckes

image I have spent a lot of time reading articles related to marketing, leadership, and economic outlooks and in doing so posted comments with great feedback along the way. I dabbled around in Blog writing in 2007 and 2008 but was not consistent. By mid 2008 I decided to get serious and test my writing ability. I have always been passionate about writing but wanted to be sure I had relevant and original content to write about for others to learn from.

In mid 2008 that is what I did. I sat down and listened to the audiences out in the cyber world through Blogs, Articles, research, and face to face customers an what I heard was that business owners and marketers were starving for knowledge to keep a competitive edge in this hyper competitive environment we all work in.

I researched the most popular topics and selected areas where I felt I had some expertise, which included how to thrive in a downturn economy, and various marketing initiatives that were proven successful in using through my own company as CEO of EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts.

By the end of 2008, I had written several Blogs and found the Top 50 Article Posting Sites and selected a few to test out my Blogs for becoming published articles. Yes, it happened! All of a sudden I was getting link building and link backs with references to my Blogs! This was exciting. I then sat down in December 2008 and created an outline from the Blogs I had started for my new book to write in 2009. Once the outline was finished with relevant leadership and marketing information, I began my journey to become an author and starting January 2, 2009 I went to my office and started spending EVERY Saturday writing unless I had a planned trip or a family commitment to be at. Through this discipline I was able to focus topic by topic and took some of the prewritten Blogs and rewrote them and turned them into actual Chapters. I started first with identifying What makes a good leader. To me, being a good leader is easy, but being a great leader would equate to becoming a “Winston Churchill” type leader.

image Over the next seven months I had become so disciplined and enjoyed writing that I completed my first manuscript draft by July 22nd. I had also been using Social Media (LinkedIn mostly) to reach out to my connections I had built to find a publishing company. Throughout this process, it only took me 72 hours to get some great feedback from the first reach out touch point in social media. I received connections to Authors to interview, publishing companies to interview and spent the next few days making phone calls and person to person conversations. I found four publishing companies and one that had turned me down as my demographic audience was the small business owner. Wow, what a trip this was! I actually enjoyed the conversations with two authors that gave me their stories of how they published their books.

Throughout the interview process, I was ready to send my manuscript off to two to three of the publishing companies. Two publishing companies accepted the book and then I realized the timing that was going to take place with going with a publishing company. I had some book content that could be outdated in a year if I were not careful in selecting the right place to publish my book and timing was everything to me.

I then decided to self publish as that was what many authors had told me was best. You control the timing and the content. Yeah!!!

After I had a copyrighter go through my book and work with me, I was ready to turn the book over to the editing team at the Self Publishing Company (Create Space). Ok, this is when I realized I am really NOT a left brain thinker w hen it comes to the details of Word’s “track changes.” I thought this would put me over the edge in completing the two edit stages with line by line editing throughout the 208 pages written for the book submission.

The editing process was completed by mid October! Next was the technical design process as I wanted control of the book cover and design. After all, I own a company with two talented graphic designers who really wanted to help out with the creative. The technical design was much more fun than the track changes!

By late November I submitted the book again and it was accepted by December 24, 2009! Christmas was wonderful knowing that I had accomplished my dream to be an author but most of all an author for such a well needed book with relevant content for the small business sector.

The book has been available through Amazon.

There are many articles, blogs, and newsletters that offer advice for what business owners should and should not do to grow their businesses in tough economic times. We seem to come across a trend article or tips piece at least once every day. We sift through all the hottest trends in recession and stalled marketing tactics and the rash of strategic opinion articles to come up with our own suggestions of what we should “do” or “not do.”

To make a long story short, Blogging is another valuable resource to build your credibility online. Become the expert through delivering fresh, targeted content. This will attract inbound links and relationship building if you deliver relevant information that can be of value to the person reading the blog. Once you have determined a great way to deliver a blog to the audience of a chosen target market, step it up by posting articles on public sites. Try writing twenty-five tips and publish the article online. There are many sources to publish articles online, but the information MUST be original content and not duplicate content. Write white pages or papers and post them online with links to draw attention to these resource tools. Win an award lately? Write a press release and post all the information online. A good reason to write articles is to increase visibility, establish authority, develop inbound links, and broaden the spectrum of prospects. This enables companies to reach people that may not otherwise be reachable in a particular market. Overall, it is about increasing awareness of your company brand, product, or service.

Once you are comfortable with writing articles, try publishing them. Some popular platforms we use to publish many articles are listed in my book to help you get started to become the author inside you, whether it be Blog writing, Article writing or writing a book!

DJ Heckes, owner and EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts and named 2009 Top Performing CEO in New Mexico, is actively involved in the New Mexico local community and is on the National Board for American Marketing Association and the local board for Albuquerque Independent Business Alliance, in addition to being a member of NAWBO and many other statewide and national organizations.