Are you ready to pick a WordPress theme for your new website and blog? If you’ve been following our Saturday social media for authors blog series and completed the first six “baby steps”, you already have a domain name, webhost, and content management system ready to go. Hopefully you’ve found time over the holidays to do a bit of window shopping and figured out how… [Read More]
Ready to begin blogging in 2012? Have you completed Steps 1-5? If so, it’s time to install WordPress.org, following the instructions provided by your webhosting service provider. If BlueHost.com is your provider, it is a simple, one-click installation. Word Press’ video tutorials offer a quick and efficient way to set up a basic design and utilize important features by familiarizing you, the new user, with dashboard commands… [Read More]
Design and Content Development for Your Author Website Before you get lost in the design details of a WordPress website, it’s important for authors to keep in mind the type of site they want to build. For most of our clients, we recommend a site that says “successful, professional author.” But beyond this general aesthetic, what will your site actually look like? What will it… [Read More]
Today I list 10 times when an author of non-fiction might need a book development editor. If you plan to write a book and your goal is publication, then you might find the professional services of a book development editor valuable. 1. Before you begin writing the manuscript, take your concept to a book development editor. Don’t write the book before you’ve done your business… [Read More]
Keeping Up With the Joneses in the Design and Development of Your New Website and Blog Over the last three Saturdays, we have outlined preliminary steps for building an author website and blog. Today we talk about design. But before picking out tiles and swatches for your new electronic home, look at your neighbors’ houses. Do some window shopping. Compare yourself to the Joneses by… [Read More]
Baby Step 3: Build your author online presence by making executive decisions in answer to the following three questions. Who will provide you with internet service? Who will provide webhosting service for your website/blog? What content management system is right for you as an author? Internet service providers are those who bring the internet into your home or office. This may be your phone company,… [Read More]
So you’ve searched Google and Go.Daddy to determine that your author name is available as a domain name. Great. But before you buy a domain name and begin building the foundation for your electronic home, open a Google account and set up an administrative email address through Gmail, using your author name. This is the name you will use consistently across all communication formats—print and… [Read More]
Our blog’s “Gone Local” series aims to explore who and what the Ithaca area’s literary community has to offer. Be it bookstores, publishers, or local authors, each contributes invaluably to the bookish zeitgeist. Recently, Swenson Book Development contacted Larson Publications (of Burdett, NY) to get an independent publisher’s views on the literary business, the craft, and the community. Larson Publications started in 1982 as a… [Read More]
Creating Your Author Platform: Your Name is Your Brand Authors’ names are their brands, and satisfied readers exercise brand loyalty. They shop for titles by author name, and when they come across a real find, they recommend it to friends. Those friends do the same, and the chain continues. But a book is more than a cover or jacket. It is the embodiment of a… [Read More]
Journalist Cathryn Prince signs book contract with Palgrave Macmillan. Stalin’s Last Torpedo by Cathryn J. Prince—the little known story of history’s largest maritime disaster—is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. Prince plans to write it largely through the perspective of the surviving eyewitnesses. At the end of World War Two, Soviet torpedoes sank the Wilhelm Gustloff—a cruise liner turned escape ship—sending roughly 9,000 German refugees to… [Read More]
