Elaine Mansfield is the author of Leaning Into Love: A Spiritual Journey Through Grief (Larson, 2014). Gold Medal Winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award 2015, her memoir captures your heart—from the extraordinary closeness of Elaine’s marriage to how she and Vic transformed their struggle with cancer and despair into a conscious relationship with mortality. After Vic’s death, Elaine leaned into her ongoing love as grief led her through overwhelming emotional and spiritual depths on a journey beyond their time together into her new life. Working closely with Elaine Mansfield during the past several years I observed her as a writer who pulled others to her words using social media. When I review her social media metrics over two years it tells a powerful story about how a book found its audience. More than a year after her book’s release, Elaine’s blogs continue to be routinely shared several hundred times on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. She has more than 1,000 Friends on Facebook, 4,000 followers on Twitter, and 500+ on LinkedIn. And she has engaged with most of them in conversations about the topic of death. When I hear from aspiring authors they have no interest or intention in building an audience platform online I want to introduce them to Elaine and let them hear her story of finding readers. Jill: You have a following and community of readers with whom you engage on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google + that is the envy of many aspiring authors. I know…
It’s tough to keep track of activity on the Twitterverse sometimes. This is how Twitter, or social media in general, draws you in and sucks away your time. The drawback of live streaming, immediately accessible social and media platforms is just that: it’s 24 hours, it’s always on. Inevitably, logging off Twitter means checking out from social media and missing out on conversation points, interesting… [Read More]
Filed Under: automation services, Ifttt, live stream, managing social media channels, notification system, online presence, smartphones, Twitter, virtual assistance
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“A novel, biography, and memoir, all/three going at once.” This is how Kirsten Wasson describes her mother’s voracious literary appetite in the poem “One Way to Read.” The two lines, however, could well have been written to describe the author’s new collection of poems, Almost Everything Takes Forever, published by Antrim House Books. It is a lush, lithe, witty, emotionally frank series of postcards from… [Read More]
Filed Under: Antrim House Books, Elizabeth Bishop, fernweh, Kirsten Wasson, manuscripts, new releases, poetry, Rennie McQuilkin
Austin hosted the 16th Texas Book Festival at the state capitol building October 22-23 with 250 authors presenting and 35,000 in attendance. Los Angeles may boast the much larger Los Angeles Times Festival of Book, which attracts as many as 140,000 visitors; but when you compare LA’s population of 9.8 million to Austin’s 800,000, you see that Austin pulled off a bigger, per capita turn out…. [Read More]
There’s a new bookstore in Athens, Georgia, with a different kind of business model. After four years of planning, learning, getting financing in place and finding the perfect location at 493 Prince Avenue, Janet Geddis opened Avid Bookshop this month. Last Friday night’s grand opening celebration crowded customers into tight corners and out the doors into the streets like a festival. Listen to this podcast… [Read More]
After the endless commencement ceremony, the cap toss, and the droning luncheons with family and friends, comes the panic-induced question asked by the college graduate: What next? Debut author Leigh Stein accurately captures this bewilderment and sense of loss experienced by so many Generation Yer’s post-college in her first novel The Fallback Plan (Melville 2012) due out in January. Esther Kohler- Stein’s Juno-esque protagonist- graduated… [Read More]