If you have been following our social media series and keeping abreast of the free advice Swenson Book Development LLC has to offer, please take note: this post trumps its predecessors. Search engine optimization, metadata, plugins, widgets, and pretty blogs all can improve web traffic and generate sales conversions. Nothing, however, is as important as the content on your website. Presentation and formatting makes a difference but it’s the content that keeps visitors coming back. Nothing but truly compelling, relevant, valuable content encourages visitors to sign up for e-mail updates, subscribe to your blog feed, follow you on your social networks, or share your website with friends. And if you can’t do any of these things… well… what’s the point? I know authors don’t like to spend time on the “new” social media. Yes, it’s less time spent on writing books; there’s no disagreement there. But consider this: how do you, as an author, expect to sell books to an audience if you don’t spend time cultivating one? The challenge of living in a competitive, consumer-driven society is the number of options available to the people. In America, we are blessed with the power to pick and choose information, whether fact or fiction. We can choose C-SPAN, NBC, or Comedy Central. A newspaper, a magazine, a website, a blog, or perhaps nothing at all. Print, PDF, or e-book. Perhaps this is a cultural Achilles heel: given the vast amount of information available to us, in combination with its ease of…
“Caught Between Worlds is a fantastic story set in Iraq in 1980 about a kidnapping—except instead of a kid, it’s his father who is taken hostage when war breaks out with Iran. Tom O’Hara’s father is taken by armed militants shortly after they move to Baghdad. Grieving the loss of his mother a year ago, Tom relies on his memories of her, an anthropology professor, and… [Read More]
Filed Under: Alexander the Great, Arab culture, BookBaby, Caught Between Worlds, Caught Between Worlds: Tom Mikhail and Alexander the Great, self-publishing, Therese Tappouni
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When Jill Swenson consulted with Jeff Selingo on his new book proposal two years ago, no one could have imagined a college admissions bribery scandal involving Hollywood celebrities would unfold. Or that a global pandemic would fundamentally alter the higher education landscape for students and their parents. Jeff Selingo’s book, Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions, will be released on September 15. From… [Read More]
Colloquial – adjective Characteristic of or appropriate to ordinary or familiar conversation rather than formal speech or writing; informal (Dictionary.com) Using conversational style (Merriam-Webster) (Of words and expressions) Informal and more suitable for use in speech than in writing (Cambridge) “The noun colloquy was first used in English to refer to a conversation or dialogue, and when the adjective colloquial was formed from colloquy it… [Read More]
For nearly 20 years, Margot Bloomstein has shaped the content strategy industry. She’s the author of Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project (Morgan Kaufmann, 2012) and the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy based in Boston. Bloomstein developed the message architecture-driven approach to content strategy now popular with many practitioners. Recognized in 2015 as one of Boston’s… [Read More]
“Caught Between Worlds is a fantastic story set in Iraq in 1980 about a kidnapping—except instead of a kid, it’s his father who is taken hostage when war breaks out with Iran. Tom O’Hara’s father is taken by armed militants shortly after they move to Baghdad. Grieving the loss of his mother a year ago, Tom relies on his memories of her, an anthropology professor,… [Read More]