If you are an author who wants to get published, you need a website, blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media platforms. Publishers expect the author to play the primary role in social media marketing. You can hem and haw, but most book professionals are going to insist you build your author brand online. Luckily, Swenson Book Development, LLC assists authors with their platform development. We can design, develop, administer, and manage your social media platforms for you and teach you how to use them effectively so you can spend less time learning technical code and more time writing. There is a catch. If you want to publish and sell books, you have to learn the language. Read, research, and listen. Pay attention. Learn about potential market resources. Authors create the success of their book in sales. So today I want to talk about a growing resource for authors, agents, publishers, booksellers, and readers. I’m talking about tapping in to a different audience, an under-appreciated audience. Take a break from reading and start listening. Blog Talk Radio Books. It’s an emerging forum for connecting book lovers to one another. It creates topical or fan-based communities connecting writers, readers, and publishers. Blog Talk Radio Books is a host for podcasts (they call them “shows”) all about books and book-related topics. You can listen to shows online or you can host your own. It’s easy to get started; just click through a list of hosts or recently aired shows. Shows…

Writing is not easy. As a developmental editor I have had the pleasure of working with fine artists, storytellers, public speakers, radio journalists, scientists, and college professors on book projects.For many, their authority as an author is based on skills and talents other than writing. Here are some tips I gathered from other professionals that may help others stand on their authority based on expertise and/or experience: Fine artists. The media may be different, but writers and fine artists use composition to organize the elements in a work. Writing, like art, begins with point-of-view as the organizing principal for conventional compositions. The subject comes into focus and the artist must lead the audience’s eyes around all elements before leaving the work. Writing a book manuscript is a hefty composition and requires organization to guide the reader. Sketch your composition, create the outline, and consider what you want the audience to know and in what order. Storytellers. The oral performance of an original story can be a magical experience. But the transcription of an oral performance rarely translates directly to the page for the reader’s eye. Storytellers write for the ear. They work on the craft by listening to their own voice and perfect it for the ears of an audience.  To turn those stories into the printed version, there is a translation needed for the deaf eyes of readers. The hand gestures, the tone or volume of vocal delivery, and the intensity of a live performance are lost on a printed…