Today I’m going to share my top 10 digital tools for the business of being an author. Most of these are free and all of them are easy to use. I recommend them to you because I use them and find them valuable and think you will too. (1) WordPress for website and blogging – Hands down there is no better platform for authors to blog. And it’s free. Open source code, it is easy to download to any webhost and if you can read the documentation or watch the video tutorials you can build a site yourself, or have us set it up for you and then you can easily manage and administer it yourself. (2) MailChimp for newsletters and RSS blog delivery. This service is free up to 2,000 names on your email list. If you want a professional looking newsletter that reflects your brand and personalized to your readers this is how to do it. And it plays nice with WordPress. There’s a plugin and your blog is delivered to subscribers from your website. You can create and import lists directly from LessAnnoyingCRM which I mention below. (3) Google Alerts. Set up an alert for your author name. Using it is not an act of vanity. It’s called image management. Yes, you want to know when anyone anywhere at any time posts something on the internet using your name or your book title. You can set up google alerts for keywords, names, places, phrases, and let…
If you are an author who seeks an agent or publisher, you know that it is important to have an audience platform. What’s an audience platform? Historically we think of the soapbox a speaker stood upon at a busy intersection of streets hawking one’s ideas or wares. Print advertisers have long based their rates on the size of their circulation, or the “reach” of the… [Read More]
Filed Under: Bookscan, Facebook Page Insights, free tools, Google Analytics, Hubspot's Marketing Grader, keyword search, Klout, Nielsen, social media metrics, target audience, twitalyzer
No Comments
How does one combine memoir, ethnography, self-discovery, and history, while contributing to two important bodies of literature—Holocaust and psychotherapy—in an eminently readable book? Do what Leila Levinson has done in Gated Grief: The Daughter of a GI Concentration Camp Liberator Discovers a Legacy of Trauma (Cable Publishing, 2011). The breadth of her project is evident even in the awards it has won—one for women’s memoir… [Read More]
The biggest secret of the best web users is not a browser, or a program, or a web site. The biggest secret is two keys that have been on your keyboard from the very moment you got a computer – Ctrl-f. To those in the know about Ctrl-f, the idea of not knowing might strike you with surprise and pity. How, you may ask, is… [Read More]
I’m going to ‘fess up: I don’t read enough nonfiction for pleasure. Fiction has always been more compelling to me. The fantasy, the adventure, the imagination, the characters – this is the stuff of storytelling. But there are some exceptional books of non-fiction and memoir that trump my fandom of fiction. Here’s my top 4 picks for NF and memoir. These books are not only… [Read More]
Filed Under: addiction, appetites: why women want, Azar Nafisi, beautiful boy, book selections, Caroline Knapp, compelling narrative, cultural studies, David Sheff, female hunger, feminism, forbidden books, Jon Ronson, memoir, Nic Sheff, Nonfiction, psychiatry, psychology, psychopathy, reading lolita in tehran, reviews, the psychopath test
Even the most poignant blog post is virtually unreadable without a little visual appeal. On one hand, text matters most because content is KING of SEO. However, the queen in this strategic game toward publishing flanks the important part of your content – key words, headings, and links generate your SEO. Your ideas are what will make people keep coming back and your visitors come… [Read More]