Friday is a good day for posting a few sites you should know about and tools you should be using as an author. So enjoy and think kindly of me as the temperature in Austin is heading toward the upper nineties!
1. If you’ve not yet registered to publish your blog on Kindle then you should do so today. Here is a great and easy way to do it on Squidoo. I have to say too that Seth Godin mentioned this in his incredible talk at IBPA this year so YOU really should do it!
2. If I were an online book publicist (which I sometimes am) then I would feel incredibly happy to share the link to the Book Bloggers Convention attendees and tell you that you don’t need an online publicist to build your own book blog pitch list from those blogs.
2A. Don’t copy the whole list and then just spam pitch them. Take time to read their blogs, see if your book is a good fit and contact them one at a time. (Of course one would hope this is what PR flaks would do too, but alas, I’m not sure they are as smart as you!)
3. Gee, I wish all those cool blog posts I have could somehow be converted to newspaper-style format, so I could be my own mini-me publisher. Hmm. How can I do that? Try Feedjournal.
4. If I were an author I would be using Muckrack.com to find what journalists are tweeting in my vertical/topic and I would make a list and follow them on my Twitter account.
5. If I were someone who is always trying to figure out other ways to use Twitter (and I am), I might start following the publications I hope to be featured in and anytime they tweet out a new article link, be one of the first ones to go the publication site and comment on the article. If I do it often enough they might even think about using me as an expert for a future story. If I do it without marketing blather and authentically then at the very least I’ve created a way for folks to find me and perhaps visit my blog.
6. If I wanted to save money on news clipping services and use the Google alerts I set up in an even more powerful way, then I would convert all the places I’m mentioned or featured online by using HTML to PDF converter for free.
7. If I had an intern and wanted to be booked on radio shows, I might have them go through this list and see how many are a good fit for my topic and who the producers for the shows are by visiting the web links to the actual station. (Ok, this means you have to do a little bit of sleuthing but is that so wrong?!)
8. If I were an author hoping to get a book review or a writer wanting a book deal I would follow the folks listed under books here.
Now go and conquer all things Web and may the “book-Force” be with you.
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- Image via CrunchBase
Excerpt from release - Nashville, Tenn., November 18th, 2009 – FiledBy (www.filedby.com), the leading online directory of authors, writers, illustrators, photographers and other book contributors, today announced the integration of the Scribd Reader technology into the online toolset provided to its fast growing community of authors and other creators. Scribd (www.scribd.com) the largest social publishing company in the world, facilitates the creation and distribution of web documents that allow anyone to share written materials easily over the Internet. As a result of the agreement, all authors and other book contributors who register and claim their FiledBy site can utilize Scribd’s document reader to publish documents on FiledBy and Scribd simultaneously.
“We integrated Scribd’s technology on FiledBy sites to provide a more powerful, extensible and integrated document viewing platform that can support many file types, improve discoverability and broaden exposure for authors and others on FiledBy,” said Peter Clifton, CEO and co-founder, FiledBy. “This integration also establishes a framework for our authors to engage in social publishing and empowers them with another state of the art way to promote themselves and their work. For authors looking to expand their reach and build their marketing platform online, document posting and sharing on FiledBy and Scribd is a very powerful connection.”
To upload documents, videos, podcasts or other media, authors must be registered and verified on FiledBy. One of the advantages to the new integrated model with Scribd is that only the author themselves or their publisher can publish documents through FiledBy. This provides a level of verification and authority that helps protect copyrighted material. Click here to view a sample document on FiledBy and Scribd.
*If you’ve not yet created an author profile at FiledBy – you absolutely should do it now!
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If you’re an author and you’ve not yet ventured into the newly revamped Amazon Author Central (beta) platform, please, please, please do so now.
At Author Central, you have a bevy of ready-made tools designed by the bookselling and bookreading techno geeks at Amazon. All of these tools empower your to share information about yourself and your work with your readers — you can view and edit your bibliography, add a photo and biography to a personal profile, and use a blog to connect with readers.
Geez Louise, this makes me want to finish my book so I too can be front and Web-face forward on Author Central too!
Don’t miss out on the sample link to Neil Gaiman’s page. And take a moment to imagine him cast in a new part for the Twilight movies. I think he’s really trying to move that mojo with the picture he has up there.:>)
My fave is my client Bill Scheft’s page because Bill is really starting to dig all these new ways to connect with people. Bill is also proof that you can teach an amazing humor novelist and 18 year David Letterman show writer new Web tricks.
Bill will also be a keynote at the Erma Bombeck Writers Conference this year (Twitter: @ebww) and he will be at the Texas Book Festival. (He writes a snappy blog too!)
I also notice at the Texas Book Fest that Buzz Aldrin will be speaking. I’m excited about this. I interviewed him years ago about his science fiction novel in Dallas, and he could not have been more gracious.
My favorite part of the interview was where I stupidly asked him (after weeks of watching old Apollo films for background) why they were doing different gaits across the moon.
“Mr. Aldrin,” I asked, “Did you all try those different gaits across the moon because you wanted to calculate differences between running, skipping, hopping?” (Oy vey, to be a young dumb journalist again.)
And he said (without a smile), “For God-sakes no. Young lady, we were on the moon! We were skipping because we were on the moon!” (Duh!)
He also had a great perspective on being the second man on the moon.
Buzz at the time was also in deep planning about his idea for a tourist service around space travel. I’m going to have to dig up the whole interview and post it as a PDF on the blog now.
Speaking of new frontiers, don’t forget to register on another fantastic author platform and one of my own personal faves – Filedby.com . If I was still a technology journalist my prediction would be that in two years from now, this is really the only author community you will need to be on.
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