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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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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eBook.com eBook Club members can choose their favorite authors, publishers and even specific titles and display these on their very own eBook home page which comes bundled with a unique URL (Web site Address). Members can share their unique web address with friends and family through social network sites, blogs, their own web site or just by email.

As a bonus, eBook.com eBook Club members receive 25% discount coupons on eBooks from major publisher such as Wiley, McGraw Hill, Random House, Harper Collins and Hachette. There is no cost associated with becoming an eBook.com eBook Club member.

eBook.com offers readers the freedom to read their favorite eBooks anywhere, any time… but in totally different way than they’ve ever read before. The end user is able to save their eBook onto a laptop, Netbook, PC and Mac and even onto a USB drive and read their eBook at home, at work, on the train or plane and even on their holiday.

Think books without boundaries… A library available to you anywhere, any time…

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While you’re waiting check out Mark Effinger’s company Rich Content and read his company story. We all know I’m a giant fan of folks using PRWeb so there’s an interesting piece on it too at the site.

Check back on Monday!

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Will post several tips, snippets and links during the week to catch you up on the conference and all the really great wisdom the agents were willing to impart!

The conference due to Cyndi Hughes and her staff just was phenomenal. Do not let people tell you that publishing is dead, agents don’t care about you and that you’ll never get your book published! These are definitely tough times, but stay true to your goals, work really hard, write tons and keep forging ahead!

“May the force with be with you.”

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Amazon is not-so-quietly building a wall between itself, its competitors, and open e-book formats. It’s time to show them that those of us who seek e-book readers without boundaries will not stand for their market monopolization and Soviet-style platform containment.Mr. Bezos, Tear Down This Wall, May 2009

You should read the whole article as it’s important in terms of Amazon and Kindle.

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Here’s an excerpt from the announcement, “AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers. “

Here is the link for all the information from Amazon.

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So what is the news on Beck? He inked a deal with Simon and Schuster as reported by The Wall St. Journal and other outlets, which brings Beck a publishing deal described by the Journal as, “a perk that publisher has traditionally reserved solely for its most important writers, such as Stephen King.”

Beck receives a smaller advance, substantial share of the profits and has secured more creative control over how the books are marketed etc. The deal also extends to different formats including an ebook, an audiobook and a new non-fiction title.

And just in time for XMAS, Beck’s children’s picture book release, The Christmas Sweater. If S&S really wanted to go all out with that children’s book they would include a set of red, white and blue knitting needles and a pattern for creating the most magnificent and patriotic sweater anyone has ever seen, in the tiny size of your child’s Ken or Barbie(TM) dolls.

Humor aside, the deal represents how publishers are trying to stay afloat in the competitive market of publishing. I think actually that the more adaptive publishers can be in terms of these deals, the better off the publishing world is overall. (Whether ye be democrat or republican! We all like to read books and want them to stay around!)

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