It’s a huge and common mistake to fiddle around with possible book titles and expect a bolt of lightning to hit when you finally spot “the one.” Often the one you fall in love with is the title no one else understands – or worse, gives entirely the wrong impression of the book. On the other hand, sometimes a million-dollar title needs to grow on you. For those reasons, … [Read more...]
How to Find an Endless Supply of Best-selling Ideas for Your Nonfiction Book Title
Feel stumped when it’s time to create your book title? There’s no need to stare helplessly at a blank page or blank screen. Instead, jump-start your creation of a title by looking at successful books on today’s best-seller lists and using the patterns you can identify in those titles to spark your own ideas, tailored for your own book’s content and focus. For example, … [Read more...]
How to Compile Newsletter or Blog Articles into a Book People Will Pay For
Got content? If you regularly provide tips, advice, case studies or the like in a free newsletter or ezine or on your blog, you may be able to repackage these articles into a free-standing product that readers would happily pay for. Whether your audience is parakeet owners, paralegals or paranoid landlords, if your information can hang together usefully for that group, and … [Read more...]
Creative Branding Techniques for Introverted Authors
Introverts are people who live on the quiet side of life, who would rather sit at home and draw or read than go to a party. They’re not the ones who readily schmooze a meeting, shaking hands and nudging shoulders with everyone or squeeze their way into a huddle of strangers at a business conference. Instead, introverts thrive by making the most of their talents, such as … [Read more...]
Kindle Publishing: Why and How to Create a Marketing Plan for Your Kindle Ebook
A very experienced information marketer I know has ventured into Kindle publishing of both fiction and nonfiction. When I asked her what she was doing off Amazon to promote her Kindle ebooks, she said that aside from enrolling her works into Amazon’s KDP Select program, which allows her to make her books free five days every 90 days, she was doing nothing and had no plans for … [Read more...]
Lessons from Napoleon Hill for a Million-Dollar Book Title
Long ago, pioneering self-help author Napoleon Hill was struggling to name his forthcoming book. Neither he nor the publisher were satisfied with their tentative title, The Thirteen Steps to Riches. Although Hill had thought up more than 500 other titles, they simply didn't have a title worthy of the book. Finally the publisher got impatient and called up Hill. "If you can't … [Read more...]
From Ebook to Print Book: Five Pitfalls
Has anyone else noticed a trend of books, both self-published and from commercial publishers, that were originally ebooks and have not completely shaken the unfortunate signs of their origin? 1. Since ebooks can be sold easily at 80-100 pages, but print books cannot, the book version gains length through appendices that take up one-third of the page count. Sometimes the … [Read more...]
Angling Especially for TV? Here’s How to Snag TV Publicity
Some publicity seekers find TV the toughest medium to crack. Whether or not that’s true, it can also be the toughest medium in which to pull off a masterful appearance. Factors that have little or no impact on how well you come across print can sabotage your effectiveness on television. For example, when Caroline Kennedy attempted to explain why she wanted an appointment to … [Read more...]
Author Self-Promotion Tools: Three Types of Sound Bites for Authors
A sound bite is a word morsel, a phrase that offers pleasure and surprise as it expands in the listener’s ear or the reader’s mind. To help promote your book, create sound bites to use during media interviews, in your blog, newsletter and press releases, as well as in your book. Any dictionary of quotations contains well-worn but still effective sound bites from authors of … [Read more...]
7 Keys to Getting Book Blurbs
"But I don't know anyone important or influential," protested a client recently when I suggested he get some high-powered quotes for his to-be-published book. You don't need to be a familiar name or face to someone to request comments on your book (or on your business). Ordinary mortals whom I know have received blurbs from luminaries like Senator Bob Dole and the Dalai … [Read more...]