eBookGuru.org

#7 Gathering All Your Friends Around

OK, you’ve finally got some people following you around. (Relax it’s just me and about 1000 of your closest fans!) It may be that manly body spray or the pheromones that you put on this morning, but whatever; it’s working for you. We’re here and we want to know where you are going to be. You need to make sure that you are SPECIFIC when you tell us where you are hanging out.

* Instead of, “Hey, I’m going to be over at AJ’s blog tomorrow, why don’t you stop on by!” Consider the following. “Hey guys, I’m going to be over at AJ’s blog tomorrow (www.ajbestwrites.com) The blog post is going up sometime around 8am and I will be answering questions on and off throughout the day. So stop by and see me! I need all the support I can get!”

When you give all the pertinent information make sure to include everyone in there. There may be people who honestly don’t know who I am. (I know, I know, I can’t imagine it either, but seriously they don’t!) And there are people where you do your promo work who have never been by AJ Best’s website (shock of all shocks since I haven’t gotten it up yet!) and don’t know when the blog normally posts. So tell them these things. Maybe AJ is a night owl and likes to have her posts run at night, so your friends and followers may end up confused and lost in a time warp. (You may stop dancing now, we are not at a showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show! Attention here people, attention!)

* Signatures lines baby, signature (sig) lines! Now don’t get over zealous here. I have seen some sig lines that are actually longer than the email message that the author sent me. That is a little bit much. If your audience gets bored after two lines then you have just over two lines too many! So keep it to the point. Where do you REALLY want to have them come see you? Where do you spend the vast majority of your time working the crowds? Start with the most important thing first your website. They have to know where to find your important information. Then list things in order of importance from there — blogs, and then social networks. Now let’s say you have a MySpace page, and a Facebook, but spend 85% of your time at MySpace, well for goodness sake, put that one in your sig tag and leave out Facebook. No need to clutter it with everything else. And if you have 12 lines of text about all of your books that you have out, do you really think that a flashing neon sign flashing the book covers, your name AND your website will get them to pay more attention to you? All things in moderation.

* OK, so you have the readers hooked on you, and they are on your website. They are searching frantically for your contact information so they can tell you just how wonderful you really are. Hold on, they can’t find it? It’s not there? WHAT!? Make sure that if you want readers to contact you, that you are available. Even something as simple as a contact form enables them to get in contact with you without giving out your email address if you are afraid of getting too many emails or getting spammed. Remember, you can’t gather your friends around if they don’t know where to find you!

* Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a great way to get in touch with people quickly to let them know what is going on in your life. You have 140 characters to get in there, and leave a message letting them know where you are. You can shrink the URL down by using a number of different methods (http://bit.ly/) which is a website you can go to that will enable you to shorten the URL, but I happen to have a favorite way to shorten mine. It’s called Glue (www.getglue.com). Not only does it shrink URLs so you can get them on Twitter (and with bit.ly also) easily, it connects you to friends and the things that they are looking at. I can go on and on about that, but this is an article about gathering all of your friends around you. (Hold on, isn’t that what Glue does?)

* Calendars! They are the easiest way in the world to keep in touch with your readers. I have created calendars for friends and they have added them to their page so their readers can keep up with where they are blogging, chatting, and guesting. It’s very easy to do with Google (www.google.com/calendar) and you are able to give access to all of your friends, family and relatives. It’s a great way to keep everyone up to date on what’s going on in your life.

So you need to make sure that people can see where you are, when you are, and who you are hanging out with. Make sure to keep the lines of communications open, because we all want to be around you, — Don’t You Know That You Are A Shooting Star? Don’t believe me? Just ask Bad Company. Catch you next week when I have to tell you to Be Prepared to Catch the Bug!

In case you haven’t heard, we’ve partnered up with Champagne Books and are giving eBooks away for Read an eBook Week. In the spirit of the event, I wanted to share some of my own thoughts on eBooks, ePublishing, and give you more on why we started this site. Most importantly I want to cover why why you should be reading electronic books.

To give a little back-story, this site was originally started by myself to review marketing eBooks. Although we still do that to a small degree, after building a small following I had a reader (Amanda, who now writes for this site) make the comment “you should review some fiction, the web needs a place that highlights some of the great eBooks out there”.

Being a writer myself, I loved the idea, and now here we are highlighting authors, sometimes giving advice on e-publishing and marketing eBooks, and even managing to pull a partnership with an excellent e-publisher for big events like Read an eBook Week.

With this site we don’t post negative reviews. Rather our goal is to give a boost to e-authors who are worth noting. In other words, if we review a book, we believe it’s worth reading and that it matches (or surpasses) the quality of anything you could find in a bookstore.

Now let’s talk about why you should be reading eBooks.

Why you should be Reading “E”

For any of you who follow things in the publishing industry (as I do). It’s no secret that the traditional book-world is one that is in trouble. Paper book sales are down, both bookstores and publishers are going broke, and in general if you work for one of those publishers, your job security at the moment is likely not that good.

If you want to understand why, it’s quite simple, and I’m going to quote Cliff Burns here (another writer with books you should read), because I couldn’t have said it better myself. When speaking about traditional book publishers, agents and editors, Cliff said:

“They’re no longer interested in identifying the “best” writers, merely the ones that hold out the most hope of selling the most books and earning them (agents, editors) more money. And that, of course, means producing empty-headed commercial fiction, copycat books and the latest “poor me” memoir…”

Whether you personally believe that or not, it is true, and it is leading us to where we are right now.

I want to talk about this from the perspective of why you should be reading “E”, so let’s talk about what problems in the publishing industry mean to you as a reader.

A shift is beginning to happen. That shift is bringing many of the best books into the world of e-Publishing.

Suddenly you have traditional publishers no longer seeking out the best fiction; instead they are publishing that which was considered “a sure thing” as far as sales are concerned. Whether those books happen to be good and end up on a best-seller list somewhere or not, they weren’t selected for quality. They were published for saleability.

While the traditional publishers are busy trying to fatten their wallets, smaller e-Publishers like Champagne Books (and others) are finding writers with excellent material. Some of those writers were shrugged off by the more traditional agents/publishers because they didn’t have the name or fan base to drive sales, and others, such as Carol North, aren’t even bothering to turn to more traditional publishers with their books.

To put it simply, some of the most enjoyable reading material out there is no longer coming from the big publishers in New York. Instead they’re being put out by companies like Champagne, and they’re thriving in the world of eBooks. For that reason you should be reading eBooks!

With eBook Week coming, you don’t even have to take my word for it. You can sign up, and we’ll send you download links to two of the best eBooks available, from authors who will make your favourite list when you’re done reading.

What do you think?

Please feel free to: agree with me, argue with me, and/or add your opinion to what I said by sharing your thoughts.

BUT, be constructive and please don’t make the overused comment “there’s something to be said about the smell/feel of a paper book”. If you want the real smell of paper read this. Also if you took the time to view an e-Publisher’s site, like Champagne Books, you would find that their electronic books are also available in paperback.

It’s that time again, and we’re giving away our monthly eBook award. I’m posting this a couple of days early as I will be away over the next couple of weeks. Before we get to the award, I’ve got to say that this month choosing was harder than ever.

First of all, Trevas posted some unsolicited (he bought the books) reviews from some worthy e-authors, and we had to decide whether those qualified for this award or not. In this case simple copyright laws keep us from sharing the books amongst ourselves, and it doesn’t make sense for all four of us to buy a book just for the awards. With that out of the way you’d think we’d be ready to choose a winner, but then we had another problem.

When we decided to give away this award, our hope was to highlight one truly exceptional work each month, and give our readers one exceptional read each month. The problem this month is that we had four books submitted by authors that were outstanding and choosing between them was quite difficult. We did eventually come up with a winner though, and you’ll find it below. Be sure to check out the runners up as well. They were all excellent reads!

January’s eBook of the Month

This months eBook of the Month is The Chocolatier’s Wife by Cindy Lynn Speer. If you remember my own review of the book, it is a mystery suspense novel set in a fantasy world, and with a little romance thrown in. (read the original review here).

This book was completely original in it’s story line, expressively written, and it draws the reader into the story right away. When I read this one, I quite honestly couldn’t put it down. After conferring together, Trevas, and Clarice agreed with me that this one was the book to highlight this month.

You won’t want to miss this book, get the links to the book in the review, and you may want to visit the author’s web site to check out her other book as well.

Don’t forget to check out our runner’s up, which as I said were all great books

January’s Runners Up

Dark Nest – Leanna Renee Hieber

Dax Rigby, War Correspondent – John B. Rosenman

WyndRiver Sinner – Charllotte Boyett Compo

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed. We’ve got more great eBooks to review for next month, and we even have a few special announcements that you won’t want to miss.