Category Archives for Marketing & Publishing
How To Use Amazon as Your Author Portfolio
Amazon has more than 3.4 million books on its virtual shelves with new books being added every five minutes. With that kind of clout in the publishing world, it’s the perfect place to establish an author portfolio.
Your author portfolio is a central location that showcases all the books you have published and which are available to purchase on Amazon, as well as books to which you have contributed in some fashion.
Whether you are a traditionally published book author, an independently published book author, or a not-yet-published book author, you can turn Amazon into your author portfolio and use it to sell more books and more of your writing in general. If you do it right, you might end up on the famous authors list.
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The Do’s and Don’ts of Asking for a Book Review
Whether you’re published traditionally or independently, from the moment your work is publicly available, someone can review it. Reviewing is an integral part of publishing. And so is asking for a review.
If your work is available for sale online, having reviews can really make a difference in your sales. Think of it from the reader’s perspective: A book with hundreds of reviews is more likely to attract your attention than one with three or four reviews.
As a result, most authors—whose name isn’t Stephen King and who lack an army of marketers—try to find readers who would be kind enough to review their book. However, asking for a review isn’t a simple process; you can’t just ask for it the way you ask someone if they like chocolate (who wouldn’t, but I digress).
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What Writers Can Learn by Attending a Social Media Conference
Social media conferences, unlike writing conferences, may not ring a bell in you if you are not really into content marketing. Still, it is one among many types of conferences that writers shouldn’t ignore, especially if they’re into writing fiction or do content production for online and social media consumption.
If you want to up your social media marketing skills, boost your creativity in design and writing, or open up to new possibilities in areas such as tech, you may have to look beyond conferences aimed just at writers.
Luckily, the start of a new year brings with it many conferences for writers and digital marketers. It is also a time for us writers to reflect, make resolutions, and plan on events to attend during the year—and this is where social media conferences, just like writers’ conferences, should enter in our planner.
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How To Write Well While Writing for SEO
I’ve been in so many rooms of writers, editors, and journalists who roll their eyes at the mention of search engine optimization (SEO). As a lot, we tend to be appalled that we must deign to taint our creations with keywords to appease the “Almighty Algorithm.”
We seem to believe there’s good writing … and then there’s SEO writing. That’s probably because most advice on writing for SEO is about numbers and algorithms. It makes you assume search engines only like boring, robotic, and even awkward writing. That’s not true (anymore).
Good writers should love SEO. Not just out of obligation, but because it helps you make better content—and it’s not as complicated as it seems.
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