Question Posted on Independent Authors at Yahoo Groups. >> Do book reviews sell book? Yes, and the review sites can prove it, because they get paid a percentage of the “buy-through” from Amazon. They don’t sell that many, and more nonfiction than fiction, but they do sell. And why not try to get our books […]

Start with the end in mind. The real key to evaluating your media performance is your sales. Radio is an instantaneous communications medium. To evaluate your performance you might want to see if you can figure out whether you can trace book sales to the time and place of your interview. Many a small radio […]

Marketing and Promotion Using News Releases When you write a news release your goal is to get publicity – media coverage about you and your book – either an article or an interview. To do that you have to write a news release that is persuasive and interesting and then make sure it gets to […]

Since I’m a publicist and do a lot of work with authors and publishing companies, I’ll give you my spin on this. Is it worth it to hire a publicist? My response: It depends. I don’t really ascribe to the amount of money invested in the book as a decision factor myself. Lots of my […]

One person on the publishing and promoting list at Yahoo posted the following message: > “For any of those that are still questioning the importance and/or value of Social Media, check out the stats in this video…” > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8 Another person responded: > “Those who pooh-pooh it are going to be the ones running to […]

Why does social media marketing suck and what can you do about it? Interesting Article at the Kansas City Examiner titled Social Media Marketing Sucks… If You Do It Wrong by Dustin Riedisel My comments: Social media are a special type of communication technology and they too, like all other communication technologies (email fax, street […]

Interesting post over at PR Squared titled The Dual Future of the News Release I don’t believe that social media news releases are all that earthshaking or special or that it will replace every other MarCom method out there. I view SM news releases as another tool in the arsenal that represents yet another choice […]

Here’s an excellent report from author Lynn Viehl’s experience and income with a mass market publisher for the book Twilight Fall which broke through to the NY Times best seller list. She calls herself in the “Top 20”. It was originally posted April 17 at the Genreality blog which receives contributions from a number of […]

My post yesterday triggered a lot of discussion including worried cries from lots of Twitter afficianodos. Sorry, I didn’t want to dampen your enthusiasm or blind devotion. It’s that pesky ROI question that I’m wanting to focus on specifically and strategically. If you are getting ROI and it’s worth your while, then keep doing it. […]

People are asking lots of questions about using Twitter, particularly as a marketing tool and as a tool for PR. The biggest challenge I see about using Twitter as a marketing tool is trying to get an answer to the following question: What ROI am I going to get out using Twitter and why? The […]