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Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Have A Young Reader? Consider This Book From Six Year Old Aaliyah Gates
Happy New Year From The Self-Published Life
Monday, December 30, 2013
How Landing Pages Can Help You Sell More Books
What are landing pages?
A landing page, or 'lead capture page' is simply a page that requests at least the name and email address of someone who would like to gain access to premium or exclusive information. Landing pages are used by Internet marketers to sell affiliate products. The goal of these pages is to collect leads and nurture them through emails to convert them into sales.They usually promise to offer something in exchange for the information given by the page visitor, such as a free report, or an ecourse or something of that nature. These leads become subscribers that you can build a relationship with, as well as to promote other products and services that you offer. Landing pages are ultimately used to build email subscriber lists.Landing pages can be a page hosted on your website or blog, or it can be a standalone link like this one that takes people to your landing page once it is clicked.
Authors can benefit from using landing pages if they know how to use them properly.
How authors can use landing pages to sell more books
An author can actually use a landing page to collect the names and email addresses of their subscribers in exchange for free ebooks, exclusive chapters released only to their mailing lists, and more. You can use a video to introduce your special offer and encourage site visitors to sign up to receive it. Your readers will be thrilled to know that just by giving you their name and email address, they can get some special 'goodies' from their favorite author.An easy and affordable way to create landing pages is with a program called Landing Page Templates. For a low monthly fee, you gain access to over 300 templates that can be used to build attractive landing pages that make people want to enter their information and ultimately, join your list.
You want to make sure that your landing page requires the bare minimums of a name and email address, but, you can get as personal as you like; but keep in mind that most people will be more apt to opt-in to your email list via your landing page if you don't require much information in order for them to join. Some people ask for name, email address, phone and physical mailing address if there is a print component to their list as well. Use your discretion here.
Ready to build your email list with landing pages? Click Here!
Until next time,
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Publish Your Book Online Free With Createspace
Get A Small Business Phone With RingCentral
Friday, December 6, 2013
Here Is The Easy Way To Promote Your Blog
Onlywire is an easy option you can use to promote your blog. It allows blog authors to publish their blog posts to over 40 sites with just a push of the button.
Social Media Starts Here - Publish to 40+ social networks with a single click.
If you are looking for a way to increase your book sales, you need to start a blog and take it seriously. You also need to promote your blog in order to educate people about your book.
So, how can you use a blog to promote your book?
- You can blog about the topics in your book.
- You can blog about the characters.
- A cool thing I have seen some authors doing is creating a blog based on their books in general and using that blog to encompass readers into "their" world.
It's all about making the time to do so.
Blog promotion, like any other promotion, requires adhering to a schedule.
You have to set aside time to blog and make sure that you stick to that time.
I have learned that blogging everyday, 2-3 times a day results in traffic to your site.
More traffic equals more eyeballs that will see the stuff that you have.
More eyeballs means that more people will learn about your book, or whatever the topic of your blog may be.
Now, if you want to sell more books, get to blogging.
Once you get your blog up and running, OnlyWire can help you to promote it.
Promote Your Blog - It's easy! Sign-up for Free and post to 45+ social media sites
Well, what are you waiting for?
Get your blog set up and they head over to OnlyWire and create an account.
In minutes you could be well on your way to have your blog promoted to over 40 social media sites, which means huge interaction and engagement for you.
Until next time,
P.S. Did you like this post? How would you like to get exclusive content like this delivered to your email inbox? Click here to join my FREE VIP List! VIP listers get lots of goodies and tons of FREE content. Stake your claim and partner up with me today!
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
December Author Showcase: Paige Adams Strickland
Akin to the Truth: A Memoir of
Adoption and Identity
Written by Paige Adams Strickland
Edited by Wendy Hart Beckman
My Bio:
Paige Adams Strickland is an
educator and writer from Cincinnati, Ohio. She is married with two daughters.
In her free time she teaches Zumba Fitness (™) classes, enjoys gardening, her
pets, reading and spending time with family and friends. Her work has been
recognized by soniamarsh.com,
awordwithyoupress.com, scinti.com
and adoption voices.com.
You can connect with Paige at her blog: https://akintothetruth.squarespace.com/about or on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/23plas and
Twitter: https://twitter.com/plastrickland23
Excerpt:
Chapter 1
When I asked my parents the classic question, “Where did I come
from?” Mom and Dad began by telling me that I came from God.
I found that piece of information very confusing because the first
picture they have of me was of a dark-haired woman holding me
with her back turned. My baby face peers over her shoulder. Bare
trees and a sky-blue Volkswagen with Ohio license plates can be
seen in the background. For a long time I wondered if God was a
brown-haired lady from Ohio who drove a classic Beetle.
I hated how the story was so nondescript and lacking in
information. It wasn’t exciting and filled with humor and
tenderness like scenes on television. Everybody else had
pictures of sleeping babies in mothers’ arms, related stories of
all the visitors who came, and told the dramatic stories of how
their dad frantically loaded the car, backed out of the driveway
and knocked over the trash cans as he sped off in a blizzard
during rush hour to deliver Mom to the hospital while she sat
beside him panting and yelling, “Honey, hurry faster! The baby’s
coming now!” I didn’t have a father who nervously paced around
in the waiting room, wearing a tread into the flooring with his
big feet or a five-o’clock shadow across his weary face. No
doctor in scrubs came out after many hours to shake his hand and
say, “Congratulations, Mr. Adams, you have a daughter.”
No one threw a party to shower my mom with receiving blankets
and tiny booties while she sat in a chair with a cup of tea, a
bulging belly and a romantic glow on her face, either.
Instead, I was born prematurely in both time and weight and had
to spend about a month in the hospital until I grew and gained
enough to be released to foster care. Then my parents came along
in 1962 and adopted me from Hamilton County Welfare when I was
13 months old. Their social worker informed them very little
about my start in life, only that the birth mother was a minor,
and she couldn’t keep me.
They noticed that I had some sort of “lazy eye” condition. My
adoptive grandmother was quite concerned that my feet were
pigeon-toed, so she and my mother took me to doctors in downtown
Cincinnati for examinations. Both specialists told my family
that everything was just fine, and that eventually I would grow
out of these perceived deformities between my eyes and my feet.
I just needed extra time. That gap between my birth and the 13
months it took to have me placed in a home setting set me back,
and the welfare agency told my parents that I might lag behind
in my development. It was HCW’s version of “Buyer beware”. When
I was eventually adopted, I didn’t walk or crawl. I could sit up
but not yet walk. I used a bottle, but I could not feed myself
finger food. I rolled around and cried, “Waa,” but I couldn’t do
much else. I was a blob, even at slightly over one year, until
people began to spend enough time with me and allow me freedom
to explore scattered toys, books, messy cookies, hallways and
the gooey jowls of our family dog, like a sensorimotor-staged
baby needs to do.
My first actual memory is sitting in the side yard of our
house throwing a bunch of leaves in the air at some lady. I can
still recall the clear autumn sky and the crunchy mounds of
just-raked leaves of rust red, dusty orange and brown, spiraling
in the air as they landed around us. Maybe the lady was my mom
who raised me. I wish I could know for certain that my first
memory is of my mom.
I don’t remember John F. Kennedy being shot, but I do
know that when it happened in November of 1963, Mom and Dad were
in the process of packing up the house and moving to a new place
over that somber weekend. We were staying in the same town, but
it would be a larger home on a street with a lot of young kids
and sidewalks for bike riding and walking to school. My parents
were among the few in the nation, it seemed, who were not JFK
fans. Mom and Dad had their own agendas and were more focused on
packing boxes, loading cars, making runs to the new house and
meeting deadlines. Their priorities at the time were primarily
on my father’s emerging career in management with the phone
company, and setting up house. They were constantly going,
growing, changing and making improvements to their lives, such
as adopting a child, moving to a better place and buying nicer
cars. They were go-getters and never stayed satisfied for very
long.
I spent a great deal of time with my Grandma Frances, my
mom’s mother. She lived in walking distance, so we spent many
days and nights together. Grandma Frances, who had an incredible
sweet tooth, was also the provider of endless sugary and starchy
treats like big cookies with icing, hard rolls, sweet rolls,
chocolate pudding and her homemade sodas with vanilla ice cream,
Hershey’s syrup and 7 Up. When she made them at her house, they
were the best because she even had long spoons with handles that
were actually straws. In all the sugar we consumed, not a soul
in our family ever turned up diabetic. No one cared about
carbohydrates or fat either. We simply ate and enjoyed.
When I was small, I was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz. I spent
hours pretending to be Dorothy, roaming my block with a stuffed
dog and a basket. I re-enacted scenes from the movie so much
that my nursery school teachers were baffled by my need to live
in an imaginary world and by my extreme creativity. The movie
scene in which Dorothy stands at the gate of her farm, while the
wind howls was mesmerizing as I watched the incredibly reallooking twister spin
closer in the background. It was amazing and terrifying.
There were two major problems when I was little. One was
being short. I had a very intense complex about this condition.
I hated the word and anything synonymous with it. For whatever
reason, to me, short or little equaled inadequate, and I dreaded
being unworthy. I was a small child in a world full of important
adults, who ruled everything. Adults in charge of me held the
secrets to the universe. They knew all the answers to
information I wanted to know, like where I really came from. I
surmised that if I could be physically bigger, I would have the
authority to know more about myself and anything else I wanted
to learn, but little people like me were stupid and couldn’t
handle it. From cookie jars to closed legal records, everything
was out of my reach.
My other shortcoming to contend with at the time was my first
name, Paige. I absolutely hated it. It was different. My parents
picked my name because my Aunt Nora, (my dad’s sister), had
heard it somewhere, and she liked it. Aunt Nora did not have
children of her own. I don’t know if my parents were trying to
include her or felt sorry for her or what, but because of her
idea, they decided not to go with the name Cindy, and my name
became Paige.
I withstood endless days of teasing on school
playgrounds. I hated all the jokes and silly remarks about my
first name, and I wished I’d been given a normal name like Julie
or Mary. I’d become angry and yell or cry, and that intensified
the taunting of the other children. Having a temper did not do
me any favors.
Unknowing people misspelled my name. I was sick and tired
of going through it with anyone who couldn’t treat my name
normally. No one else had confusion about his or her moniker. My
name was the only identity I did have, and it pissed me off when
someone got it wrong. I was ready to scream and punch out the
next person who said, “Oh...like page in a book.” When I was
small, I couldn’t tell the difference between honest mistakes or
if this was another way for people torture me for having an odd
name. Once, when we had to write business letters in third
grade, I received a reply to mine addressed to Mr. Paige Adams.
The stupidity and thoughtlessness of people would never end,
even with adults!
I hated being different. Around school, peers would
crucify and senselessly hate you for being different. All I
wanted was to blend in with people. Instead, I saw myself as a
feisty, short person with a weird name, who had an odd start in
life and a bad haircut to boot. My goal was to cruise along,
unnoticed, and be treated the same as everybody else. However,
that wasn’t easy for a little person with an uncommon name, and
ugly, crooked pixie bangs, who often felt left out when
childhood friends discussed how do babies get born.
Until next time,
To have your book showcased on this blog, click here.
Amazon's Createspace Offers Free Publishing Services
Amazon's Createspace offers a free publishing platform that allows authors to publish their own books online at no cost. The service allows for authors to sell books on amazon through the amazon.com site, and through Kindle bookstore if the author chooses to also have their book published as an ebook.
Many new authors seek to publish their own books but lack the funds to get started. With the free publishing tools offered through Createspace, new authors can test the waters with their books and build up their following, thus raising much needed to launch their own publishing company.
With Createspace, you can get access to FREE book publishing tools, resources, and a growing online community of authors. Learn how.
Once you have learned how to sell your book, and who your target audience is, then you can graduate to your own publishing company. Here is where you will foot the entire bill for bringing your books to print.
Becoming your own publishing company and building your name and brand is hard work, yet it is fun work. You will be joining the ranks of some of the most powerful publishing houses in the world, like Simon and Schuster and Random House.
You can use the information you learned bu utilizing the free publishing services offered by Amazon through their Createspace program as a stepping stone to building your own publishing company. In order to make the transition from being published through an author services firm to being your own publisher, you have to learn the tools of the trade. In my ebook, 'The Self-Publishing Blueprint', I show you all the steps you need to take to ensure that you not only produce a professional quality book, but, that you also keep all the rights to your book.
If you don't understand how to publish your book correctly, you could very well just hand your book over to someone; along with all of the rights to it. As I often tell my students and clients, in indie publishing, you have to foot the entire bill for bringing your book to print. And not only that, you are also responsible for all of the marketing, promotion and publicity for your book as well as the books of the authors you will eventually sign to your company.
I would suggest however that even though you are working with Createspace, you should still consider purchasing your own ISBN number. This number is unique to your book and lists you as the publisher of your work. It costs $125 to purchase your own ISBN number. If you just don't have it, you can use the number assigned by Creatspace; however, when you do decide that it's time to become your own publishing house, then you will have to purchase an ISBN anyway because more than likely your book will have to have extensive changes done to it, making it a new edition of the book, like adding a completely new cover.
Long story short, the free publishing program offered by Amazon's Createspace is indeed an affordable way for new aspiring authors to break into the marketplace and learn the field before shelling out the big bucks to start their own company. So, what are you waiting for? If you are an aspiring author, here is your opportunity. Get Published: Take your book from manuscript to the masses with self-publishing and print-on-demand from CreateSpace.
Until next time,
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