Author Justine Musk is writing a great series called “building your author platform even if you’re not published yet.” Part one explains why you should, and part two talks about what to do after you’ve created your blog.
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To, Marketing, Social Media at 5:09 pm • comment
We’ve just posted Alan DeNiro’s new site — just in time for the launch of his first novel! Congrats to Alan. I loved his short story collection and can’t wait to read Total Oblivion, More or Less.
Posted by Stephanie Leary in Client News at 11:18 am • comment
The Writer’s Guide To Twitter covers everything: picking a username, the etiquette of following and retweeting, how to use hashtags and chats, spam, and more. This is a great series.
LibreDigital research confirms something we’ve always heard anecdotally: readers who check out online sample chapters are more likely to buy books.
Harlequin’s Malle Vallik always has excellent advice on social media. Her column today at Romancing the Blog is excellent:
A great social media tool is the comment section of your blog or someone’s blog that you’ve identified as worth following. This someone else has already started the conversation and they are hoping, wanting a new friend to join in. Good commenting helps establish your online presence and builds your author brand.
And then she offers five ways to comment effectively. If you already live comfortably online, these things might seem obvious. If the blogosphere is foreign to you, this is a great explanation of comment culture.
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To, Marketing, Social Media at 10:18 am • comment
MySpace has just introduced a beta feature that will let you sync your status with your Twitter account. Log in to your account and go to the ’sync’ section. Give MySpace permission to use Twitter, and you’re done! You can choose whether the sync goes one way (Twitter updates MySpace) or two-way (MySpace updates Twitter and vice versa).
Big thanks to Todd Jones on GetSatisfaction for pointing this out!
Posted by Stephanie Leary in Marketing, Social Media at 7:28 pm • comment
Edward Willett won this year’s Aurora Award for the best long-form work of science fiction or fantasy by a Canadian writer in English. Congratulations, Edward!
Posted by Stephanie Leary in Client News at 9:15 am • comment
As the economy gets worse and publishing deals fall through, we’ve seen a lot of authors turn to serial fiction projects. We’re quite avid fans of a few! However, it seems that most authors don’t know how to properly manage a web serial. Because they’re doing things the hard way, they introduce little glitches into the process — and spend more time than they need to on technical issues. We see the same problems over and over:
Formatting. Your manuscript is probably in Word. When you try to save as HTML or paste the chapter into a web editor, everything gets screwed up: your curly quotes turn into weird symbols, your em dashes turn into square boxes, and your line breaks sometimes disappear altogether.
Scheduling. You want to publish your new chapters at roughly the same time every week (or month, etc.). Yet, you have a life (such as it is). You can’t guarantee that you’ll be at home in front of the computer at 9 a.m. on a Monday two months from now.
Consistency. You’ve built a lovely design for your serial, but every time you copy a new chapter into your template, something goes wrong — a fiddly bit in the footer disappears, or a background image at the top gets cut off for no apparent reason.
Linking. Every new chapter has to be added to the table of contents, and you really ought to have ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links on each chapter for easier navigation… but sometimes you forget to add links to the latest installment in all the right places.
Announcing. Not only do you have to be there at 9 a.m. on Monday to publish your new chapter, but you have to alert people that it’s up. Do you keep a mailing list so you can send emails? Do you build an RSS feed? Do you use Twitter, Facebook, or LiveJournal?
Managing all this with flat HTML files, formatted and linked by hand, is an enormous pain. There is a better way! You can automate all these aspects of publishing a serial. Set it all up in advance, and all you have to worry about is producing those installments. (more…)
This week’s Mind Meld at SF Signal asks: “How has blogging and the emergence of social networking changed the face of publishing? How has it affected you personally?” Fourteen authors offer fourteen answers.
Posted by Stephanie Leary in Publishing Industry, Social Media at 1:14 pm • comment
Normally, I dread redoing old work.
Not today.
I’ve just switched out the cover images for Justine’s Liar, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
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