I wanted to thank everybody who wrote in with wise and loving messages about my friend, G. I appreciate the prayers most of all! They really do help.
G’s family is going to remove her from the respirator this week. I am feeling better. I’ve made peace with the situation and I am now fondly remembering G’s love and the special gifts she gave to all of us during her special lifetime.
Letters will return after the holidays.
How can you improve your chances breaking into highly competitive national business publications such as “Fortune,” “Forbes” and “Business Week”? These magazines require their freelancers to have business writing experience. How can you get those all-important business article clips to persuade national business magazine editors to give you an assignment? Writing for local and regional business publications can enable you to get these precious clips and the needed experience.
I can’t understand why my book is not selling? Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, Target.com, etc. advertise the book, as I do on my website. It’s been online for two years now. Why isn’t it selling?!
Many authors make the mistaken assumption that putting a book online means people will actually see it and that this will automatically translate into sales. Since there are so many websites, and so many online bookstores, and so many books in those bookstores, nobody can expect sales from just putting a book online.
Marketing a book online should be considered at least a part-time endeavor. The authors who are really successful are the ones who make marketing their books a full-time job. You have to get online daily and spread the word, through an ezine (an ezine is more effective than a blog because you contact your readers directly; you don’t wait for them to come back and visit your site whenever they happen to remember you’re there), through networking, through requesting links on other websites, through offering excerpts for other websites and online publications to run, and through participating in online discussions about your book’s topic/your book.
Assuming that simply having a book page on Amazon will mean you’re going to start making money on your book is probably one of the most common misconceptions I hear from newbie authors. Nobody is going to know about your book until you start telling them about your book.
Things have been incredibly stressful here lately. Did I buy everything I was supposed to? Are all the books that MUST be done by Christmas formatted and uploaded to the printer? Did Frank remember to turn on the outdoor Christmas lights tonight? Is the baking on schedule? Who’s going to shovel that half inch of snow and ice off the front steps in the morning? Did I just hear Max say he has a sore throat? Did Zach remember to ship the packages to the grandparents yesterday? Shouldn’t Ali be home from basketball practice by now??
Letters will return next week.
Most of us, the first time around the publishing block, have a clear vision of life as an author. We see ourselves holding our new books in one hand while raking in thousands of dollars in royalties or profits with the other. What a shock to discover that your wonderful book – the manuscript into which you poured your heart and soul – isn’t flying off of bookstores shelves into the hands of eager readers. The fact is that you may not even find it in bookstores at all.
My publisher will let me order postcard and other things with my book’s cover on them but they seem awfully expensive. Do you have any sources that might be less expensive?
I went to an Israeli wedding tonight. The wedding proceeds, dinner begins, and we dance, dance, dance. Tired dancers leave as younger, more energetic celebrants hit the bumpy stone floor adjacent to King David’s grave. The band strikes up a Celtic sound in the starlit night. We get jiggy with it, and the wait staff joins the foot-stompin’ party. Women and girls toss glitter, wave paper pompons and metallic streamers of many colors, ululating to the beat. Teen girls wind paper leis around their arms and necks and rock-sway with them to the music. Guys perform acrobatics or dance with full-throated song.
