HOW TO REMEMBER, WRITE AND PUBLISH YOUR LIFE STORY

Regarding your autobiography writing guide (also good for biographies), you might remind your readers to pursue the biography of a relative NOW. My father put his 30-year naval career on tape and, as he finished each tape, I transcribed. He wanted and for lack of time, I agreed to review, add, and edit once it was all on tape. Two weeks after the last tape was recorded, he fell ill with what we later learned was Mesothelioma. He tired quickly, too much so to work on the revisions, and within three months he was gone.

We were very, very close, and I couldn’t listen to the tapes or read the hardcopy without dissolving into tears. It took five years before I returned to the biography in earnest. I finally finished the written word and am now scanning documents and pictures and hope to have it finished in time to be a Christmas present for each of my kids. I wish we had worked a little harder and more on schedule so we could finish before he passed. There are lots of unanswered questions in his biography. Nevertheless, it will still be meaningful to my kids.

Happy Halloween.

Ethel

DOES FACEBOOK TRUMP EZINES FOR BOOK PROMOTION? NO!

Hi Ang,

Definitely liked your article about using Facebook to your advantage without being annoying. And I realize you’re primarily talking about free ways to market a book, but one thing that I think Facebook does very well is ads. I have used Facebook ads (for which you do have to pay) to advertise my blogs and my regular professional website.

While I haven’t had the money to put into it to make a thorough study, in my humble opinion, if you did have an ad budget, I don’t think it would be a waste to market your book through Facebook ads. The great thing about them is you get 10’s or 100’s of thousands of impressions that you don’t even have to pay for (you only pay for clicks) so the trick is to have a memorable URL or book title, or both and make sure that’s front and center on the ad so that all the people who don’t click will still see your URL or title and may remember it later even if they don’t click right away.

The other thing to make sure of is that you have a Facebook Page (like the business page you referenced) for anything you want to promote so that, if someone who didn’t click on your ad decides to search for you on Facebook later (by typing your title into Facebook search for instance), they don’t come up empty handed. As of yet, pages are still free!

I realize this is all speculation since I haven’t had the budget to really test it out, but I think anytime someone sees your name, title or URL, that’s valuable.

If it hasn’t already been written, I think it will be soon, a comparison of the usefulness of Facebook ads vs. Adwords ads. I think Facebook may be beginning to rival even Google. Yep, all I had to do was google it. Here is one: https://social-media-optimization.com/2010/07/facebook-ads-versus-google-adwords/

Thanks for all you do! You’re an inspiration to us all.

-Juliet Meredith