Just got off the phone with the president of the SEO firm who was buying leads from whoever has been sending me the spam emails. Here is my original post: http://publishingrevolution.com/2013/02/05/when-does-email-marketing-become-spam/.
The president said the SEO firm no longer buys leads from this company. I agreed to give him the benefit of the doubt and not name them, unless and until it happens again. But, I need your help. Let’s see who is buying these leads.
Here is a list of all the spam email addresses.[more]
I missed Stella Fair and her friends. Missed all of the spam emails from deep within India telling me how my domains could make me a ton of money. In case you missed the original post, here it is: http://publishingrevolution.com/2013/02/05/when-does-email-marketing-become-spam/. [...]
If you are one of those people who received an email from LinkedIn congratulating you on being in the “top 1% most viewed profiles of 2012″, I will pause for a second while you login to Facebook and take down the [...]
I know there are many first-time authors and yet-to-be first-time authors who read my blog. I thought it might be cool for you to be reminded that you’re not alone. So, meet Julie Weinberg, a stay-at-home mom from the D.C. area, who after years of writing and editing, is about to self-publish her book about her journey to getting pregnant. Julie and I exchanged some emails about the publishing process. I asked her to write a guest post for my blog from the perspective of an author about to step on to the publishing path. [more]
I recently moved a number of book publishing related domains from a domain parking company to my own servers, thus creating my own landing / parked pages. It’s a smart move that has driven substantial traffic to my core sites. I promise another post about that, as it might be something you’ll want to consider if you own a decent chunk of domains.
The part that process that sucked, is that each of these now hundreds of sites has a contact us page, and even though there is a CAPTCHA, I’ve been getting spam…from a series of gmail addresses. Actually, 49 emails since January 7, 2013, up through and including today.[more]
Since 2004, my site BookPublishersCompared.com, has provided a free download of The Author’s Bill of Rights , which is an eight article document that enumerates the rights all self-published authors should expect and demand from any self-publishing service provider. It’s been downloaded 40,000+ times. I had it designed to look “constitution-y” (probably not a real term), with fancy fonts and on a parchment looking background.
For nearly eight years, it never occurred to me that visually impaired and blind authors couldn’t read it. Two days ago, I received an email from, Donna Hill, a member of the National Federation of the Blind Writers’ Division, explaining how she downloaded The Author’s Bill of Rights, but couldn’t read since it was a PDF sans any text (basically, just an image).”[more]
My sister took my three nieces to the Mall of America at midnight to kick off Black Friday. On my top of my list of things I’d never do is going to the MOA on Black Friday.
I celebrated Black Friday by downloading the Red Laser iPhone App and red-lasering my book, The Fine Print of Self-Publishing. It’s a cool app, and while accurate on price (especially for online retailers), it doesn’t provide any reviews (not that I was expecting them on Red Laser, but I assumed they’d be sucked using someone’s API), and it featured the book cover I used from the last edition.”[more]
As some of you already know, Amazon is deleting reviews of books made by authors for books by other authors. As reported in the L.A. Times, Steve Weddle, a crime fiction author, attempted to leave a review for his friend’s book. The review was deleted by Amazon. When Weddle inquired as to why, he received this reply from Amazon, “”We do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product.”[more]
As Rupaul so adeptly said in his/her song Supermodel , “You better work it, girl.”
When it comes to book marketing, I know three who are great at. The first, Rachel Thompson , prolifically uses social media (72,000 Twitter ain’t no joke) to market and sell her two fantastic books The Mancode: Exposed and A Walk in The Snark. I wrote about Rachel last year, which you can read here.
The second is Amanda Taylor. Amanda’s tenacity at book marketing is so admirable. Every book marketing program out there — Amanda has tried. Some work, some don’t. Amanda is a friend and for months would email updates about all of the book marketing techniques and tools she was using. Some, I’d never heard of. But, I thought that Amanda’s information was so great, I suggested she turn it into an ebook. She finally took my advice and recently published The Newbie Author’s Survival Guide: How To Thrive In the Book Marketing Wilderness. [more]
“I want my book in retail outlets, but I’m not willing to take a chance on returns,” says an author to me at a book fair a few weekends ago.
Insert the crickets chirping here.
Now, insert my jaw dropping. [more]
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