Inspired by Dane Golden's guest post on YouTube videos, I have begun a new series of YouTube videos, the second of which answers the question "Should all authors (published or not) blog?" Check out the video below for my answer. Also, one announcement: Litquake, San Francisco's literary conference, is introducing Digi.lit, a one-day digital publishing conference that will take…

You probably know that Amazon bought GoodReads at the end of March. A week before that, I had the pleasure to meet Patrick Brown, Director of Community at GoodReads, when he came to lunch at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. Brown spoke about the…

If you’re a journalist looking for a way to display your clips on your website, look no further. Contently.com offers a “build-your-own portfolio” site tool that is quick and easy to use and that you can embed into your own…

An essay that ran in Salon Tuesday titled “I’m a self-publishing failure” recounts how one writer, John Winters, spent countless hours and dollars promoting his book online only to sell a handful of copies. Where did John go wrong? How can you avoid becoming a self-publishing failure?

1. First of all, start early.

Seth…

1. Use your name/brand as your Twitter handle. For the same reason that you want your name on your blog and your Facebook page, people won’t realize that Kiala Givehand is “supercoolwriter,” whose Tweets they follow and love, when they see her book in the bookstore, and they won’t buy it. Unlike on Facebook,…

For those of you who were intimidated by the thought of marketing yourself on YouTube, here’s a video tool for you.Vine, Twitter’s new social media video app, allows you to make short videos on your computer or mobile device and easily upload them to your Vine, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. The catch? The videos are limited to…

Today I'd like to welcome guest blogger Dane Golden of Hey.com, who is here to talk about how writers can use YouTube to build their author platforms.…

Multimedia ebooks, enhanced books, enriched books, interactive ebooks—whatever you call them, they’re here to stay. As more companies make the foray into multimedia book publishing, authors have greater opportunities than ever to transform their static PDFs into living stories with the addition of audio, video, and graphics.

Below is a comparison of the top multimedia ebook publishers on the market, but keep your eyes peeled. There are new ones popping up every…

Before the ink dries on your New Year’s resolutions, I want you to add one more to your list: BACK UP your data. Please. Do it now. And do it regularly.

If you’re like me, you wait until one computer dies before you buy another, which means you’re bound to lose some files in the…

Happy Holidays!

Something we don't talk about very often in the world of online networking is the importance of taking a break. We hear a lot about the value of posting to our blogs, Facebook and Google+ pages, and Twitter accounts frequently and consistently. We read about the necessity of blogging on a schedule. The most successful bloggers will tell you they "have never missed a scheduled post." But what few people talk about is the importance of setting your social media…

If you have a professional Facebook page, you’re probably familiar with Promoted Posts, which Facebook launched in May of this year. For $5 $10, or $15, Facebook will make your post more visible within your followers’ news feeds. If you don’t promote your post, only a fraction of your followers will ever see it. On average, 16 percent of all your Facebook activity on your professional page shows up in your followers’ news feeds, which means a slightly higher number of your status updates get…

For those of you who are new to blogging or still thinking about setting up a blog, here are some of the "Best Blogging Practices" I teach my students in my Blogging for Beginners class at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. Have a great Thanksgiving next week. I'll see you on November…

When most people say, "I'm doing a Twitter cleanse," or, "I'm on a social media cleanse," it means that they're refraining, wholly or partially, from social media. Social media is addicting. Sometimes you must quit cold turkey just because. But me? I've done a different kind of Twitter cleanse. I haven't refrained, but, rather, I've gone through all of my Twitter followers and purged many who aren't following me back. What's more, there were many who'd I'd given a courtesy follow to who had…

I guess I just don't understand the creepy weirdness of some people.  Some creepy weirdness, I get.  I am, after all, an artist.

I tell myself that perhaps a few generations ago, it might have been the "in" thing to be a complete social recluse of a writer.  It made the authors mysterious, and by extension, some kind of cool.  I suppose.

In the days of writers and artists like Poe, Fitzgerald, Hemingway,…

I started my blog almost two years ago after attending a writers’ workshop on publishing in the digital age. There wasn’t much talk of e-books or self-publishing from the presenters. Instead, they hammered a single message into us all day: you, as writers, need an electronic presence . . . preferably a blog. It’s how you control the message of who you are and what…

I’m Gulf Coastal Southern and most of the time my stories are flavored with southernisms. Rick Bragg recently noted in Southern Living that the way to tell if you’re a true southern writer inducted into the canon is if you have a tale that includes a dead mule somewhere. To set the record straight…