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…

Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram are great for connecting with your friends and your fans, but how can you expand your reach to people who have never heard of you? Self-publishing stars like Amanda Hocking know the…

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…

Today I'd like to welcome Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press and founder of Warner Coaching. Brooke is here to talk to us today about self-publishing and the changes going on with the Big…

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…

Last week I registered for the BlogHer 13 conference, which will take place in Chicago July 25-27 of next year, and I’m very excited! If you sign up before Nov. 7, you can get the $198 early bird rate, too. After that, the price doubles, so sign up fast, so we can hang out in Chicago next year!

When I registered for the BlogHer conference, I had to fill out a form that asked me how many followers I have on…

If you’re a blogger, you’ve probably heard the term “SEO,” short for “search engine optimization.” You may even know what SEO is (a method for improving your website’s ranking in Google and other search engine results). But why should you care about SEO? Because few people look past the first page of results when they do a web search. If your website doesn’t come up in the top page for a particular keyword (your name, your blog name, the title of your book, a product you are selling), you…

Because the title of this series is “Networking for Introverts,” the focus is on social media. Social networking, or online networking, is a style of networking that is popular among introverts because it allows us to blog, tweet, and post status updates from the quiet of our desk chairs and sofas. We don’t need to articulately deliberate over the national deficit while sipping martinis and munching canapés in some stranger’s living room. We can sit in our flannel pajamas, unshowered and…

The $64,000 question when it comes to social media is: Does it sell books? Many authors have written blog posts attempting to answer this question, and the consensus seems to be that yes, done right, social media does sell books, but in modest quantities. In other words, a rock star social media platform does not (necessarily) a bestseller make.



Nathan Bransford, author of the Jacob Wonderbar novels, has more than 100,000 Twitter followers and 6000 Facebook followers and is…

Recently on a writers’ listserv to which I subscribe, a woman asked for advice about turning her nonfiction book into a blog. She has queried agents to no avail and is anxious to get her message out to the public, book deal or no book deal. Another writer suggested she read How to Blog a Book: Write, Publish, and Promote Your Book One Post at a Time by San Francisco author Nina Amir. After all,…

After @KristenLambTX decided to reclaim her hashtag, #myWANA, by announcing that she would block anyone who prescheduled tweets using it, I had to ask myself: Have I been abusing hashtags, too?



For those of you new to Twitter, a hashtag is a searchable keyword that you attach to a tweet using the pound sign. For example, this tweet…