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Don’t take your book to LinkedIn. Take the ideas making you write it.
Bill Cox never shouts. He does not chase trends or controversy. His voice — steady, thoughtful, and honest — cuts through noise with clarity and conviction. My Pursuit of the Axis of Evil is about people — a lifetime of encounters across Siberia, Southeast Asia, India, and Alaska. He writes from the road, the sky, and the heart.
Bill carries a principle often attributed to Pythagoras: “Check your prejudices at every port of entry.” And he does — again and again, across more than two dozen journeys to parts of the world most Americans glimpse only on the news.
Bill does not need LinkedIn to make his writing valuable. But imagine one observation from one of those journeys — not a book advertisement, just something he learned from sitting across a table from someone Americans normally encounter only as a headline. A professional network gives an author room to share exactly this kind of thinking.
What Conversation Did Your Book Come From?
A leadership book came from years of conversations about leadership. A teacher’s memoir came from conversations about education. A veteran’s book came from conversations about service and sacrifice. Bill’s book came from a lifetime of crossing borders and checking assumptions.
LinkedIn is where many of those professional conversations continue. The platform is not a bookstore. It is a place where professionals share ideas, experience, and perspective. If the conversation producing your book is already happening on LinkedIn, the platform gives you a seat at the table.
Not every book belongs there. Fiction rarely finds its natural audience on LinkedIn, though a novel exploring workplace culture or ethical dilemmas might connect through the ideas it contains. The question is the same one we have asked about every platform: where are your readers, and what do they expect to find?
Ideas, Not Advertisements
A bare “Buy my book” post contributes little to a professional conversation. An idea from the book can contribute a great deal.
The leadership author sharing a lesson learned the hard way. The historian connecting an archival discovery to a current debate. The teacher reflecting on what twenty-five years in a classroom taught her. The traveler describing what happened when a headline became a person.
Somewhere in the author’s profile is the book. For the reader who wants more, it is easy to find. But the post itself contributes something to the conversation — it does not interrupt it.
Setting Up the Profile
Update your LinkedIn headline to include “Author of [Book Title]” alongside your professional identity. This signals the book to every visitor without requiring the author to mention it in every post.
LinkedIn’s profile sections change over time, so check your own profile editing options for where to add publications and featured content. Most profiles allow you to list published works and pin a book link with the cover image visible near the top of the page. These changes take minutes. Once in place, the book is present on every profile visit.
The Voice Worth Following
Bill Cox writes from curiosity rather than self-promotion. LinkedIn gives an author room to do the same: contribute an observation, share something learned, raise a worthwhile question, and let the book sit naturally behind the conversation.
If your book comes from professional experience, if it contains ideas your colleagues and community would find valuable, if your voice is steady and has something to contribute — LinkedIn is a place to share it.
The book announcement is not advertising. It is a professional milestone: “After twenty years working in this field, I finally wrote down what I learned.” The professionals who know your name may be the first audience worth reaching.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen — a book about why authors write and why what they write matters.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, visit the same website and order directly.
Last Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2026.
The laureate is Anne Carson — Canadian poet, classicist, translator. The committee called her work bold and inventive, said she had created new forms for contemporary literature in playful dialogue with the classical tradition. She was in Iceland when they reached her. She said the conversation was rather halting.
Carson’s most celebrated work of grief is Nox (Knopf, 2010) — not a book in the ordinary sense, but a facsimile of a handmade accordion book: pages folding out, photographs, fragments of letters, her own handwritten notes. At its center is her translation of Catullus, Poem 101, a Latin elegy written by the Roman poet for his brother who had died far from home. Carson’s own brother, Michael, died in 2000. She had not known him well. He had been absent from her life for years before his death. Nox is what she made from the gap — from the years she did not know him and the years he was gone.
Nox is the Latin word for night. She worked on it for years before it was published. When the Nobel was announced, the book sold out within hours.
Gaius Valerius Catullus wrote Poem 101 around 54 BCE.
His brother had died in the Troad — the region of Troy — far from home. Catullus traveled there. He stood at the grave. He performed the ritual. He said the words. The poem ends: ave atque vale. Hail and farewell. An address to a brother who cannot answer. A gesture made anyway.
Carson spent years working over her translation of the poem, turning every word, looking for what the Latin was doing underneath the surface. She wrote in Nox: “A translation always makes its way from one kind of darkness to another.” Catullus had been dead for two thousand years. The poem had crossed those years to find Carson when she needed it. She answered back with a book.
The Power of Authors points here. Carson did not make Nox to publish an elegy. She made it because her brother was gone and language was the only material left to her. The book is one of the most extraordinary things in recent literature — not because it was calculated to be, but because the need behind it was absolute.
Write toward the people you are losing or have lost. Write the letter you cannot send. Do the translation no one asked for. Make the book no publisher requested. The writing is not for an audience. The writing is what you do with your hands when language is the only way to reach someone.
Catullus’s brother has been dead for two thousand years. The poem is still being read. It was waiting for Carson when she needed it.
Write what you cannot leave unsaid. Someone is waiting for it — across town, or across twenty centuries.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594338698. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
Instagram is not about the book. It is about the world the book comes from.
When Josh Verhagen created Eddie the Ermine, he understood something most authors miss. The illustrations in his book do not decorate the story. They teach. Every page invites interaction. Hidden animals draw young readers deeper into the images. The visual experience is inseparable from the message.
Instagram works the same way for an author. The images are not decoration for the marketing. They are the world the book comes from — made visible to readers who may never have seen it.
Is Instagram Right for Your Book?
Not every author belongs on Instagram. The platform is visual — built around images and video rather than long-form text. If the book’s subject has a visual dimension — a setting, a landscape, a process, a craft, a place — Instagram gives readers a window into it.
An author writing about Alaska wilderness can share the ridge where the story takes place. An author writing about cooking can share the kitchen and the ingredients. An author writing about history can share the archive, the photograph, the artifact. An author writing a children’s book can share the illustrations in progress — the sketch, the color study, the finished page.
An author whose subject is not photographic still has visual material to work with. Research notes, hand-drawn diagrams, maps, timelines, archival documents, and the ideas themselves — rendered as a sentence on a clean background — can each offer something worth seeing. The question is not whether the author owns a camera. The question is whether something about the book’s world can be shown rather than only described.
If the book’s world is primarily interior — ideas, arguments, analysis — LinkedIn or Substack may serve the book better. The question is: where are your readers, and what do they expect to find?
What to Share
The bookstagram community — readers and authors who use Instagram to discover and discuss books — gives authors a chance to show readers something generic promotional graphics cannot: the actual world behind the book. A photograph taken at the research site, a marked-up manuscript, or the view from the writing desk belongs to this author and no one else.
Share the world behind the book. The place where you write. The view from the desk. The stack of research materials. The map pinned to the wall. The coffee shop where the outline came together. The landscape driving the story.
Share the process. A first draft page with revisions in the margin. The cover design before and after. The moment the printed books arrive. The signing table before the first reader walks up.
Share what you are reading. What you are noticing. What surprised you during research. What a reader said at a signing — with their permission and first name only.
Each of these images offers something a generic book-cover post does not — a window into one author’s particular world. The image earns attention by being worth looking at, not by asking for a purchase.
What Not to Share
The same cover image posted every week with “Available now!” If every post is a purchase invitation, there is little reason for a reader to return between buying decisions.
Stock images with inspirational quotes. A stock photograph can be used by anyone. The photograph from your research trip can come only from you.
Personal details the reader did not ask for and the author may regret sharing. The line between sharing your world and oversharing your life is real. Share the writing life. Protect the personal one.
Start Where You Are
Josh Verhagen did not write a long book. He wrote a short, purposeful one. Eddie the Ermine works because it does not try to do everything. It does one thing well — and enough.
Instagram works the same way for authors. One photograph of the place the story came from, posted with a sentence about why it matters, can show a reader something a week of generic promotional graphics cannot.
Start with one image. The one showing a reader something they would not see without you.
If the image exists — as a photograph, a sketch, a document, or an idea made visible — Instagram may be the right place for your book. If it does not, another platform may serve you better. Either answer is the right one.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen — a book about why authors write and why what they write matters.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, visit the same website and order directly.
Three years after his wife’s death, Wolo receives a letter.
It is from Victoria — the woman driving the car during the accident. She was not at fault. The road was icy. But she has been carrying the weight of it for three years, and she needs, somehow, to meet him.
Imbolo Mbue’s new novel, Every Story Is a Love Story (Random House, October 6, 2026), follows what happens when Wolo answers the letter. His family thinks he has lost his mind. He thinks so too, sometimes. But he goes. And what Mbue traces — through their hesitant, impossible, human meetings — is whether two people broken by the same event can find a way to help repair each other.
The novel asks: what do we owe those who have hurt us without meaning to? And beneath it, a quieter question: are any of us defined by our worst moments?
In July 1960, Joy Davidman died of cancer. She was forty-five.
Her husband, C.S. Lewis, had been one of the most celebrated Christian writers in the English-speaking world. He had written about faith, about joy, about the problem of pain. He thought he understood suffering.
He did not understand grief.
He wrote in notebooks. Not to publish, not to teach, not to make a point. He wrote because writing was the only thing he could do with what was happening inside him. He wrote: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” He wrote about the anger. He wrote about the silence where God had been — a door shut, the sound of bolting. He wrote his way, over months, from devastation toward a tentative peace.
He published the notebooks in 1961 under the pen name N.W. Clerk. He did not want his name on it. The book was called A Grief Observed. He later found it on a friend’s shelf — the friend had given it to someone in grief without knowing Lewis had written it.
The writing had traveled without him.
Mbue’s Wolo is not a writer. He is a man trying to find his way through an impossible situation. But the novel itself is the act — Mbue writing what she has seen and understood about grief, loss, and the strange grace of unexpected connection. She wrote it so Wolo would not be alone on the page, and so the reader would not be alone either.
The Power of Authors points here. Lewis did not write A Grief Observed to help the bereaved. He wrote it because he was going to break apart if he didn’t. But the writing reached every person who has sat with their own grief and felt, suddenly, less alone.
Write what you cannot survive without saying. Don’t calculate the audience. The audience finds the writing born from need.
Someone is carrying exactly what you are carrying. They are waiting to find the page where they are not alone anymore.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594338698. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
The question is not Page or Profile. The question is: where on Facebook do your readers expect to find you?
You will hear this advice: create a Facebook Page for your book.
It is not wrong. But it is no longer the only answer — and for some authors, it may not be the best one. Facebook has changed considerably, and an author choosing where to build a presence in 2026 has options the old advice does not cover.
Before setting up anything new, ask three questions.
Where Are Your Readers Already Finding You?
If readers are already finding you through your personal profile — if friends, family, and community members are the core of your audience — you may not need a separate Page at all.
Facebook now offers Professional Mode for personal profiles. Turning it on adds public followers, analytics, and creator tools directly to the profile you already have. Anyone can follow you without sending a friend request. You keep your friends, your posts, and your name. Facebook adds a professional layer on top.
For many authors — especially those whose readers come from their existing community rather than a national audience — Professional Mode may be the simplest and most effective choice. The readers are already there. The profile is already active.
Do You Need a Distinct Professional Presence?
A Facebook Page is a separate professional address. Anyone can follow it. It appears in search results. It displays the book, the bio, the website link, events, and contact information. It provides analytics and is the place where paid promotions run.
A Page makes sense when the author wants a public presence entirely separate from the personal profile — a storefront distinct from the home. It is especially useful for authors building a presence beyond their personal community, because the Page can be linked from the website, included in the media kit, and shared without exposing the personal profile.
But a Page built and left empty is worse than no Page at all. If an author creates a Page because someone said authors are supposed to have one, posts to it for a month, and then stops, the Page becomes an outdated picture of the author.
Build a Page only if you intend to keep it current. The standard from campaign 131 applies: accurate, present, and recognizable.
Is There Something for Readers to Gather Around?
A Facebook Group is a community space — a place where readers talk to each other, not just to the author.
But a Group should not exist so the author has another place to promote the book. A Group should exist because the people in it have a reason to talk even when the author is not in the room.
Alaska history. Wildlife photography. Mystery fiction. Homesteading. Military memoir. Grief and recovery. If the book’s subject connects to a community of shared interest, a Group gives the readers a table to gather around. The author’s role is host, not advertiser.
If there is no natural community around the book’s subject — if the Group would be a space for one author talking to a handful of followers — skip it. Not every book needs a Group. Every book needs a findable author.
The Principle Underneath
Facebook offers authors three kinds of space. The profile is the person. The Page is the sign on the house. The Group is the gathering around the table. Each serves a different purpose. Not every author needs all three.
The platform will change again. It always does. What will not change is the principle: go where your readers are, give them a reason to stay, and make it easy for them to find you when they come looking.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen, where reaching the reader always begins with understanding where the reader already is.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
Livia Bohusz was going to be a pianist.
She was a conservatory student — the kind of student who doesn’t just play but feels music as something larger than technique. Then a relationship ended badly. A choice was made young. She became Livia Cable instead, living quietly in farm country, having traded the conservatory for stability and the passion for something more manageable.
Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, Partita (HarperCollins, October 6, 2026), opens when an old lover calls, decades later. He wants to see her. What Livia must now face is not just the relationship but the art she left inside it — who she was when she played, and what leaving cost her. Kingsolver calls the book an exploration of ‘the timeless love affair between life and art.’ The novel’s chapter titles are musical terms: Interlude, Fugue, Partita. A partita is a suite of separate movements, each complete on its own, each part of a larger whole. The life, like the music, is built from pieces.
Livia left the piano. The novel asks what she finds when she looks back.
In 1908, Willa Cather became managing editor of McClure’s Magazine — one of the most powerful editorial positions in American journalism.
She had grown up in Nebraska, the daughter of a farm family on the open prairie, and had been writing fiction in the margins of a journalism career for years. McClure’s was important work. The salary was secure. Her colleagues were serious people doing serious things.
She left in 1912.
She walked away from the managing editor’s desk at thirty-eight years old to write novels. She went back to Nebraska — to the landscape she knew before journalism, before New York, before security. The books she wrote afterward are studied in American classrooms more than a century later: O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop. She did not know she would write any of them. She just knew the editorial work, however good, was not the life she was supposed to be living.
She walked toward the writing. She did not look back.
Kingsolver’s Livia made the other choice. She walked away from her art toward the stable life. Partita does not judge her for it. The novel asks something more careful: when she looks back, what does she find? What is still there? What was lost and what, perhaps, was not?
The Power of Authors does not ask you to quit your job and move to Nebraska. It asks something simpler and harder: don’t keep postponing the writing already in you.
Cather left the desk at thirty-eight. You know how old you are. You know what you have been telling yourself. You know the year you meant to start.
Livia left the piano at twenty-something. The novel finds her, decades later, getting a phone call from the past.
The writing will not call you. It will wait, or it won’t. Write it now, while it is still in you to write.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594338698. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
For every post asking readers to buy the book, share three giving them a reason to stay.
Think about the authors you follow on social media. Not as a publisher. As a reader.
Some of them post interesting things — a passage from the manuscript in progress, the story behind a character, a photograph from the place where the book is set, a thought connecting the book’s subject to something in the news. You look forward to their posts. When they mention the book is on sale or a new one is coming, you pay attention because they have earned it.
Others post the same thing every week. “Buy my book.” A link. A cover image. Another link. Another cover image.
Which author would you rather follow?
The Rule of Three
For every post promoting the book — a buy link, a sale announcement, a signing invitation — share three giving the reader something worth receiving. A passage from the book. The research behind a scene. A photograph from the setting. A question inviting conversation. The story of how you came to write it. A recommendation for another author’s book you admire.
Three is not a researched optimum. It is not an algorithm. It is a reminder: give readers considerably more reasons to stay than reasons to buy. The number is less important than the principle — the reader followed you because they found you interesting. Keep being interesting. The promotion works because it arrives surrounded by content the reader already values.
You Are Already Interesting
Here is something most authors do not believe: someone who enjoyed your book is interested in the person who wrote it. They want more of you, not more advertisements. They want the behind-the-scenes. The personal connection. The sense they are following a real person who happens to write books, not a marketing account pretending to be a person.
The value posts are not obligations. They are invitations to share the parts of your life and work your readers are already curious about. The research trip. The morning writing routine. The book you are reading. The view from your desk. The question a reader asked at a signing and the answer you gave.
Imagine Robin Barefield posting a photograph of sunrise over the water at her remote Kodiak lodge. No Amazon link. No website link. Just: “This is what greeted us this morning.”
It didn’t drive traffic. It didn’t collect an email address. It didn’t ask anyone to buy anything. But for a reader who follows Robin because her books come from a world they want to glimpse, the post gave them exactly what they came for. They are seeing the place where the stories come from. The relationship is not leading somewhere. The relationship is somewhere.
The Porch
An author stands at the front door of their house. If every time a neighbor walks past, the author shouts “Buy my book!” eventually people cross the street.
But imagine the author sitting on the porch. Talking about something discovered during research. Showing the view. Mentioning a book they just read. Telling the story behind a character. Answering someone’s question. And occasionally saying, “By the way, the new book comes out Tuesday.”
The book announcement belongs because the author already belongs.
Social media works the same way. The author who gives readers a reason to stay makes the occasional invitation to buy feel like part of the relationship rather than the purpose of it.
Start this week. Before the next time you post about the book, share three things your readers would find interesting even if the book did not exist. The balance will feel strange at first. It will feel like you are not marketing enough.
You are sharing your world with readers because your world is worth sharing. When it’s time to mention the book, the book already has a place in the conversation.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen, where the relationship between author and reader is treated as the foundation of everything worth building.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
Amazon reviews tell readers your book has been read. Trade reviews tell librarians and booksellers your book has been evaluated.
When I first met Weston Fields, he looked every bit the Kodiak fisherman — rubber boots, suspenders, wool shirt. He was there to support his mother, who had written a book about ranching history on the island. She spoke first. He said almost nothing. When he finally did, it was to tell me — gently — he had already edited her manuscript.
I chuckled to myself. He didn’t look like any editor I’d ever met.
Turns out, I was the one who needed editing.
Weston was a scholar, a linguist, and a historian who spoke five languages fluently. He had interviewed every living figure associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls. He served as Executive Director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation. More than once, as we worked on The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Full History, he paused mid-conversation to confirm a detail — not online, not from a book, but from a prince on his speed dial. Fluent Arabic, calm tone, quiet certainty. Then back to work.
I looked at rubber boots and made an assumption. I was wrong. First impressions do not always tell us what something is worth. Sometimes we need an informed second opinion.
A book faces the same challenge. Friends may love it. Amazon readers may praise it. But a librarian deciding which titles to acquire or a bookstore manager deciding which books to stock sometimes wants a different kind of opinion — an evaluation from someone whose job is to evaluate books.
Read and Evaluated
Amazon reviews give us the experience of readers. A stranger read the book, formed an opinion, and shared it. The value is social proof — evidence the book has been read and responded to by real people.
Trade reviews give industry professionals an independent critical assessment. A professional reviewer — trained, experienced, and writing to the standard of traditional publishing criticism — reads the book and evaluates its quality, effectiveness, and audience. The value is professional credibility — evidence the book has been examined by someone with no personal connection to the author.
Neither replaces the other. Neither guarantees sales. They serve different purposes and reach different audiences.
The Options
Several services offer professional reviews to independent authors. Among the most recognized are Kirkus Indie Reviews, Foreword’s Clarion Reviews, BlueInk Review, and BookLife by Publishers Weekly. Each charges a fee — typically several hundred dollars — and assigns a professional reviewer to read and evaluate the book.
A positive trade review opens doors Amazon reviews cannot reach. Libraries use trade reviews from recognized publications to guide acquisition decisions. A strong review quote can be added to the book’s Amazon listing through Author Central’s Editorial Reviews section, where the publication’s name carries weight beyond the words themselves. The review also becomes a permanent piece of the media kit — useful in pitches to podcast hosts, journalists, event coordinators, and bookstores.
Most paid review services allow the author to choose whether an unfavorable review is published, but the investment is made regardless of the outcome. The review may be critical. It may identify weaknesses the author did not see. This is part of its value — an honest evaluation is useful even when it is uncomfortable.
What Is This For?
Before spending several hundred dollars on a professional review, ask the same question we ask before writing anything at Publication Consultants: What is this for?
If the answer is “I want another five-star review,” a trade review is the wrong tool. Professional reviewers do not write endorsements. They write evaluations.
If the answer is “I want an independent critical assessment helping me approach librarians, booksellers, or media with credibility,” then investigate the options. Research the services. Compare their costs, timelines, and the audiences they reach. Choose the one serving your book’s specific goals.
If the answer is “My book’s audience is reached primarily through Amazon and direct sales,” the investment may serve the author better elsewhere — in advertising, in events, in building the email list.
I looked at Weston Fields and saw a fisherman. What I missed was a scholar who could telephone a prince to check a fact. The trade review exists because first impressions — even good ones — are not the only kind of evaluation worth having.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen, where every decision in the author’s journey begins with the question: What is this for?
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
It is the summer of 1951. London is still pockmarked with bomb sites. Food is still rationed. Men who survived the Burma Railway, the North Atlantic convoys, the firebombing of cities have come home to a country worn to nothing by six years of war and five more of austerity. The war ended in 1945. The damage did not.
The government’s answer: a festival.
Kate Atkinson’s new novel, Our Noble Selves (Doubleday, September 15, 2026), is built around the real Festival of Britain, held on the South Bank of the Thames in 1951. The Festival was the government’s deliberate attempt to give a shattered nation a reason to feel something other than exhaustion. It celebrated British art, architecture, design, industry, and history. It ran from May to September 1951 and drew more than eight million visitors.
Atkinson’s main character, Harry Flynn, is a journalist who spent most of the war as a prisoner of the Japanese on the Burma Railway, forced to work on a project killing twelve thousand Allied prisoners and nearly one hundred thousand Asian laborers. He comes home carrying what cannot be spoken. He finds himself working on the Festival — helping build something beautiful because the country has decided, against all evidence, beauty is necessary.
The other organizers around him are survivors too: a Welshman who spent a week on a raft watching everyone else die, a man with a secret history in intelligence, a fourteen-year-old boy with no father. They are making something out of the wreckage. Atkinson’s author’s note says: “The only thing I made up was the plot to fit around all this.” The real history was strange enough. She simply gave it characters.
One year before the Festival of Britain was conceived, a novelist and playwright named J.B. Priestley sat before a BBC microphone on the evening of June 5, 1940. He had been asked to give a Postscript broadcast following the nine o’clock news.
Four days had passed since the Dunkirk evacuation ended. In nine days, some 338,000 soldiers had been lifted from the beaches of northern France by a fleet of naval vessels and private pleasure boats — small steamers, fishing boats, river launches, paddle steamers — anything capable of crossing the Channel.
Priestley described the pleasure boats. He said they had been “called out of our holidays and our pleasures.” He said the boats — built for summer outings, for families on day trips, for the ordinary happiness of peacetime — had gone to the beach at Dunkirk. He made the boats into an emblem of what Britain actually was: ordinary, practical, humorous, willing. He said: “So to the valour of our fighters and the fortitude of our people, there is added — and it is no small thing — the saving grace of humour.”
The broadcast was heard by millions. His Postscript series continued for months and became one of the most listened-to programs of the war. He was eventually taken off the air — some in government felt he was becoming too popular, too much his own voice. He kept writing. He kept giving the country language for what it was living through.
In 1951, Priestley helped plan the Festival of Britain. He already understood what it was for. He had been doing it another way for eleven years.
Atkinson’s novel is not about the Festival. It is about the people who built the Festival while carrying what they had seen. What those people did was not sentimental. It was not escapism. It was the deliberate act of people who had looked at the worst and decided to make something worthy of the best. Reviewer Kirkus wrote of Our Noble Selves: “What begins as a narrative of personal and collective collapse becomes, by the end, a story about the power of love and connection.”
The answer the Festival gave was not: forget what happened. The answer was: here is what we are still capable of. Here is the architecture we can still raise. Here is the music we can still write. Here is the story we can still tell.
The Power of Authors teaches: writing is not the comfortable work done after the necessary work is finished. Writing is necessary work. Priestley’s broadcasts did not wait until Britain was safe. They did their work in the middle of the danger — giving people language for what they were enduring, restoring dignity to ordinary life, naming the saving grace of humour when humour seemed impossible.
You may be wondering whether your writing matters right now. Whether the world’s weight leaves room for story.
It was 1951. London had bomb sites. Food was rationed. The weight was considerable. They built the Festival anyway. Harry Flynn, who had survived the Burma Railway, helped build it.
Write anyway. Your writing is not the decoration around the necessary work. It is evidence of what is still possible. Write it.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594338698. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
Your book may already have a home on Goodreads. Have you looked to see what your readers find there?
Robin Barefield lives in the wilderness on Kodiak Island, where she and her husband own a remote lodge. She wrote her first novel, Murder Over Kodiak, powered by a generator, miles from the nearest road. No MFA. No publishing connections. No high-speed internet.
Search for Robin Barefield on Goodreads today and you find an author with multiple books listed, reviews from readers, a bio matching her website and Amazon page, and links connecting her to the broader reading community. A reader in New York or London or Anchorage can type her name and discover her entire catalog in seconds.
Robin built this from one of the most remote places an author could live. She built it by claiming her profile and keeping it current. The distance between a wilderness lodge on Kodiak and a reader’s nightstand collapsed because she showed up on the platform where readers gather.
What Goodreads Is
Goodreads is a reading community owned by Amazon. Readers use it to track what they have read, rate and review books, discover new titles, and follow authors whose work interests them.
Your book may already be in the Goodreads database even if you have never created an account or claimed your author profile. But an unclaimed listing is a shell — it may show the title and cover, but it carries no bio, no photograph, and no connection to you as a reachable author.
Claiming your Author Profile through the Goodreads Author Program changes this. The program is free and open to any published author with at least one book in the Goodreads database. Once approved, you can update your photograph and bio, manage your book listings, connect your blog, run giveaways, and interact with readers through Goodreads’ Ask the Author feature. Your profile receives an official Author badge, and readers can follow you for updates on future work.
How to Claim Your Profile
Go to goodreads.com and sign in or create a free account. Search for your book by title or ISBN. On the book’s page, click your author name to open the author profile. Scroll to the bottom. Look for the prompt: “Is this you? Let us know!” Click it and follow the steps to submit your application. Goodreads typically approves applications within two business days.
Once approved, add your photograph — the same one appearing on your website and Amazon page. Write your bio in third person, focused on where you write from, what you write, and what connects you to your subject. Add every book you have published with the correct cover, ISBN, and description. Link your website.
If your book is not yet in the Goodreads database, the Goodreads Librarians Group — a community of volunteers — can help you get it listed.
The Search Test
Once your profile is claimed, take the same test from last week’s campaign. Search for yourself on Goodreads the way a reader would. Is your photograph there? Does the bio sound like you? Are all your books listed and correctly attributed? Do the links work? If a reader found this page and nothing else, would they know enough to decide whether to read your book?
Ask your early readers to rate and review the book honestly on Goodreads as well as Amazon. Ratings give the next reader something an author cannot provide: the experience of people who have already read the book.
Robin Barefield started where she was — remote, unknown, powered by a generator. She claimed her profile, listed her books, and kept her presence current. The readers found her because she made herself findable.
Goodreads is where many readers already gather. Your profile is your seat at the table. Claim it. The readers are already there.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen, where showing up for the reader is the foundation of every practical step.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
The question hasn’t changed. “What should I read?” The person — or machine — answering it has.
A reader once walked into a bookstore and said, “I’m looking for a mystery set in Alaska.” The bookseller reached for a shelf and handed her a book.
Then readers typed essentially the same words into Google.
Now they can type a complete question into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or another AI assistant and receive a conversational answer with specific book recommendations.
The question is the same. The scale is different. And the author’s relationship to the answer is worth understanding.
The Experiment
Try something. Open whatever AI assistant you have on your phone or computer. Type a question a reader might ask if they were looking for a book like yours.
“Recommend a mystery set in Alaska.”
“What are the best memoirs about commercial fishing?”
“Suggest a children’s book about wildlife.”
Look at what comes back. Is your book in the answer?
Now look at the books it does recommend. What do they have in common? Ask the AI why it chose them. Ask for sources. Try a different wording. Try a narrower question. Try a broader one.
You are not testing the AI. You are learning how a growing number of readers are now discovering books. And you are seeing, for the first time, whether the information available about your book is sufficient for this new kind of recommendation to find you.
What We Know and What We Don’t
AI assistants with web search capabilities can find and synthesize information from across the internet when answering a reader’s question. They can draw from book descriptions, reviews, author pages, reading lists, and other publicly available sources. Different systems work differently, and even the same assistant may answer from its training data in one situation and search the live web in another.
Nobody can guarantee an AI assistant will recommend your book. The systems are complex, their methods are proprietary, and their results change depending on how the question is asked.
What we can say with confidence is simpler: accurate, public information about your book gives both human readers and web-search-enabled systems something real to find. The work you have already done — claiming your Goodreads profile, maintaining a consistent author bio, keeping your Amazon listing current, building a website connecting you to your subject — serves this new channel the same way it serves every other.
The Three-Week Progression
In campaign 131, you searched your own name and saw what a reader sees. In campaign 132, you searched for yourself on Goodreads and saw what the reading community sees. Now you have asked an AI assistant about the kind of book you wrote and seen what this new discovery channel finds.
Three searches. Three perspectives. Each one reveals something different about how your book exists in the world beyond your own desk.
I wrote in The Power of Authors: “Technology changed the way I publish — but more importantly, it changed who could find the books I produce.” This has been true at every technological shift in my six decades of publishing. The bookstore gave way to online retail. Online retail gave way to social media. Now social media shares the stage with AI assistants answering questions in plain conversation.
The author’s job has not changed. Write something worth reading. Make accurate information about it available where people — and now systems — can find it.
The way readers ask for books is changing. Be curious about it. Test it. And make sure when someone comes looking for information about your book, there is something trustworthy to find.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen, where every shift in technology is treated as an opportunity to reach the reader who has not found the book yet.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
This past Thursday, September 11, 2026, family members gathered at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in lower Manhattan. As they have every year since 2002, they read the names of the 2,977 people killed in the attacks. The reading takes several hours. Every name is spoken aloud.
The ceremony is the same every year. The names are the same. The readers change — grown children now where small children once stood, grandchildren where children once stood. The memorial pools fill the footprints of the towers. The water falls continuously.
In the days after September 11, 2001, people reached for poems. Not for the poems written about September 11 — there were almost none yet, the event was too new — but for poems already written, poems written about other days, poems written about other catastrophes. One poem circulated more than any other.
The poem had been written sixty-two years earlier, about a different September morning.
On September 1, 1939, a British poet named W.H. Auden sat in a bar on 52nd Street in New York City. He had arrived in New York six months earlier with his partner Christopher Isherwood. He was thirty-two years old. That morning, Germany invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun.
He wrote a poem. He called it “September 1, 1939.”
He wrote from inside the bar, from inside the specific fear of the morning itself. He wrote about sitting “uncertain and afraid” as the events of Europe moved toward catastrophe. He wrote about what human beings do when the structures they had trusted begin to collapse. He wrote about the need to hold something true against the dark.
The poem’s most famous lines: “We must love one another or die.”
He published the poem in 1940. It was widely read and praised. Then Auden turned against it. He said the central line was dishonest — we die anyway, whatever we do. He tried to suppress the poem. He wanted it removed from his collected works. For a time, editors honored his wishes.
Then September 11, 2001 arrived. People reached for the poem and passed it to each other by email, by phone, by hand. It circulated in a way nothing else written in those days did. The poem Auden had tried to suppress was exactly what 2001 needed. The fear he had named in 1939 was the same fear. The need he had described was the same need.
The poem outlasted his objections. It outlasted him. It found the readers who needed it next, sixty-two years after he wrote it at a bar on 52nd Street.
Auden was not writing for 2001. He was writing for September 1, 1939 — for the specific bar, the specific morning, the specific fear in the room. He wrote what was real in front of him with as much precision as he had.
The precision is what traveled.
Writing aimed at the future usually misses. It is abstract; it generalizes; it tries to be universal by leaving out the specific. The specific is what lasts. The bar on 52nd Street. The particular quality of the morning’s fear. The exact word for what a person feels when the world they trusted is revealed as fragile.
The Power of Authors teaches: write about this moment, this place, this fear, this need — with enough precision, the truth inside it can travel. The reader who needs it in ten years or sixty years will find it the same way the readers of 2001 found Auden’s 1939 poem: with recognition. With the feeling of being met.
This past Thursday, people read 2,977 names at the edge of two pools. They have done it every year for twenty-five years. They will keep doing it.
Someone will need to read what you write today the way people in 2001 needed to read what Auden wrote in 1939. They may not exist yet. They may not know they need it yet.
Write it precisely. Write it now. Let the truth carry it.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594338698. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
On July 28, 2026, the judges of the Booker Prize announced the 13 novels longlisted for the year’s award. The chair of the panel, classicist and writer Mary Beard, described what the judges had found in their reading: “Books are not mirrors: they don’t simply reflect ourselves back to us.”
The 13 books on the list came from writers representing seven nationalities across three continents. They were chosen from 163 novels published in English in the United Kingdom and Ireland between October 2025 and September 2026. The judges noted the range of what they had found: funny and unsettling, dystopian fantasy and domestic drama, gritty and magically mysterious.
But one detail stood apart from all the others. The list contained a debut novel by a 28-year-old and the 13th novel by an 81-year-old.
The 81-year-old is M. John Harrison. His novel is called The End of Everything. Harrison has published fiction, essays, and criticism since 1971 — fifty-five years. He has written science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. He has won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Tiptree Award, and the British Fantasy Award, among others. He has been called “one of the greatest living British writers” by critics who have followed his work for decades.
If he wins the Booker Prize in November, he would be the oldest winner in the prize’s history — older than Margaret Atwood when she won for The Testaments at 79.
He has been writing for fifty-five years. He is still writing. The shortlist will be announced on September 22.
Harriet Doerr spent the first decades of her adult life raising children, managing a household, and supporting her husband Albert’s copper mining enterprise in a small village in Guanajuato, Mexico. She had studied at Stanford before her marriage but never finished her degree. She was a reader, always, but the writing waited.
Albert died in 1972. She was in her mid-fifties. In 1977, at age sixty, she went back to Stanford and finished her undergraduate degree. She continued as a graduate student in the creative writing program. Her teachers included writers who were decades younger than she was.
She wrote about Mexico — the village, the mine, the landscape, the people she had come to know in the years she spent there. She wrote what she knew from the inside.
At seventy-three, she published her first novel. Stones for Ibarra (1984) tells the story of Sara and Richard Everton, an American couple who move to a Mexican village to restore a copper mine. It won the National Book Award for Fiction. It was reviewed across the country. It was read widely. It found the readers it was written for.
She wrote nine more books over the following two decades. She gave readings, spoke at universities, corresponded with other writers. She died in 2002 at the age of ninety-two.
She published her first book at seventy-three and her last in her late eighties. Twenty years of published writing — after a lifetime of preparation.
Harrison has been writing for fifty-five years and hasn’t stopped. Doerr published her first novel at seventy-three and wrote for twenty more years after. Between them, they describe the whole span of the writing life: beginning to end, early to late, first book to thirteenth book.
The Booker Prize longlist has never before placed a debut by a 28-year-old beside a 13th novel by an 81-year-old on the same announcement. The judges did not plan it this way. They simply chose the best work. The range was what the work required.
The Power of Authors teaches: writing is not a career stage. It is not something you do in the years between youth and middle age, then leave behind. It is the practice of someone who has something to say and the commitment to say it precisely. That practice begins when you begin. It ends when you stop.
You may have been waiting. You may have told yourself the time has not yet come, or has already passed. You may have a story you have carried for years without writing it.
Harriet Doerr carried Mexico inside her for decades. She started at sixty, published at seventy-three, and wrote until she was nearly ninety.
The writing life does not have a closing date. It has a starting point. Go.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594338698. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
Search your own name as a stranger would. What you find is what your reader finds.
Open a browser you do not normally use. Type your name. Hit search.
What comes up?
This is the test most authors never take. They build profiles during launch week and never look at them again. They assume the pages they set up a year ago are still doing their job. They have no idea what a stranger sees when curiosity leads them to a search bar.
Try it now. Before you read another sentence. Type your name into a search engine the way a reader would — someone who heard about your book at a dinner party, or caught a mention in a podcast, or saw a friend’s recommendation and wanted to know more.
What they find in the next sixty seconds shapes whether they keep looking or move on.
What the Search Reveals
When you search for Mary Ann Poll, you find an author who is present. Her Goodreads page appears with thirteen books and hundreds of ratings. Her Amazon Author Central page shows a consistent bio, a professional photograph, and her full catalog. Her own website — maryannpoll.com — carries the same bio, the same voice, the same positioning: “America’s Lady of Supernatural Thrillers.” Her Medium page shows recent writing. Her podcast, Real Ghost Chatter, appears in the results. The Readers and Writers Book Club features her work.
A stranger searching for Mary Ann Poll finds a coherent picture. The same photograph. The same language. The same book covers. Every platform confirms what the last one said. The reader’s confidence builds with each click because the author’s presence is clear and recognizable across every door.
Mary Ann built this by showing up — consistently, across platforms, across years. She does not disappear between books. When a reader comes looking, the author is home.
What to Look For
When you search your own name, look for three things.
First, can the reader find the book? A cover image, a title, a working link to where they can buy it. If the book is not visible within seconds, the search has failed regardless of what else appears.
Second, does the reader get a sense of who you are? Not a resume. A voice. A photograph showing a real person. A bio answering the question every reader carries: Why did this person write this book?
Third, does the presence look current? A profile last updated months ago may not drive a reader away, but it does not invite them in. Recent activity — even modest activity — signals the author is still part of the conversation.
If any of these three are missing, fix it before you do anything else. The reader who searches for you today may not think to search again.
Consistency Is Clarity
The reader may find you on Goodreads, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or your own website. They may visit several in the same session, assembling a picture of who you are.
If the picture is consistent — same photograph, same bio adapted to each platform, same book prominently displayed — the reader feels clarity. This author knows who they are. The presentation is intentional.
If the picture is scattered — different photos, different bios, a book cover on one platform and nothing on another — the reader feels uncertainty. And uncertainty makes the next click less likely.
Use one professional photograph across every platform. Write one bio and adapt it to each site’s format. Make the book the first visual element a visitor sees. Link to where the book is sold. These are not creative decisions. They are acts of clarity.
The Annual Audit
Once a year, take the search test again. Update the bio. Refresh the photograph if needed. Make sure every book link still works. Remove anything outdated. The audit takes an afternoon. The impression it maintains lasts twelve months.
Every profile is a door. The reader searching for you is standing on the other side, deciding whether to walk through. She is already interested — she heard about the book and took the step of searching. All you have to do is be there when she arrives.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen, where every element of an author’s presence serves the reader searching for the book.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
In 1995, a nine-year-old boy named Gaël Faye left Burundi with his family and flew to France as a refugee.
He had grown up in Bujumbura, the capital — the son of a French father and a Rwandan Tutsi mother. In 1994, the genocide in neighboring Rwanda killed between 500,000 and 800,000 people in one hundred days. Civil war followed in Burundi. His family left. He grew up in France.
He became a rapper. He performed under his own name. He built a following and a career in French music. But something from Bujumbura stayed inside him — something the music could not fully reach.
In 2016, he published a novel. Small Country, written in French, tells the story of a boy in Burundi watching the Rwandan genocide from across the border. It is the story Faye lived, written from inside the community it belongs to. The novel sold more than a million copies in France, won the Prix Renaudot des lycéens, and has been translated into more than forty languages.
This month, his second novel arrives in English. Jacaranda is set in Rwanda thirty years after the genocide. It tells the story of the generation born after — children who did not live the events but who inherited the silence, the grief, and the unanswered questions their parents carried. It is published by Hogarth in a translation by Sarah Ardizzone.
Faye was nine years old when his world broke open. He spent decades learning how to write what he saw. He wrote it from inside, because only someone from inside could write it fully.
In 1958, a young Nigerian writer named Chinua Achebe published his first novel. He had grown up reading the British colonial literature of Africa — Rider Haggard, John Buchan, Joseph Conrad — and he had noticed something.
The Africans in those books were backdrop. They were atmosphere. They were the darkness against which the European protagonists shone. They were not people with names and histories and interior lives and moral complexity. They were the landscape.
Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to give the Igbo people of Nigeria their own story, told from inside. He wrote about Okonkwo, a man of the Umuofia clan — his strengths, his fears, his pride, his failures, the world he built and the world colonialism took from him. He gave the story its Igbo roots: the proverbs, the rituals, the specific shape of a specific community’s life. He wrote what the colonial literature could not write, because the colonial literature was looking from outside.
The novel has sold more than twenty million copies and been translated into more than sixty languages. It is one of the most widely read books in the world. Achebe said: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
He was the lion. He became the historian. He wrote the account the hunters had left out.
Faye was nine years old in Bujumbura in 1994 and 1995. He grew up in France, in a language not his mother’s first language, in a culture not quite his own. He carried a story no one outside his community could fully reach. Small Country is what he wrote when he was ready. Jacaranda is what he wrote when he understood the story was still unfinished.
Achebe looked at the colonial library and saw his people rendered as backdrop. He picked up his pen. He wrote them as the center. Things Fall Apart did not simply add an African perspective to world literature. It changed what world literature could be.
The Power of Authors teaches: the story of a community belongs to the people of the community. Not exclusively — great writers have always crossed into other lives and other worlds. But the story told from inside carries what no outsider can provide: the specific names of specific things, the proverbs used in specific moments, the texture of a life lived from the center rather than observed from the edge.
You come from somewhere. You know a community — a family, a neighborhood, a faith, a region, a people — from inside. Someone has told your community’s story before. They told it from outside. Something was missing.
You know what was missing. Write it in.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
The morning after. The folding tables are back in the garage. The leftover food is in the refrigerator. The unsold books are stacked on the dining room table. The banner is rolled up in the corner.
The house is quiet. The excitement is gone. The author sits at the kitchen table and feels a familiar weight settling in — the sense something important just ended.
It didn’t end. It started. And what the author does in the next forty-eight hours will determine whether the release party was a celebration or a launch.
The Morning After
The author opens her laptop before the breakfast dishes are cleared. She pulls up the photographs from last night — the ones her designated photographer took of her standing with each guest, the book between them, both of them smiling. She picks the first photograph, types two sentences beneath it, and sends it.
“It was wonderful to see you last night. Here’s our photo from the signing.”
Not a mass email. A personal note. One guest at a time. By lunch, every person who attended has received their photograph and a thank-you.
Something begins happening she did not plan. Guests share the photographs on social media. Not because she asked. Because people share photographs of themselves. A guest posts the picture with a caption — “Great night at the book launch!” — and her friends see the cover. One of them asks where to buy it. Each shared image carries the book into a network the author has no other way to reach. The release party, which ended twelve hours ago, is now arriving in living rooms across town.
The Week After
She posts the best photographs herself — not all at once, but spaced across three or four days. The author signing books. The room full of guests. The two-minute reading. The table before the first book sold and the table after the last one left. Each post extends the party’s life by another day. A reader who missed the event sees photographs appearing in her feed across the week and thinks: something is happening with this book. The party lasted three hours. The story of the party lasts much longer.
She pulls out the signup sheets from the door and the checkout table. Names and email addresses, written in the handwriting of people who stood in her room, held her book, and chose to stay connected. She enters each address into her mailing list — the same list receiving every future announcement, every signing invitation, every new book. The signup sheet at the party clearly told them what they were joining: the author’s mailing list for book news and events. The consent was given in the room. The relationship continues in the inbox. These are the warmest contacts she will ever have — people who came because they were invited and stayed because the book moved them.
The release party was a three-hour event. The email list makes it permanent.
The Next Event
Before the week is out, she schedules the next event. A public release at a bookstore. A library reading. A speaking engagement at a community group. The specific event matters less than the momentum. An author with nothing on the calendar drifts. An author with the next date circled moves toward it. The release party gave her confidence. The next event gives her direction.
Denny Bache-Wiig wrote Nothing Ventured about her family’s South Pacific voyage after her husband’s death. Sales were modest. But she worked for every one of them. She did not treat the release party as the conclusion. She treated it as the first event in a series — each one reaching new readers, each one building on the last.
The authors whose books find lasting audiences are not the ones who throw the biggest parties. They are the ones who show up the morning after and ask: What is next?
The party was one night. The author is who got up the next morning.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen, where the launch is never the end of the work — it is the beginning of the practice.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
This week, Literary Hub published an interview with Chang-rae Lee about his new novel, A Tender Age (Riverhead Books, August 2026). The novel follows Jeon-Gi, an eleven-year-old Korean-American immigrant at summer camp in 1976. It is Lee’s most personal book.
Lee came to the United States from Seoul at age three, with his mother and sister, to join his father, a psychiatrist who had immigrated earlier. He grew up in Westchester County, outside New York City. As a child, he often translated for his Korean-speaking mother. He stood between two languages for her, carrying her words into English and the world’s words back to her.
He went to Exeter, then Yale, then to an MFA program at the University of Oregon. His thesis became his debut novel. His first book was not memoir. It was a spy novel. He found a form the facts alone could not have held.
When asked why he chose fiction rather than autobiography to tell this story, Lee said: “I’m just too restless in what I want from a story. I don’t want to be limited by my experience.”
He described making tteokguk this week — Korean rice cake soup, a broth of kelp and dried anchovies — trying to get the exact flavor his mother used to make. He was tasting it with his adult daughter, asking her: do you taste the fishiness and the sea? “That, for me,” he said, “is why life is worth living.”
He was not talking about cooking. He was talking about what fiction is for — trying to give someone else the feeling of something they did not live, so precisely and so honestly the feeling arrives whole.
In 1989, Eva Hoffman published Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, a memoir about emigrating from Kraków, Poland, to Vancouver, Canada, at age thirteen. She had grown up in a Polish Jewish family, speaking Polish and Yiddish and German. At thirteen, she arrived in a country where none of those languages worked.
She described what happened to her feelings when she lost her language. In Polish, she had words for every shade of sadness, every quality of light on a winter afternoon, every particular longing. In English, the words were approximate. The feelings were still there. The words were a size too large or a size too small.
She wrote: “I have to translate myself.”
She also wrote: “English is not my native tongue, but it is the language in which I live.” She did not mean she had given up the first language. She meant the first language and the second had made something between them — something neither could make alone.
Her memoir is not only about loss. It is about the discovery, in the gap between languages, of a self who could speak from both. She did not write the book she would have written in Polish. She wrote the book only an immigrant into English could write.
Lee does not want to be limited by his experience. Hoffman found she had to translate herself. Both are describing the same thing from different directions.
The experience itself is never quite the truth you are trying to reach. The experience is what happened. The truth is what it felt like, what it meant, what it made possible, what it cost. The experience is the surface. The truth lives below.
The Power of Authors teaches: fiction is not a flight from truth. It is the form you use when the truth is too large for the facts to hold. Lee was an immigrant child translating for his mother. His debut novel was a spy thriller. He found a form the autobiography alone could not have made. The feelings arrived anyway — in the spy’s alienation, in the immigrant’s double life, in the loss of a self lived between two languages.
You have a true experience you do not know how to write. You have tried it as memoir and it flattens. You have tried it as fiction and it feels like a lie.
It is not a lie. It is the form searching for itself. Keep writing. Lee made tteokguk and asked his daughter: do you taste the sea? He has been trying to pass the feeling across for thirty years.
Find the form your truth requires. The facts are not the limit. They are the starting point.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
Someone is giving you a few moments of their attention. Make those moments easy for them.
Monday morning. A bookstore manager sits down with forty-seven unread messages. She has an hour before the store opens. She is deciding which emails deserve her attention and which ones can wait.
Two of them are from authors requesting signings.
One subject line says: Book signing
The other says: Signing request — Alaska memoir — March availability
Which one would you open first?
You already know. Everyone does. The second subject line respects the manager’s time. It tells her what the email is about, what kind of book is involved, and what the author is asking — before she opens it. The first subject line tells her nothing. It asks her to do the work of figuring out what the author wants.
This is not about looking professional. This is about treating the person on the other end as someone whose time matters.
What the Recipient Sees
Every email an author sends to a bookstore, a reviewer, a podcast host, or a journalist is a request for attention. The recipient does not owe the author anything. They are choosing, from a crowded inbox, which messages deserve a response.
The author who makes the recipient’s job easier gives the request a better chance of being considered. Not because they are more talented. Because they showed respect for the person reading.
This means a clear subject line naming the book, the request, and the relevant detail. Not “Hello” or “Question” or “My book.” A subject line helping the recipient decide in one glance whether this email belongs in their day.
This means a brief message. Three to five sentences. Who you are. What the book is about. What you are asking. Keep the first message brief enough the recipient can quickly understand who you are, why you’re writing, and what you’re asking.
This means knowing the recipient’s name. “Dear Events Coordinator” is acceptable. “Hi” is not. When the manager’s name is readily available, use it. Those thirty seconds tell the recipient you took the time to learn whom you’re writing to.
This means a signature. Name, book title, website, phone number. The recipient who wants to follow up should find what they need at the bottom of the email without asking for it.
Your Email Address
When you register your domain name for your author website, most providers offer a professional email address — you@yourdomain.com. This is worth setting up. Every email sent from your domain carries your website address with it. The recipient sees your name and your web presence in the same line.
A Gmail or Yahoo address is not disqualifying. Many successful authors use them. But a domain-based address adds a small, steady signal: this author has invested in their presence. It is one element among several — the subject line, the message, the signature, the tone — contributing to the overall impression.
No single element makes or breaks the email. The combination does. A domain-based address with a vague message and no signature is no better than a Gmail address with a clear, respectful request. The email address is not the point. The respect is the point.
The Principle Underneath
Every piece of author communication — every email, every pitch, every signing request, every follow-up — is a conversation with a human being who has other things to do. The author who remembers this writes differently. They write shorter. They write clearer. They anticipate the question before the recipient asks it. They make the response easy because they understand they are asking for something valuable: a few moments of someone’s day.
This is not marketing technique. It is the same principle governing every page of writing worth reading: think about the person receiving the words, not the person sending them.
Before you send the next email to a bookstore, a reviewer, a podcast host, or a journalist, read it once from their side of the screen. Ask yourself: If I received this message in a crowded inbox on a Monday morning, would I respond?
If the answer is yes, send it. If the answer is no, rewrite it — not for you, but for them.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen, where the author’s work is always measured by the reader it serves.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
The novelist Ella Camposanto has arrived in Sicily with her twelve-year-old daughter, Manuela. They are staying near the ruins where the narrator’s grandmother once worked on an archaeological dig. The summer is full of volcanic rumbles and sudden storms. The narrator’s mother is beginning to forget.
Manuela, the daughter, has a request. Could the next book have a beginning, a middle, and an end?
The question is more complicated than it sounds.
Valeria Luiselli’s new novel is called Beginning Middle End. It was published on July 28, 2026, and received extraordinary reviews — TIME called it “inventive” and “piercing.” Kirkus called it an “offbeat migration story as artful as any in Luiselli’s oeuvre.” Publishers Weekly said: “A masterpiece.”
The novel asks three questions Luiselli names plainly: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?
The title belongs to Manuela. Beginning middle end. A child’s request for a story she can follow. But also a writer’s confrontation with the hardest fact about family: if you do not write the beginning down, you will arrive one day in the middle with nothing before it.
The narrator’s grandmother worked among ruins. Her mother is forgetting. She has brought her daughter to the place where the old stories might still be in the ground.
Gabriel García Márquez grew up in Aracataca, Colombia, in the house of his maternal grandparents. His grandmother told stories. She told the wildest stories — about ghosts, about rains of yellow butterflies, about a man who ate the earth when he was sad — and she told them without hesitation, in a tone so certain anyone who doubted her was a fool.
He absorbed everything. When he was eight, the family left Aracataca. His grandmother died. The world she had described remained inside him.
Decades later, he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. The town of Macondo, the Buendía family, the yellow butterflies, the rain of flowers, the ice — all of it came from his grandmother’s voice. He said:
“The formula was simply that I wrote exactly the way my grandmother used to tell her stories. She told them as if they were absolute truth, as if anyone who doubted them was an idiot.”
She never doubted them. He wrote them down. The novel was published in 1967. His grandmother had been dead for years. But the stories were permanent now. They had found the form they needed to survive.
García Márquez said: “I had to go back to Aracataca to write the beginning.” He drove there with his mother in 1950. When they arrived, the town was ruined, smaller than he remembered. “Suddenly I had a complete vision of the novel,” he said, “from the first line to the last.” His grandmother’s world was disappearing. He wrote it into permanence before it was entirely gone.
Luiselli has taken her daughter to the place where her grandmother’s world still exists in the earth. García Márquez drove back to the town where his grandmother’s world was fading into ruin. Both were writers who understood: the beginning of the story is not in the imagination. It is in the family. And the family is forgetting.
The Power of Authors teaches: writing from genuine purpose means writing for a reader who needs what only you can give them. There is one reader only you can serve — the person who will come after you in your family, who will need the beginning you are carrying right now. The beginning no one else has.
You are someone’s grandchild. You carry stories you did not choose to carry. You received them in kitchens and on porches, in the car on long drives, in the half-awake hours before sleep. You received them from a voice you can still hear if you try.
Write them now. Not as documentary. As story. Tell them the way she told them — as if every word were absolutely true. García Márquez’s grandmother never doubted the stories. Neither should you.
Your mother is not forgetting yet. Your grandmother’s voice is still in you. Write from there. That is the beginning.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
The one-star review will come. What you do next reveals whether you are writing for your ego or for your reader.
When I was publishing Alaska Outdoors magazine, the head of the journalism department at the University of Alaska sent me a submission. It was so poorly written, I took it for a joke. I answered it as a joke, only to learn the author was serious. He simply had such an inflated self-image; his writing read like a spoof. It was no spoof.
He later became the book reviewer for the Anchorage Daily News. One of his first reviews was of our book, Hiking Guide to Alaska. It was scathing. The paper gave it nearly a full page — a full page less one column — which is unheard of for a book review.
When I read it, I was angry and hurt. I did not know what to do or what to say.
I went to see Lynn Dixon, who owned Cook Inlet Book Company in Anchorage. She was a good friend, and she had already read the review.
“Lynn, what am I going to do about this?”
“Evan, do not do anything,” she said.
“I must do something.”
“No. Do nothing. Most people will only look at the headline. It says Hiking Guide to Alaska, by Evan and Margaret Swensen. They will not read the review. They will say to themselves, this must be a very good book — it got almost a full page in the Anchorage Daily News. And anyone who knows the reviewer, who knows the man and his character, will discount it entirely. They already know the review is a joke. Not because it is funny. Because he is.”
I took Lynn’s advice. I did nothing.
Then the letters to the editor began.
One a day. Sometimes two. For a week, then ten days. Readers of Hiking Guide to Alaska wrote to the paper telling the reviewer how wrong he was. They did the work I had wanted to do. They did it for me.
It turned out to be a very good thing. The review sold a great many books.
If I had responded — if I had written a furious letter to the editor, if I had called the paper, if I had confronted the reviewer — the story would have been about me fighting with a critic. Instead, the story was about readers defending a book they loved. The readers became the voice. The book became the winner. And I had done nothing but stay out of the way.
Every author will receive a negative review. The question is not whether it will come. The question is what you do when it arrives.
Do not respond publicly. Not on Amazon. Not on social media. Not through a friend’s account. Every author who has responded publicly to a negative review has regretted it. The response makes the author look defensive. It turns a complaint into an argument the author cannot win.
Read it honestly once the sting fades. Ask yourself: Is there truth in this? If there is, the next book benefits. If there is not, the review fades into background noise, and the book continues its work.
A negative review means your book reached someone outside your inner circle. Friends and family leave five-star reviews. Strangers leave honest ones. A book with nothing but five-star reviews looks curated, not credible. A mix of ratings — mostly positive, with a few dissenting voices — tells the browsing stranger the reviews are real.
There is a difference between a review saying “The pacing in the middle section lost me” and a review saying “This is garbage.” The first is feedback. The second is noise. One makes you a better writer. The other tests your discipline.
I tell our authors to take the attitude Henry Ford is said to have taken whenever someone sent him a complaint or said something derogatory about him or his company: “Say what you want about me, but spell my name correctly.”
Your book will outlast the review. Your readers will do the defending. Your job was the writing. The review belongs to the reader now.
The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the author who writes for the reader, not the critic, builds something lasting.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
At 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, Kiyoshi Tanimoto was on the outskirts of Hiroshima, unloading a handcart at a house in the suburb of Koi. He was two miles from the city center. He had slept poorly — the overnight air-raid warnings had kept him up — and he had risen early and set out with the cart.
Then the sky turned to fire.
Tanimoto was a thirty-six-year-old Methodist minister. He was not killed. He ran back toward the city. He found people moving without expression, following one another in silence. He wrote later: “Skin from faces, hands, arms, and breasts was stripped off or hanging loose. People were moving… without expression… following one after another in silence… like a procession of ghosts.”
He spent the day ferrying the injured across the river in a damaged boat, using a pole because there was no oar. He went back and forth through the ruins until dark.
Two years later, in 1947, he sat down and wrote 230 pages in English — not his first language — and mailed the manuscript to John Hersey, the American journalist who had already published his landmark account of six Hiroshima survivors in The New Yorker in 1946. Tanimoto was one of Hersey’s six subjects. He had his own account to give. He wrote it in English because he wanted Americans to understand what their weapon had done to the people it hit.
The manuscript arrived at Hersey’s address and disappeared into his papers.
For nearly eighty years, Tanimoto’s words sat in a folder at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, unread. In 2023, Hersey’s grandson, Cannon Hersey, opened the folder and found the manuscript. This week — on the 81st anniversary of the bombing — the memoir was published as Hiroshima, 8:15: The Lost Memoir by Modern Library.
Tanimoto died in 1986. He never knew whether his account had been read.
Vasily Grossman was a Soviet journalist who covered the Second World War from its first days to its last. He was there when the Red Army entered the ruins of Stalingrad. He was there when Soviet soldiers liberated Treblinka. He wrote what he saw. He wrote the testimony of survivors. He was one of the first writers in the world to document the Nazi extermination of Jews.
He spent years writing Life and Fate, a vast novel about the war and about the Soviet state — a book comparing Stalinist totalitarianism to Nazi Germany. In 1960, the KGB came to his apartment and took the manuscript. They took the carbon copies. They took the typewriter ribbons. They told him the book could not be published for two or three hundred years.
Grossman appealed to Nikita Khrushchev personally. His appeal was denied. He died in 1964, four years after the confiscation, believing the work was gone.
It was not gone. A friend had made a microfilm copy. It was smuggled to the West. The book was published in Switzerland in 1980. It was published in Russia in 1988. It is now read around the world and considered one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
After the KGB took his manuscript, Grossman said: “They arrested the book. Why bother arresting me?”
He was right. The book was more dangerous than the man. Because the book was the record.
Tanimoto wrote 230 pages and mailed them to Hersey, and they were not read for eighty years. He wrote them anyway because he had been there and someone had to write it down. He wrote them in English because he wanted the people who had dropped the bomb to understand what they had dropped it on.
Grossman wrote for years and the state confiscated every copy. He died believing the work was destroyed. The work survived him by decades and is still being read.
Neither man wrote with any certainty of readership. Neither wrote to build a career or reach an audience or win a prize. Both wrote because the record had to exist. Because someone had been there. Because if they did not write it, no one would.
The Power of Authors teaches: the obligation to bear witness does not depend on readership. It depends on presence. If you were there, the record is yours to make. Not because someone will read it tomorrow. Because someone will need it someday.
You may be writing something right now with no certainty anyone will read it. No publisher has said yes. No audience has formed. The work is difficult and the outcome is unclear.
Tanimoto wrote in a second language about the worst morning of his life. Grossman wrote against a state powerful enough to confiscate his typewriter ribbon. Both wrote anyway.
Write the record. Honestly. Completely. It will find its readers. Even if you are not there to see it.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
You get one launch. The reviews arriving in the first two weeks shape every week after.
Two books publish on the same Tuesday.
Both are good. Both have strong covers and clear descriptions. Both land on Amazon at the same moment, side by side in their category, equally unknown.
By Friday, one has seven reviews. The other has none.
The book with seven reviews is not seven times better. It is seven times more visible — not to Amazon’s algorithm, but to the human beings browsing the category page at ten o’clock at night, deciding what to read next. Seven strangers said this book is worth their time. The other book has silence where the social proof should be.
By the end of the month, the gap has widened. The book with early reviews has attracted more buyers. More buyers produced more reviews. More reviews attracted more buyers. The flywheel is turning. The book with no launch-week reviews is still waiting for its first one, and every day of silence makes the next review harder to earn.
This is why the launch-week review push matters. Not because of a magic number. Because of momentum.
The Window
Launch week is the period of greatest natural attention. Friends and family are excited. Social media posts announcing the book are fresh. The release party has just happened or is about to happen. The people most likely to buy the book are paying attention right now.
This attention has a half-life. Two weeks after launch, the excitement fades. The social media posts stop appearing in feeds. The friends who meant to buy the book have moved on to other things. The window of natural momentum closes, and everything after requires more effort to produce less result.
Reviews arriving during this window do double duty. They provide social proof to the strangers finding the book on Amazon. And they signal to book-promotion services — many of which require a minimum review count — the book is ready for a featured deal. A book qualifying for a promotional feature in week three is in a fundamentally different position than a book qualifying in month six.
The Sequence
The launch-week review push is not a separate effort. It is the convergence of everything you have already built.
Your advance review copy recipients received the book four to six weeks before launch. By publication day, they have had time to read it and prepare their reviews. The morning the book goes live, you send a brief message: “The book is available on Amazon today. If you’re ready to post your review, here is the direct link.”
Your launch team received the book two weeks before launch. They have been reading it. On launch day, they post their reviews. The five to ten reviews appearing in the first forty-eight hours are not a coincidence. They are the result of planning begun during the production window.
Your endorsers have already written their blurbs. You contact them on launch day and ask them to post their endorsements as Amazon reviews. Most will do it within hours.
By the end of the first week, the book’s Amazon page has reviews from multiple sources — advance readers, launch team members, endorsers. The page looks alive. The stranger browsing at midnight sees a book other people have read and valued. The decision to buy becomes easier.
Why Timing Changes Everything
The same ten reviews arriving in week one and arriving across six months produce entirely different outcomes. In week one, they create a foundation of credibility during the period of greatest traffic. In month six, they arrive after the launch momentum has dissipated and the natural audience has moved on.
Amazon’s sales ranking responds to velocity — how quickly a book sells in a given period. Reviews drive sales. Sales drive ranking. Ranking drives discoverability. The cycle feeds itself, but only if it starts fast enough to catch the current.
An author who waits for reviews to arrive organically is an author watching the current pass. Reviews do not arrive organically for unknown authors. They arrive because someone asked, someone prepared, and someone followed through — at the right time.
The Push
Launch day is not the day you start asking. It is the day your preparation becomes visible. The ARC recipients, the launch team, the endorsers — every person you contacted during production is now doing the work you invited them to do.
Your job on launch day is coordination, not recruitment. A message to each group with the direct Amazon link and a thank-you. Nothing more. The heavy lifting was done weeks ago.
You get one launch. The foundation you build in those first two weeks is the foundation the book stands on for years. Build it before the window closes.
The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen explores what it means to write with purpose — and why the authors who prepare for launch week reach further than the ones who wait for it.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
Last week, the Center for Fiction announced the longlist for its 2026 First Novel Prize — nineteen debut novels selected from more than 180 submitted titles by more than 500 writers, librarians, and booksellers. The prize has been given since 2006 to honor the best debut novel of the year. The winner receives $15,000.
Among the nineteen longlisted novelists this year are writers who have been writing for a long time before this first novel existed.
T Kira Madden published a memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Motherless Girls, in 2019. Her debut novel, Whidbey, published this August — seven years after the memoir.
Nafissa Thompson-Spires published a short story collection, Heads of the Colored People, in 2018. Her debut novel, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford, published this year — eight years after the collection.
These are not beginners at the craft. They are writers who have been writing for years, who knew what the first novel should be, and who spent years learning to get it on the page.
Every debut novelist on the Center for Fiction longlist this year arrived at the first book after years of work no one saw. The prize honors the book. It does not see the years behind it.
Junot Díaz is a past winner of the same prize. He won it in 2007 for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which also won the Pulitzer Prize.
He spent eleven years writing it.
In a 2009 interview, he described those eleven years. He had written six hundred pages he threw away. He had the vision of what the book should be. He could not execute it. He said:
“I had this very, very clear vision of what I was trying to do. And I could not execute it. I could not bridge the gap.”
He also said: “You can’t tell anyone you’ve been writing a book for ten years. It sounds pathetic.”
He kept going. In the eleventh year, the book came together. He published it. It won the Pulitzer Prize and became one of the most celebrated American novels of the last quarter century.
The gap he described — between what he could see and what he could execute — was not a problem with the vision. The vision was right. The gap was the work. The eleven years were not time lost. They were what it cost to learn to bridge it.
The writers on this year’s longlist know the gap. They have all been in it. Seven years, eight years — writing toward what they could see, learning to get there.
The debut novel is not a beginning. It is evidence of years of work no one saw. The book is the visible part. The years are the invisible part. But the years are what made the book possible.
The Power of Authors teaches: purpose is not enough on its own. Purpose without the capacity to execute it is a vision without a book. The writer who writes from genuine purpose writes toward what they can see until they can also get there. Not past the gap. Through it. The years are the bridge.
You may have a vision of what your book should be. You may have had it for years. You may be writing toward it and not yet reaching it. You may be ashamed of how long it is taking.
Díaz was ashamed. He said so. He kept going for eleven years.
The gap between what you see and what you can execute is not a sign of failure. It is a sign of a vision worth pursuing. Keep bridging it. The book is on the other side.
Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
The word “unverified” does not mean “invalid.” It means the reader found your book somewhere other than Amazon. Not a failure. A sign your book is traveling.
You check your Amazon page for the first time after your launch team has done its work. The reviews are there. Three in the first week. Your heart lifts. Then you notice the label beneath one of them.
“Unverified Purchase.”
Your stomach drops. You wonder if it counts. You wonder if Amazon is flagging it. You wonder if the reader did something wrong or if you did something wrong by sending them an advance copy.
Take a breath. The review counts. The reader did nothing wrong. Neither did you.
What the Labels Mean
“Verified Purchase” means Amazon can confirm the reviewer bought the book through their platform using their Amazon account. The purchase and the review are linked in Amazon’s system.
“Unverified” means the reviewer did not buy the book on Amazon — or Amazon cannot confirm they did. They may have received an advance copy. They may have bought it at a bookstore or a signing. They may have received it as a gift or borrowed it from a friend. Every one of these is a legitimate way to encounter a book, and every one of these readers is entitled to leave a review.
Unverified does not mean fake. It does not mean suspicious. It means the reader found the book somewhere other than Amazon’s checkout page.
Why Verified Reviews Carry More Weight
Amazon’s systems generally give verified reviews greater prominence and weight in how reviews are ranked and displayed. The reason is trust. A verified purchase means Amazon has proof the reviewer spent money on the book. A person who pays for something and takes the time to review it is, statistically, a more credible signal than someone who received a free copy.
This does not mean unverified reviews are worthless. They still count toward your total review number. They still appear on your page. They still influence browsers scanning for social proof. A book with fifteen reviews — ten verified and five unverified — looks far more credible than a book with zero.
What This Means for Authors
If you sent advance review copies before launch, the reviews from those readers will be unverified. This is expected. This is how the system works. The ARC is one of the most effective tools in publishing, and every review it produces is legitimate under Amazon’s rules. As a best practice, the reviewer should include a brief disclosure — “I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review” — though Amazon’s specific policies on disclosure evolve over time.
If a reader bought the book at your signing, at a bookstore, or from your website, their Amazon review will be unverified. This is a sign your book is reaching people through channels beyond Amazon — which is exactly what a healthy book does.
If you want to encourage verified reviews specifically, the simplest path is to ask readers who bought the book on Amazon to leave a review. Send them the direct link. The purchase and the review link automatically, and the verified badge appears.
What you must never do is manufacture reviews. Amazon’s detection systems look for patterns — bursts of five-star reviews from accounts with no history, reviewers who share addresses or payment methods with the author, review swaps between authors. Amazon has sued review brokers and terminated accounts. One dishonest review puts every honest review at risk.
Both Matter
The author who sees “unverified” on a review and panics is reacting to a label, not a reality. The reality is a human being read your book and cared enough to tell the world about it. Whether they bought it on Amazon or received it at a signing or found it on a friend’s shelf, they showed up. They wrote the review. They added their voice to the conversation around your book.
Verified reviews carry more algorithmic weight. Unverified reviews carry the same human weight.
Let the mix reflect the truth — your book is reaching people through every door available. A book with reviews from many sources is a book with a life beyond any single platform. And a life beyond any single platform is what every book deserves.
If this idea resonates with you, you will find the same philosophy throughout The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen, where every honest review is treated as a human connection, not a marketing metric.
The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.
More than year ago… Publication Consultants announced Authors Campaign Method (ACM) for sales and marketing. Two recent Author Updates, October 4 and October 12) listed eight facets of ACM.
1. Release Party
2. Web Presence
3. Book signings
4. Amazon Author Page
5. Facebook Page
6. Active Social Media Participation
7. eBook Cards
8. Book Listing on Indibound
We recently read a marketing book for authors and recognized the author’s list for building an author’s platform paralleled and added to the facets of ACM. Additional items to our ACM list included:
1. Speaking Engagements
2. Emails
3. Building Relationships
4. Traditional Media
5. Endorsements
6. Internet Publishing
7. Promotions
8. Advertising
Together these 16 tools constitute areas Authorpreneurs should center their efforts in building an author platform. However, we doubt that an author can work all these, still write books, and have any personal life. It seems that an author should select only the ones they can manage and enjoys doing and not worry about the others. For us, the important thing is to only do as much as you’re able and enjoy as you connect with your readers. Of course more effort leads to better and quicker success.
We realize that an author applying these tools may not receive book sales for as long as 12 months, but we are convinced that applying these tools will result in long term success.
Publication Consultants’ Blog
Publication Consultants’ recent blogs, <https://publicationconsultants.com/pcblog> have been directed more to unpublished authors than to published authors. Heartbreaking, tragic book publishing stories come to us with regularity. Most of these could have been avoided if the new author had the information in these recent blogs: Questions to Ask a Publisher Before Signing Anything, What To Look Out For When Publishing Your First Book, Why You Should Approach a Consultant Before Trying to Get Published, How to Avoid Being Scammed by a Publisher, and Becoming a Published Author. We know that published authors are asked about their publisher by writers looking for a publishers. If you’re a published author kindly point inquiring writers to our blog. The writer you’re talking with will appreciate your concern.
Independent Book Stores
We recommend you put your books on the Independent Book Stores website. There are hundreds of ABA booksellers with websites and storefronts. These stores want to know about you and about your books. They welcome authors for book signings and will promote the author event if your book is listed on the ABA’s website. Here’s how to make sure your book is listed and is for sale at ABA member bookstores.
Adding titles or cover images to the ABA database:
First, log in to http://www.indiebound.org/user using your personal account. If you don’t have an account on IndieBound.org, please create one at http://www.indiebound.org/join
Once you are logged in, kindly search for your title first, by ISBN, using the search form in the upper right of the site (13 digits only, no dashes or spaces). If your title is already listed, it does not need to be added. If you see that information is missing or incorrect, please email the necessary changes to addabook@bookweb.org (be sure to include ISBN and Title).
If your title (or cover image) cannot be found in the database, use the links below to add it:
1) To add a complete book listing, including a cover image, go to:http://www.indiebound.org/addabook
2) To add a missing cover image to an existing book, go to to:www.indiebound.org/addabook/cover
Just enter your data, upload an image, and submit!
Please allow time for approval by someone at ABA. You will receive an email when your book is approved. Once approved, it can take up to 24 hours for your book to appear in search results and on IndieBound.org, but it will be available on individual store websites, in book lists, etc. immediately.
Keep in mind that adding a book to the ABA shared database does not necessarily make the title available for purchase. If a customer clicks to purchase your title, they will be taken to one of the ABM member bookstores. It is then up to each bookstore to obtain the book for their customer. However, if a store cannot find your title available from the publisher or a distributor, they may inform their customer that the book is not readily available. The easier it is for the bookseller to find and obtain your title, the likelier that a store will fill an order for your book.
ABA also has an affiliate program www.indiebound.org/affiliate where you can actually earn money for referring people to member’s stores.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Author Campaign Method (ACM) for Authorpreneurs
We take the quote by Marcella Smith, Small Press Business Manager, Barnes & Noble seriously: “The author is essential to the success of the book, giving energy behind the book to make it something that a customer will come in and ask for. That is what makes the difference in a book that sells, that develops legs, and has a life of its own. Otherwise the book goes on the shelf and stays there for three months. Then it gets returned.”
This is Publication Consultants’ motivation for constantly striving to assist authors sell and market their books. Author Campaign Method (ACM) of sales and marketing is Publication Consultants’ plan to accomplish this so that our authors’ books have a reasonable opportunity for success. We know the difference between motion and direction. ACM is direction! ACM is the process for authorpreneurs who are serious about bringing their books to market. ACM is a boon for them.
The seven facets of Publication Consultants’ ACM includes: a release party, web presence, book signings, Amazon Author Page, Facebook Page, Active Social Media Participation, and eBook Cards. We will be adding new facets to ACM as time goes by. ACM is a living, growing sales and marketing method for authorpreneurs.
Release Party
We’re the only publisher we know of assisting and supporting author release parties. Your Publication Consultants’ publishing contract includes our support of your release party. If you’d like more information about release parties, kindly contact us or see the Well Planned Release Party video on our website <>. A well planned release party kick starts the sales and marketing of your book, is well suited for authorpreneurs, and is essential to your ACM’s effectiveness.
Web Presence
We’re the only publisher we know of that creates a web presence for their authors by obtaining a domain name, creating a website, and establishing a blog. Your Publication Consultants’ publishing contract includes establishing your web presence. Keep in mind that your website will do little unless you feed and nurture it by regularly posting to your blog, keeping your events current, and promoting it in your social media offerings. A website will become a frustration or a great joy. It just depends on posting at least once a week.
Your fans want to hear from and about you. An authorpreneurs blog and other social media offerings meets their desires—and helps sell books.
Book Signings
We’re the only publisher we know of that provides authors with book signing opportunities. Book signing are appropriate for authorpreneurs. To schedule a book signing kindly go to our website, <https://publicationconsultants.com>. Click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Request, follow the prompts, and Author Services will take it from there. Once you’ve made the request you’ll receive confirmation that the request has been received. As soon as the request is approved by the bookseller you will receive notification from Author Services giving you details about the signing.
Amazon Author Page
An Author Page on Amazon Author Central is a authorpreneurs CM requirement. Author Central is a free resource designed to help authors become more active participants in the promotion of their books. In Author Central you can manage an Author Page, update information about your books, and view Customer Reviews and sales information for your bibliography. If you don’t already have an Author Page on Amazon.com, Amazon will create one for you when you sign up for Author Central. You can find out more at: http://authorcentral.amazon.com or the help site https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help. A well maintained Amazon author page is essential for your authorpreneurs success. You should point all of your social media offerings to your Amazon author page. Your author pages makes it easy for potential readers to purchase your book.
Facebook Profile and Facebook Page
We hear authors complain about all the personal stuff on Facebook. Most of these complaints are because the author doesn’t understand the difference difference between a Facebook profile and a Facebook page. Simply put, a profile is for personal things for friends and family; a page is for business. If your book is just a hobby, then it’s fine to have only a Facebook profile and make your posts for friends and family; however, if you’re serious about your writing, and it’s a business with you, or you want it to be business, then you need a Facebook page as an author. It’s simple to tell if it’s a page or a profile. A profile shows how many friends and a page shows how many likes. Here’s a link <> to a straight forward description on how to set up your author Facebook page.
Active Social Media Participation
Social media marketing is a frustration for most authors. However, SMM is the authorpreneur’s key to success and the glue holding the other facets of ACM together. As a published author, you are a celebrity in the minds of your readers. They are interested in you and what you do and what you think. The proper use of social media gives you the opportunity to serve your reader’s desire to be a part of your celebrity status. You are a part of this way to reach readers. Traditional ways are changing at a high rate of speed. As an author, you can no longer be a spectator. If you want to advance your writing career, you must become the parade. Strong social media marketing is essential—and exciting! A business savvy authorpreneur, using available social media tools, may become their inch-wide-mile-deep market parade!
Ebook Cards
Here’s how eBook cards works. Authors purchase eBook cards at wholesale prices. The eBook card shows the regular eBook retail price. Authors can use the eBook card in a variety of ways to help them sell more books. For example, authors can simply sell the eBook card for the retail price, or any price they want, or use the eBook card as an incentive to readers to purchase printed books. Authors can bundle eBooks and pBooks. The eBook card is perfect if an author is invited to make a presentation somewhere. Authors can tell the event promoters that they’ll do the event if they allow the author to sell books at the back of the room after the presentation, and if the promoter will purchase a given number of eBook cards to be used as door prizes to promote the event. And, eBook cards are a way to sell eBooks while an author is talking to anyone, anyplace, anytime. Authors may be use the eBook card in any in manner they want; either to sell for full retail, sell at a discount, bundle it with a printed book, or any variety of ways to help establish then as an author and to promote their works. Perhaps the biggest benefit for selling eBooks, by using eBook cards, is that when the customer redeems their card they give us their contact information and we can market to them. And, of course, the author can autograph the eBook card, letting the purchaser know to save the signed eBook card. It may be as valuable someday as a signed baseball card.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
ReadAlaska 2016
ReadAlaska is two months away—but your decision to participate is only days away. Publication Consultants will be participating in the event this year; but this year will be different.
Many authors decided it was in their best interest for them to have their own table and sign and sell their own books. Therefore, for ReadAlaska 2016, Publication Consultants will have only one table. Authors may decide to have their own table or share a table. We are attaching the Sign UP information and form for your consideration and use. It is essential that, if you want a ReadAlaska 2016 table, you make your decision quickly and send your Signup Form to the event promoters.
If you have questions kindly contact:
Edward Bovy & Alissa Crandall
Greatland Graphics
P O Box 141414
Anchorage, AK 9951
(907) 337-1234
info@alaskacalendars.com
We are looking forward to another pleasant and profitable ReadAlaska
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
The Great Alaska Book Fair: October 8, 2016
Publication Consultants, in association with Alaska Book Week, is hosting the Great Alaska Book Fair sponsored in part by The Mall at Sears and Anchorage Public Library. Book fair hours are 10 AM to 6 PM on Saturday, October 8, 2016. Tables will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis. Authors are responsible for their own sales—and pocket all the money. There will not be a central check out register. There is a charge of $50 per table. Authors may share tables if they’d like.
Other events at the mall include: a Farmer’s Market, a Sidewalk Sale and the Better Business Bureau’s Shred Day, and a Financial Fitness Fair. This is the same day as the The Mall at Sears is featuring their annual sidewalk sale to coincide with the release of Permanent Fund Dividends. This should be a high traffic day when people have expendable money to spend.
If you’re interested you can sign up by going to .
If you’e a serious author and want to sell more books we suggest you consider this event.
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Mary Ann Poll
Mary Ann published her first book with us in 2010 and soon after became our Author Events Coordinator. In addition to writing two more novels she has continued to serve Publication Consultants and our authors. For many booksellers and authors she’s been the face of Publication Consultants. Mary Ann is now finishing her new novel where the setting of her book moves from Alaska to Texas. Mary Ann also moved to Texas a couple of years ago to be closer to family. The move to Texas slowed her writing down a bit, but now she’s completing a new novel and increasing her social media marketing and personal book signings.
A couple of weeks ago we received the email we knew was coming some day, but dreaded on one hand and welcomed on the other. Mary Ann announced that she’s going to start focusing more on her writing and marketing her books—and spending time with family. Of course we’re more than pleased about that, but we were saddened with her notice that in order for her to concentrate her time and resources she’s unable to continue as our Author Events Coordinator.
We’re grateful for Mary Ann—her friendship, her absolute loyalty to us, and her service to our authors and booksellers—and we are pleased and excited about her increased energy to writing and promoting her works. We wish her only the best knowing that as she succeeds our company benefits and our friendship is strengthened.
With this note we also announce that the procedures Mary Ann developed for arranging and tracking author signings will continue. We have appointed Neha Madaan as our new Author Events Coordinator. With Mary Ann’s assistance Neha has the tools required to meet author’s signing needs. We encourage you to be patient as Neha gets to know you, your books, and our booksellers. We ask that you direct author event questions and comments to neha@publicationconsultants.com. She will respond promptly and professionally.
You can join with us in expressing your appreciation to Mary Ann by writing her at maryann@publicationconsultants.com or posting on her Facebook page: <> Mary Ann Poll: America’s Lady of Supernatural Thrillers.
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Book Signing At Mosquito Books
Jim Misko’s report on his Mosquito Books reads like an award winning author, which he is of course.
“Signing went well at Mosquito Books in C Concourse, Ted Stevens Anchorage International airport yesterday, Monday, June 6th. It was D-Day for ambushing great customers on the concourse. Deborah provided table and chair and free coffee and donuts.
“Had two double sales and 30 interactions with customers.
“Carol and Gwen treated me very well and were helpful . . ..”
Jim sold 28 books and scheduled more Mosquito Books author signings.
The Mall At Sears Author Signings
The mall is proving to be a good venue for authors and more authors are scheduling signings there. Please note that the Mall At Sears signings are for Saturday only and only two authors will be scheduled on any given Saturday.
Other Signing Venues
We are still working on signings at Carrs/Safeway but we do not have the approval and procedure just yet. If you’ve been receiving invitations to signings you’ll notice that a great number of venues are available.
To schedule a book signing kindly go to our website, <https://publicationconsultants.com>. Click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Request, follow the prompts, and Author Services will take it from there. Once you’ve made the request you’ll receive confirmation that the request has been received. As soon as the request is approved by the bookseller you will receive notification from Author Services giving you details about the signing.
If you have questions about book signings please let us know.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
The Mall At Sears
We received a short note from David Kunkel, author of Locked Up Abroad, following his Saturday signing at The Mall At Sears: “Hi Evan; Had a good signing at Sears. Hope it’s as good next Saturday.” We hope so to David.
As you may know we have arranged for book signings each Friday and Saturday at the Mall At Sears. If you’re interested in this signing kindly go to our website and request a signing. We will not schedule more than two authors each day. This venue is available each week except June 3 and 4. The mall would like an author during all hours the store is open; however, this is not a deal-breaker requirement. You can pick your hours and even share time and table with another author. For this signing you will bring your own books, receive and process payment, and pocket the proceeds. To schedule this signing kindly go to our website, <https://publicationconsultants.com>. Click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Request, follow the prompts, (United States, Alaska, Anchorage, The Mall at Sears) and Author Services will take it from there. Once you’ve made the request you’ll receive confirmation that the request has been received and you will receive specific instructions about your signing.
If you have questions about book signings please let us know.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Women In The Locker Room
Maggie Holeman, author of Women In The Locker Room, received a nice review by Glacier City Gazette .
The Mall At Sears
We have arranged for book signings each Friday and Saturday at the Mall At Sears. If you’re interested in this signing kindly go to our website and request a signing. This venue is available each week except June 3 and 4. The mall would like an author during all hours the store is open; however, this is not a deal-breaker requirement. You can pick your hours and even share time and table with another author. For this signing you will bring your own books, receive and process payment, and pocket the proceeds. To schedule this signing kindly go to our website, <https://publicationconsultants.com>. Click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Request, follow the prompts, (United States, Alaska, Anchorage, The Mall at Sears) and Author Services will take it from there. Once you’ve made the request you’ll receive confirmation that the request has been received and you will receive specific instructions about your signing.
If you have questions about book signings please let us know.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Book Signings
In addition to the Talkeetna Alaska Lodge Publication Consultants’ authors can now schedule author signings at the Talkeetna Public Library. Many authors find that some of these less obvious, smaller venues offer more sales than larger ones.
Of course other venues are available: Barnes and Noble, Fireside Books, and Mosquito Books. To schedule a book signing kindly go to our website, <https://publicationconsultants.com>. Click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Request, follow the prompts, and Author Services will take it from there. Once you’ve made the request you’ll receive confirmation that the request has been received. As soon as the bookseller approves the request you will receive notification from Author Services giving you details about the signing.
We’re still working on Carrs/Safeway and it looks like this will be happening before summer. We were encouraged when Costco came back to us and approved book signings; however, they put time of day restrictions, short selling time, and minimum sales. When we looked at it we determined that it was not profitable for either our authors or us. Fred Meyer corporate management has not been receptive to author signings.
Some authors have asked if there was something they could do to help. The answer is yes; wherever you shop ask to talk with a manager and ask them if it is possible to do book signings. Once you find that it’s possible kindly let us know the name of the person and contact information and we’ll take it from there. We’ve found that local management may have altitudes that corporate gives them for local events.
If you have questions about book signings please let us know.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Book Signings
We’re still working on signings for Costco, Fred Meyer, and Carrs. We’ll let you know when we are able to do these again. We hope to have these in place before summer. Please hold your signing requests for these venues until we have things in place.
Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge
Bonnye Matthews stopped in and visited with the folks at Talkeetna Alaskan Lodge and confirmed that it will be a wonderful venue for book signings. We heard back from lodge management that they enjoyed Bonnye’s visit and are looking forward to having author signing events this coming season beginning in June and going through August. Here’s some facts we’ve learned about the lodge. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday’s are projected to be the slowest days of the week. The heaviest days are Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Saturday is medium. A good time for evening is between 5 and 6 into the night until about 8:30 PM. The morning best time, depending on when the coaches leave, is between 7 AM and 9 AM. After that, the folks at the lodge says. “you hear crickets until about 4 PM.” And a important, exciting tidbit they shared with us; “We had 30,000 guests walk through the door last year.” I hope you read that!
Mary Ann Poll
Mary Ann is recovering from her second wrist surgery, so she may not respond in her normal Mary Ann- do-it-now-time to your requests for a couple of weeks. Please be patient if she doesn’t get right back with you.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publisher’s Graphics
We have used the short run printing services of Publisher’s Graphics for more than 20 years. Authors who have been around for a while will remember the case bound books we used to produce for the Mat/Sue Young Writers Conference. Publisher’s Graphics was the company we used for printing these books in addition to many other short run titles. We recently made an agreement with Publisher’s Graphics to sell our titles on their new online bookstore, PG Direct. We have many of our books on this new bookselling site <>.
Kindly review the PG Direct site and confirm that the information about your book is correct. If you don’t see your book, please inform and we’ll let you know how we can add your title. Feel free to include the link to your book on your social media offerings and website.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Mat/Su Young Writers Conference April 30, 2016
We invite you to participate in this year’s Mat/Su Young Writers Conference on April 30, 2016. We need your help if you’re willing to assist. The following authors will be there: Steven Levi, Janet Mc Cart, Rebecca Goodrich, Halene Dahlstrom, Lavon Bridges, Alice Wright, Martin Grossman, Lindianne Sarno, Bonnye Matthews, and Julie Rahm. If you’d like to join these authors and assist young people kindly let us know by return email. Of course, Lois will be hosting participating authors to lunch at a local restaurant.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Talkeetna Alaska Lodge Book Signing Opportunity
We have added Talkeetna Alaska Lodge <http://www.talkeetnalodge.com> to our Author Signing link on our website. If you’re traveling past Talkeetna, our want to make a special trip, here’s a new signing opportunity. Most guests arrive every evening and depart the next morning. The lodge will promote the signing on the evening of your arrival. You will be the “entertainment” for the evening. Your signing will be the only activity at the lodge that evening. You can create your own presentation, talk, reading, of just signing books. The following morning you will be able to meet guests prior to their departure for a final book signing opportunity. Multiple day signings are possible. You’ll have a new audience every day. The lodge is extremely excited about author signings and will pre-promote your bing there.
To schedule a Talkeetna Alaska Lodge book signing kindly go to our website, <https://publicationconsultants.com>. Click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Request, follow the prompts, and Author Services will take it from there. Once you’ve made the request you’ll receive confirmation that the request has been received. As soon as the request is approved by the Talkeetna Alaska Lodge you will receive notification from Author Services giving you details about the signing.
We’ve included a couple of photos of where your signing event will take place in the lodge.
If you have questions about book signings please let us know.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Mat/Su Young Writers Conference
If you’d like to, and are able, we invite you to participate in this year’s Mat/Su Young Writers Conference on April 30, 2016.. Because of the popularity, enjoyable experience, and opportunity to sell books and help kids, we’ve already heard from some or our authors who have asked to be included in this year’s faculty. You will enjoy teaching students hungry to learn from a published author. Our authors have participated in this wonderful conference for almost 20 years. If you’re able to set aside that Saturday morning for young people please let us know by return email. We only have room for 22 authors.
The Rationale for the conference is to:
· Promote district curriculum and the Alaska Writing State Standards goals related to composition using the six-writing traits and reading.
· Provide instructors with a highly motivating and meaningful activity as a vehicle to encourage creative writing.
· Promote opportunity to fulfill needs of student interest and gifted abilities in the area of composition.
· Provide a shared, common experience for students, staff and parents; and an opportunity to see how different schools approach the activity. This provides a forum for idea sharing for the teaching staff.
· Provide modeling of the writing process and publishing process by known Alaskan Authors.
· Increase community awareness and understanding of the school district efforts to develop writers.
And, the conference gives you opportunity to sell a few books and broaden you customer base.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Costco Book Signings
We have approval from Costco for book signings in the three Alaska stores. If you’d like to do a book signing in Costco in the next six months kindly let us know. Your book will have to be pre approved by the Costco book buyer before you can schedule a signing. Once your book is approved we’ll let you know and you can schedule your signing. We’ll be sending the list for approval on Wednesday, February 17. If you’re interested in a Costco signing, kindly let us know by Wednesday.
eBook Cards
Here’s how eBook cards work. Authors purchase eBook cards at wholesale prices. The eBook card shows the regular eBook retail price. Authors can use the eBook card in a variety of ways to help them sell more books. For example, authors can simply sell the eBook card for the retail price, or any price they want, or use the eBook card as an incentive to readers to purchase eBooks. Authors can bundle eBooks and eBooks. The eBook card is perfect if an author is invited to make a presentation somewhere. Authors can tell the event promoters that they’ll do the event if they allow the author to sell books at the back of the room after the presentation, and if the promoter will purchase a given number of eBook cards to be used as door prizes to promote the event. And, eBook cards are a way to sell eBooks while an author is talking to anyone, anyplace, anytime. Authors can autograph the eBook card and it becomes a keepsake for the purchaser. Authors may be use the eBook card in any in manner they want; either to sell for full retail, sell at a discount, bundle it with a printed book, or any variety of ways to help establish then as an author and to promote their works. Perhaps the biggest benefit for selling eBooks, by using eBook cards, is that when the customer redeems their card they give us their contact information and we can market to them.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Enthrill
We have enclosed a sample card from Enthrill to give you a better idea of what these will look like (below). It is also attached as a pdf for a larger view.
We have formed a partnership with Enthrill that allows authors to sell eBooks at book signings and author events by using eBook cards. Here’s how it works. Authors purchase eBook cards at wholesale prices. The eBook card shows the regular eBook retail price. Authors can use the eBook card in a variety of ways to help them sell more books. For example, authors can simply sell the eBook card for the retail price, or any price they want, or use the eBook card as an incentive to readers to purchase eBooks. Authors can bundle eBooks and eBooks. The eBook card is perfect if an author is invited to make a presentation somewhere. Authors can tell the event promoters that they’ll do the event if they allow the author to sell books at the back of the room after the presentation, and if the promoter will purchase a given number of eBook cards to be used as door prizes to promote the event. And, eBook cards are a way to sell eBooks while an author is talking to anyone, anyplace, anytime. Authors may be use the eBook card in any in manner they want; either to sell for full retail, sell at a discount, bundle it with a printed book, or any variety of ways to help establish then as an author and to promote their works. Perhaps the biggest benefit for selling eBooks, by using eBook cards, is that when the customer redeems their card they give us their contact information and we can market to them.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Enthrill
We have formed a partnership with Enthrill that allows authors to sell eBooks at book signings and author events by using eBook cards. Here’s how it works. Authors purchase eBook cards at wholesale prices. The eBook card shows the regular eBook retail price. Authors can use the eBook card in a variety of ways to help them sell more books. For example, authors can simply sell the eBook card for the retail price, or any price they want, or use the eBook card as an incentive to readers to purchase eBooks. Authors can bundle eBooks and eBooks. The eBook card is perfect if an author is invited to make a presentation somewhere. Authors can tell the event promoters that they’ll do the event if they allow the author to sell books at the back of the room after the presentation, and if the promoter will purchase a given number of eBook cards to be used as door prizes to promote the event. And, eBook cards are a way to sell eBooks while an author is talking to anyone, anyplace, anytime. Authors may be use the eBook card in any in manner they want; either to sell for full retail, sell at a discount, bundle it with a printed book, or any variety of ways to help establish then as an author and to promote their works. Perhaps the biggest benefit for selling eBooks, by using eBook cards, is that when the customer redeems their card they give us their contact information and we can market to them.
FlexPub
Enthrall is the method and means to sell eBooks away from the Internet. Before the end of January we’ll announce our partnership with FlexPub which will allow authors to promote their eBooks on the Internet: by email, Facebook, websites, and any social media platform. Coupled with Enthrill, FlexPub gives authors the power to promote eBooks through the Internet, social media, in person, and become entirely professional in their sales and marketing. For example, as part of your email signature you can include a link where the customer may purchase and download your eBook to their reading devise whether it be Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iPad, iPhone, computer, or any other reader. As a result sales will improve and royalties with increase.
Cortex
Our partnering with Cortex allows authors who are serious about social media marketing to spend less time, post at optimum times, and increase the quality of their posts. If you’re serious about social media marketing, are frustrated with social media marketing, and want to change and do better, kindly contact us and let’s talk Cortex.
Book Signings
We are unable to schedule book signings at stores supplied by Readerlink. However, this is not permanent. We are working to correct this and will let you know as new book signing opportunities develop. In the meantime you can continue to use our website to schedule signings at independent book stores, Barnes and Noble, and Mosquito Books. We’re using this time to make book signings better and more profitable for authors.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Book Signing Schedule
Author services will be unable to confirm book signing requests until January 1. The stores are just too busy to address author requests. Kindly hold scheduling your signings until the beginning of 2016.
Author Campaign Method (ACM)
Publication consultants supports authors who are serious about selling and marketing their books with our Author Campaign Method (ACM) of sales and marketing. ACM is a multifaceted approach to assisting authors to sell more books. ACM includes:
1. Release Party
2. Web Presence
3. Book Signings
4. Amazon Author Page
5. Facebook Profile and Facebook Page
6. Cortex, Artificial Intelligence For Marketing
Beginning in January Publication Consultants will introduce two new facets to ACM.
1. A new program that allows and assists selling and promoting your eBooks directly from your website, Facebook page, and even emails.
2. A new program so authors can give or sell gift cards for free eBooks. For example, author will be able to offer a free eBook gift card at a book signing to encourage customers to purchase a printed book. This is only one of a host of ways this facet may be used to enhance sales.
More to come later.
In the mean time. Lois and I wish you and yours a most merry Christmas.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
ReadAlaska
Lois and I extend our gratitude to the authors who participated in ReadAlaska. There was not as many visitors this year as previous years and sales were down; however, most of the authors did well. All enjoyed the company of Publication Consultants’ authors and the other authors. We made many new friends. As usual, the authors who were present sold books.
Jim Misko
Jim had both a successful signing at Barnes and Noble and a pleasant and unusual signing experience. The first customer of the day turned out to be someone from his high school days. Of course she purchased all five of Jim’s books.
Walter Grant
Walter Grant also enjoyed a successful Barnes and Noble signing. Here’s Walter’s comments: “Everyone at the Spanish Fort store was more obliging than at any place you’ve set me up for a signing. Elizabeth is a sweetheart, she put up a large sign by my table—positioned me in front of the door—kept asking to bring me coffee, brought me a piece of cheesecake. She is a great ambassador for Barnes and Noble.”
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Loren Pitchford
We met Loren for the first time when he submitted an article for Alaska Outdoors magazine. A couple of years ago Loren made a presentation to the Alaska Writers Guild about writing and marketing his book, Alaska Fish Tales. During his presentation he mentioned that we had given him his start in writing and inspired him to go forward with his book. Over the years Loren has been a supportive friend of Publication Consultants. Loren passed away late last month and his memorial will be held this Saturday at 11 AM at Legacy Funeral Home, Heritage Chapel at Angelus, 440 East Klatt Road. Loren’s obituary may be read at .
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
Here’s the A Link To Your World attachment intended to be with our latest Author Update.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Benjamin Franklin Award
If your book was published in 2015, you are eligible to enter the Benjamin Franklin Awards. The deadline tented is December 15, 2015. The IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards are regarded as one of the highest national honors in independent and self-publishing. The Awards are unique in that entrants receive direct feedback on their submissions. The judging forms are returned to all who enter. If nothing else, it’s a great way to receive critiques and even positive quotes for marketing. This is the award Jim Misko won last year for his book, As All My Fathers Were. For entry information go to <http://on.fb.me/1HzuvR2>.
A Link To Your World
We’ve been asked by A Link To Your World to supply a book review for each of the issues of the magazine. We’re attaching a copy of the first review written by Steve Levi for his book, Walrus With A Gold Tooth. If you’d like an opportunity to have your book, or series of books, reviewed, and your book is published or distributed by Publication Consultants, kindly write a 1,200 to 2,000 word review and send it to us. We will work with the publication’s publisher in determining which review is best for their magazine, but one of our reviews will be published each issue. The magazine is mailed six times a year to addresses throughout South Central and Interior Alaska.
If you have questions about ReadAlaska please let us know.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Jim Misko Book Signing at Barnes and Noble
Jim Misko author of the Benjamin Franklin Award winning book, As All My Fathers Were, understands the purpose of a book signing and how to have a successful one. Jim reports: “Sold 18 books; got 18 names and email addresses; had a wonderful day full of meeting interesting people that confirmed once again that you cannot tell by appearances who will buy your books. If you ask every one, you will be astounded by who asks to buy your book—people you would have written off when they walked in the door. It is like Michael Jordan said; “You miss every shot you don’t take.” Same with book selling. If you don’t ask them to look at your books or ask them to buy, they’ll walk by you with a smile and never get to read the good stuff you wrote, FOR THEM. For whom else did you write it?”
Facebook Pages and Profiles
There is a marked difference between pages and profiles on Facebook. Much of the frustration we hear about Facebook is because the author doesn’t understand the difference.
Personal profiles are for non-commercial use and represent individual people. A personal profile shows how many friends the person has.
Pages look similar to personal profiles, but they offer unique tools for authors. Pages are managed by authors who have personal profiles. Pages show how many likes for the page.
Each author who signs up for Facebook has one account with login information. Each author account has only one personal profile but may have multiple Pages; however, we recommend that authors only have one Page. A Page lets author engage with people on Facebook and offers tools to help you manage and track engagement.
It’s against the Facebook Terms to use your personal account to represent something other than yourself (ex: your business). If you’re using your account to represent something other than yourself, you could permanently lose access to your account if you don’t convert it to a Page.
Facebook Pages enable authors to create an authentic and public presence on Facebook. Unlike your profile, Facebook Pages are visible to everyone on the internet by default. You, and every person on Facebook, can connect with these Pages by becoming a fan and then receive their updates in your News Feed and interact with them.
Hobbyist authors have personal profiles—serious authors have author pages. Simply put—profiles are for friends and family—pages are for business.
Authors can create their Facebook page quickly by following the instructions found at http://on.fb.me/1Pvfsga.
ReadAlaska
ReadAlaska is the largest and most popular book event in Alaska. To schedule your time at ReadAlaska kindly go to our website, <https://publicationconsultants.com>. Click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Request, follow the prompts, and Author Services will take it from there. ReadAlaska is just one month away and tables are limited. We are only able to display and sell books published during 2015 and those displayed when the author is present. This is a change from previous years. Another major change is that authors will not be a part of passing out brochures as other arrangements have been made for distribution. To kick start a potential customer’s interest in purchasing one of your books we are again offering a Book for a Buck promotion which has proven very successful in past years. ReadAlaska dates are November 27, 28, 29: Friday and Saturday 10 Am to 6 PM and Sunday Noon to 5 PM.
Cortex
Cortex is for serious authors and will probably not be of interest to hobbyists. We recorded our Cortex training and information meeting. If you’re a serious author, and did not attend the meeting, and would like to review the training information, kindly let us know. Authors are required to have a Facebook author page to use Cortex.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Website Update
We’ve updated our website <https://publicationconsultants.com> and invite you to take a look. If you’re a published author, we encourage you to look at your book’s listing and confirm that all is okay.
Holy Cow!
Joan Dodd, author of Cow Woman of Akutan, received another wonderful review <> under the headline:
Holy Cow! Homer woman shares family’s incredible story of starting cattle ranch on Akutan in ’60s
Howard Frank Mosher
Howard Frank Mosher, author of several book, friend of Jim Misko, and not one of our authors, displays his signing schedule on his web site <>. I invite you to see his schedule. He’s a serious author—definitely not a hobbyist.
Bonnye Matthews
Another serious author. Just take a look at Bonnye’s schedule on our website to see what we mean.
Other Serious Authors
We extend our gratitude to both serious and hobbyist authors who attend book signings, book fairs, and are active contributors to social media. We know some who are able to devote very little time to ACM, but they’re giving 100%. We applaud you for your accomplishments.
The Great Alaska Book Fair
We have one more table for The Great Alaska Book Fair on October 10 <>.
ReadAlaska
There are several openings for ReadAlaska. To reserve your place go to <https://publicationconsultants.com>. Click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Request, follow the prompts, and Author Services will take it from there.
Thanks for allowing us to be your publisher. We continually strive to be worthy of the trust you place in us.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
ReadAlaska 2015
Correction:
We’re calling for reservations now for ReadAlaska 2015, Saturday, November 27 from 10 AM to 6 PM, Friday, November 28 from 10 AM to 6 PM, and Sunday, November 29 from Noon to 5 PM. This year’s event promises to be even better than previous years and once again dominated by Publication Consultants’ authors and their books. We are again printing a nice brochure to give people as they enter the museum, but we will not be asking authors to hand these out as in years past. People will be hired to distribute the brochures. The brochure invites people to come upstairs and meet the authors. We will also feature the highly successful Book For A Buck promotion of past years.
Here’s how to schedule your reservation. Kindly go to our website, click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Requests or click <> to go directly to the signup page, and then click on the large blue sign up button at the bottom of the page. Follow the prompts, and under the Location field, select ReadAlaska. Then put in your preferred day and beginning and ending times. Most authors choose to arrive when the day’s event opens and remain until closing time. Although we welcome authors whose schedule only allows attendance less than full time on the three days, by necessity, we give preference to authors arriving at opening and staying until closing. When making your reservation please put in the note section if you have location preference or would like to sit next to a given author.
As always, we will have everything set up, including books, ready for your arrival at your scheduled time. We’ll have enough space so you can make a nice display for your books. You’re encouraged to bring a table covering and small display item for your place on the table to attract people to your space. Bring your banner and stand. We will also have a central cash register and check out so you need not worry about taking money or credit cards.
We look forward to ReadAlaska 2015 and once again associating with authors. We hope to see you there.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
ReadAlaska 2015
We’re calling for reservations now for ReadAlaska 2015, Saturday, November 27 from 10 AM to 6 PM, Friday, November 28 from 10 AM to 6 PM, and Sunday, November 29 from Noon to 5 PM. As mentioned above, this year’s event promises to be even better than previous years and once again dominated by Publication Consultants’ authors and their books. We are again printing a nice brochure to give people as they enter the museum and will ask authors to hand these out as in years past. The brochure invites people to come upstairs and meet the authors. We also will have three large banners on stands placed in strategic areas in the museum. In addition, we’ll be producing a flyer authors can print and post on bulletin boards, other appropriate places, and hand out.
Here’s how to schedule your reservation. Kindly go to our website, click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Requests or click <> to go directly to the signup page, and then click on the large blue sign up button at the bottom of the page. Follow the prompts, and under the Location field, select ReadAlaska. Then put in your preferred day and beginning and ending times. Most authors choose to arrive when the day’s event opens and remain until closing time. Although we welcome authors whose schedule only allows attendance less than full time on the three days, by necessity, we give preference to authors arriving at opening and staying until closing. When making your reservation please put in the note section if you have location preference or would like to sit next to a given author.
As always, we will have everything set up, including books, ready for your arrival at your scheduled time. We’ll have enough space so you can make a nice display for your books. You’re encouraged to bring a table covering and small display item for your place on the table to attract people to your space. Bring your banner and stand. We will also have a central cash register and check out so you need not worry about taking money or credit cards.
We look forward to ReadAlaska 2015 and once again associating with authors. We hope to see you there.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
The Great Alaska Book Fair: October 10, 2015
Publication Consultants, in association with Alaska Book Week, is hosting the Great Alaska Book Fair sponsored in part by The Mall at Sears and Anchorage Public Library. Book fair hours are 10 AM to 6 PM on Saturday, October 10, 2015. Tables will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis. Authors are responsible for their own sales—and pocket all the money. There will not be a central check out register. There is a charge of $50 per table. Authors may share tables if they’d like.
The book fair is held in the mall and is on the same day the mall is featuring their annual sidewalk sale to coincide with the release of Permanent Fund Dividends. There should be a high traffic day when people have expendable money to spend.
If you’re interested you can sign up by going to .
This note just arrived: “We’ve got posters up, and the event is listed on our webpage. We’ll put out social media announcements, as well as post to the various community calendars. The more we can get the word out the better.” Rayette Sterling, Anchorage Public Library, Adult Services Coordinator
If you’e a serious author and want to sell more books we suggest you consider this event.
ReadAlaska: 2015, Saturday, November 27, Friday, November 28, and Sunday, November 29
Here’s how to schedule your reservation. Kindly go to our website, click , and then click on the large blue sign up button at the bottom of the page. Follow the prompts, and under the Location field, select ReadAlaska. Then put in your preferred day and beginning and ending times. Most authors choose to arrive when the day’s event opens and remain until closing time. Although we welcome authors whose schedule only allows attendance less than full time on the three days, by necessity, we give preference to authors arriving at opening and staying until closing. When making your reservation please put in the note section if you have location preference or would like to sit next to a given author.
If you have questions about The Great Alaska Book Fair or ReadAlaska kindly let contact us.
Author Campaign Method (ACM) Update and Upgrade
We take the quote by Marcella Smith, Small Press Business Manager, Barnes & Noble seriously: “The author is essential to the success of the book, giving energy behind the book to make it something that a customer will come in and ask for. That is what makes the difference in a book that sells, that develops legs, and has a life of its own. Otherwise the book goes on the shelf and stays there for three months. Then it gets returned.”
This is Publication Consultants’ motivation for constantly striving to assist authors sell and market their books. ACM is Publication Consultants’ plan to accomplish this so that our authors’ books have a reasonable opportunity for success. We know the difference between motion and direction. ACM is direction! ACM is the process for authors who are serious about bringing their books to market. ACM is a boon for serious authors, but a burden for hobbyist. We don’t recommend ACM for hobbyists.
The six facets of Publication Consultants’ ACM includes: a release party, web presence, book signings, Amazon Author Page, Facebook Page, and Active Social Media Participation.
Release Party
We’re the only publisher we know of assisting and supporting author release parties. Your Publication Consultants’ publishing contract includes our support of your release party. If you’d like more information about release parties, kindly contact us or see the Well Planned Release Party video on our website <>. A well planned release party kick starts the sales and marketing of your book and is well suited for both serious authors and hobbyists. For the serious author, a well planned release party is essential to your ACM’s effectiveness.
Web Presence
We’re the only publisher we know of that creates a web presence for their authors by obtaining a domain name, creating a website, and establishing a blog. Your Publication Consultants’ publishing contract includes establishing your web presence. Keep in mind that your website will do little unless you feed and nurture it by regularly posting to your blog, keeping your events current, and promoting it in your social media offerings. A website is a frustration for the hobbyist and an asset for the serious author. If you want information about establishing your web presence kindly send us an email and we’ll send you the details.
Book Signing
We’re the only publisher we know of that provides authors with book signing opportunities. Book signing are appropriate for hobbyist and essential for serious authors. To schedule a book signing kindly go to our website, <https://publicationconsultants.com>. Click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Request, follow the prompts, and Author Services will take it from there. Once you’ve made the request you’ll receive confirmation that the request has been received. As soon as the request is approved by the bookseller you will receive notification from Author Services giving you details about the signing.
Amazon Author Page
An Author Page on Amazon Author Central is a serious author ACM requirement and desirable for the hobbyist. Author Central is a free resource designed to help authors become more active participants in the promotion of their books. In Author Central you can manage an Author Page, update information about your books, and view Customer Reviews and sales information for your bibliography. If you don’t already have an Author Page on Amazon.com, Amazon will create one for you when you sign up for Author Central. You can find out more at: http://authorcentral.amazon.com or the help site https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help. A well maintained Amazon author page is essential for your ACM’s success. You should point all of your social media offerings to your Amazon author page. Your author pages makes it easy for potential readers to purchase your book.
Facebook Profile and Facebook Page
We hear authors complain about all the personal stuff on Facebook. Most of these complaints are because the author doesn’t understand the difference difference between a Facebook profile and a Facebook page. Simply put, a profile is for personal things for friends and family; a page is for business. If your book is just a hobby, then it’s fine to have only a Facebook profile and make your posts for friends and family; however, if you’re serious about your writing, and it’s a business with you, or you want it to be business, then you need a Facebook page as an author. It’s simple to tell if it’s a page or a profile. A profile shows how many friends and a page shows how many likes. Here’s a link <> to a straight forward description on how to set up your author Facebook page.
Active Social Media Participation
Social media marketing is a frustration for most authors: serious ones and hobbyist alike. However, SMM is the serious author’s key to success and the glue holding the other five facets of ACM together. As a published author, you are a celebrity in the minds of your readers. They are interested in you and what you do and what you think. The proper use of social media gives you the opportunity to serve your reader’s desire to be a part of your celebrity status. Regardless of what you’re now doing with social media we have some exciting news. Publication Consultants has partnered with Cortex: Artificial Intelligence for Marketing. Cortex is for serious authors and will probably not be of interest to hobbyists. We’ve been using Cortex for the past 30 days and are prepared to introduce it to you as a tool to maximize your SMM results and minimizing your efforts. We’ll be sending you an invitation to attend our introduction, information, and training webinar in a few days. We think you’ll be pleased with what you learn.
ReadAlaska 2015
Again this year Publication Consultants will be the major publisher participate in ReadAlaska; our twenty-second year. ReadAlaska is Alaska’s premier book fair. We’ve been working with the event coordinators, Ed Bovey and Alissa Crandall, to make this year’s event even better than past ReadAlaska’s—and better publicized. A ReadAlaska website <> has been created and will include book reviews for participating authors. If you’d like your book reviewed, schedule your ReadAlaska 2015 reservation, send us a copy of the review, and we’ll see that the review gets listed, where possible, with a picture of the cover.
We’re calling for reservations now for ReadAlaska 2015, Saturday, November 27 from 10 AM to 6 PM, Friday, November 28 from 10 AM to 6 PM, and Sunday, November 29 from Noon to 5 PM. As mentioned above, this year’s event promises to be even better than previous years and once again dominated by Publication Consultants’ authors and their books. We are again printing a nice brochure to give people as they enter the museum and will ask authors to hand these out as in years past. The brochure invites people to come upstairs and meet the authors. We also will have three large banners on stands placed in strategic areas in the museum. In addition, we’ll be producing a flyer authors can print and post on bulletin boards, other appropriate places, and hand out.
Here’s how to schedule your reservation. Kindly go to our website, click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Requests or click <> to go directly to the signup page, and then click on the large blue sign up button at the bottom of the page. Follow the prompts, and under the Location field, select ReadAlaska. Then put in your preferred day and beginning and ending times. Most authors choose to arrive when the day’s event opens and remain until closing time. Although we welcome authors whose schedule only allows attendance less than full time on the three days, by necessity, we give preference to authors arriving at opening and staying until closing. When making your reservation please put in the note section if you have location preference or would like to sit next to a given author.
As always, we will have everything set up, including books, ready for your arrival at your scheduled time. We’ll have enough space so you can make a nice display for your books. You’re encouraged to bring a table covering and small display item for your place on the table to attract people to your space. Bring your banner and stand. We will also have a central cash register and check out so you need not worry about taking money or credit cards.
We look forward to ReadAlaska 2015 and once again associating with authors. We hope to see you there.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
New Book Signing Opportunity
We have added a new book signing opportunity to our website’s list of booksellers. Alaskana Raven Books & Things, in downtown Fairbanks, has openings for author signings at their First Friday events. You can schedule a signing in the normal manner by visiting our website and clicking on Book Signings and following the prompts.
Jim Misko
Jim Misko reported on his Fred Meyer book signing, “Had a fine signing yesterday. Logistics worked out well.” In reporting his success Jim always adds the number of interactions, number of questions about eBooks, and how many names and email addresses he obtained. Jim understands the real purpose of book signings. Oh yes, he sold all but three of available inventory. Here’s a photo of Jim and his customer, Bill Tobuk.
Author Campaign Method (ACM)
To fully participate in our ACM of sales and marketing program we encourage you to establish and regularly update your Author Page on Amazon and the Independent Book Sellers site. If you have questions about these two sites or ACM, kindly contact us.
Cow Woman Of Akutan
Joan Dodd, author of Cow Woman of Akutan, visited Homer Book Store recently and found a pleasant, heartwarming surprise; her book was displayed on the store’s best selling wall in the number four position. In addition, she received a glowing review in MENSA Bulletin and Alaska Women Speak. Her review was among some not too complementary ones.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Alaska Outdoors Magazine Podcasts
We invite you to come along with us. Alaska Outdoors Magazine podcasts, earlier radio show recordings, are interesting, informative, and sometimes controversial. The podcast is your window to Alaska outdoors. Evan’s guest on Episode 01 is inventor and biologist, Smiley Shields. Smiley talks about stone bows and a flyreel made from wood. The show includes visiting with Natural Pantry’s, Vicky Solberg, telling us what we should be doing to stay fit and healthy in the outdoors. The show address Subsistence, Scenarios, and Solutions by booing the governor’s approach to subsistence and applauding the legislature for their approach. This episode ends with Evan’s One Last Cast titled, For Kids Only.
We’ve attached an audio file that will give use a quick introduction to the show. Please give it a listen.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Author Campaign Method (ACM)
Since posting our ACM Author Update on Monday we’ve received a number of inquiries indicating that some authors may need more training and reminding. With this as the backdrop I offer the following:
As you may know we take the quote by Marcella Smith, Small Press Business Manager, Barnes & Noble seriously: “The author is essential to the success of the book, giving energy behind the book to make it something that a customer will come in and ask for. That is what makes the difference in a book that sells, that develops legs, and has a life of its own. Otherwise the book goes on the shelf and stays there for three months. Then it gets returned.”
*We know that authors who approach their writing as a business do better than those do who’s purpose in publishing is vanity or a hobby.
*We know that our online video titled, Book Signings are Fun, states a truth; however, book signings are also hard work—but essential to an author’s success.
*We know that social media has leveled the playing field for authors and that social media marketing is demanding work and it takes consistency and a long time for results to develop and mature.
If you want your book to “develop legs” then it’s up to you to give it “a life of its own.” Keeping this in mind, kindly review the following Author Updates found on our website at: https://publicationconsultants.com/signing-requests/author-news
Successful Book Marketing: 26 January 2015
Author Campaign Method: 04 February 2015
All About Book Signings: 29 April 2015
Let’s Talk About Books Signings: 28 May 2015
Author Campaign Method of Sales and Marketing (ACM): 10 June 2015
Author Campaign Method (ACM) of Sales and Marketing: 13 July 2015
I think you’ll find these helpful in developing your inch wide and mile deep place in your book’s genre.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Author Campaign Method (ACM) of Sales and Marketing
If you’d like to participate in ACM it is necessary to have an author page on Amazon and a website. Here’s information about how to establish your Amazon Author Page at Author Central.
Author Central is a free resource designed to help authors become more active participants in the promotion of their books. In Author Central you can manage an Author Page, update information about your books on Amazon.com, and view customer reviews and sales information for your bibliography.
If you don’t already have an Author Page on Amazon.com, Amazon will create one for you when you sign up for Author Central.
You can find out more at: http://authorcentral.amazon.com or https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help
Several are ACM participants including the following authors:
www.author.maryannpoll.com
www.author.ispetteice.com
www.author.douglasandersonbooks.com
www.author.dangriffinbooks.com
www.author.carldouglass.com
www.author.waltergrantbooks.com
www.author.publicationconsultants.com
If you click on any of these unique URLs you’ll be able to see the author’s page on Amazon. Some of the author pages are still being worked on and updated.
Bonnye Matthews and Jim Misko also have functioning Amazon Author Pages; however, they do not have an unique URL:
http://www.amazon.com/Bonnye-Matthews/e/B001KMIPJU/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1432744100&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Jim-Misko/e/B0039KQSLS/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2?qid=1432744484&sr=8-2
When an author uses their unique URL in one of their social media posts, and a potential customer clicks on the unique URL, they are taken immediately to the author’s Author Page on Amazon. Once there the potential customer can find out about the author and the author’s books. They can also purchase either the printed book or the eBook.
If you have question about ACM or Author Central, kindly contact me and let’s talk.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Author Campaign Method of Sales and Marketing (ACM)
On the Internet, Niches are Riches. We’re seeing this more all the time.
Publication Consultants wants to assist you with a social media marketing strategy that will allow you to dominate the genre in which you write. However, there are a few things you should be aware of to be successful:
1. You should treat your writing as a business.
2. While Publication Consultants is able to provide the promotional environment, you are the brand and readers want to connect with you. The face to your reader is you, not Publication Consultants.
3. Publication Consultants’ Author Campaign Method (ACM) only works if you actively participate in the promotion of your campaign. The promotional channels are: Facebook, Twitter, Email, Other Social Media Outlets (Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.), Blogs, and offline word-of-mouth.
4. To fully participate using ACM you will need a website. If you don’t have a website Publication Consultants will pay for your domain registration and creation of your website. You will be responsible for the monthly maintenance cost.
5. You will need an Author Page on Amazon Author Central. Author Central is a free resource designed to help authors become more active participants in the promotion of their books. In Author Central you can manage an Author Page, update information about your books on Amazon.com, and view Customer Reviews and sales information for your bibliography. If you don’t already have an Author Page on Amazon.com, Amazon will create one for you when you sign up for Author Central. You can find out more at: http://authorcentral.amazon.com or the help site https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help.
Here’s examples of ACM author pages on Amazon:
www.author.publicationconsultants.com
www.author.carldouglass.com
www.author.maryannpoll.com
www.author.ispetteice.com
www.author.douglasandersonbooks.com
www.author.dangriffinbooks.com
6. It will take three months for your campaign to mature.
If you’re ready, we’re ready to proceed with Author Campaign Method of sales and marketing (ACM), and invite you to discuss it with us.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Let’s Talk About Book Signings
Mosquito Books has a new location in the Anchorage international airport and is available for signings with 21 days notice. Jim Misko had a signing there yesterday. His signing report included these words, “Had the best day ever at the airport . . ..”
When you’re ready to have a book signing go to https://publicationconsultants.com,click on Book Signings, Click on Author Signing Request, follow the prompts, and select the State, City, and Location and enter your request. If your desired venue isn’t listed, please send an email to authorservices@publicationconsultants.com and let us know the venue, contact person, address, city, state, zip, phone numb, and email address. We’ll add the venue to the form and let you know when it’s available for use.
We’ve been working with Jerry Simmons, a book marketing consultant. We shared the attached Author Event Information sheet with Jerry and asked for his imput. He didn’t suggest any changes, but made this comment: “The Author Event Information is an excellent tool for your authors. Well written and to the point, if they follow your advice they can have successful book signings.” We encourage you to review it and follow the advice for successful signings.
Also on our website if you click on Book Signings and then select Scheduled Book Signings you’ll find a schedule of signings. This way you can see right away if your signing has been approved. You can also see where your fellow authors are signing and if you’ll have company at your signing. We don’t schedule more than two authors at the same venue at the same time.
Once again we express our gratitude for the trust you’ve placed in us and we’ll do all we can to prove worthy of that trust.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Author Book Signing Request
The Author Signing Request feature on our website is open for business. This service for authors is unique to Publication Consultants. No other publisher provides this opportunity for authors to expose their works to the public, to booksellers, and bookseller employees. The procedure for scheduling book signings is simple. Go to our website <https://publicationconsultants.com>, click on the Book Signing tab near the top of the page, select Author Signing Request, and follow the prompts. Once you complete the request you will receive an email notice that your request has been received. As soon as the request has been approved Author Services will send you a confirming email. It’s just that simple.
Barnes and Noble Open Invitation
When we announce a new book or a release party we send an invitation to our email mailing list which includes booksellers. We received the following note after we set the release party invitation for Northern Verses by Dennis Lattery.
“Wishing you a wonderful event and much success… I was in Alaska fifteen years ago and would LOVE to return again someday.
“Thank you for the invite and the information on this new book by Dennis Lattery. If he is ever in “the states” or any of your other authors, I would welcome them to our Barnes & Noble and would love to host an event for them.
“Lori Peuterbaugh
Community Business Development Manager
Barnes & Noble, Inc.
6510 N. Illinois Street
Fairview Heights, IL 62208”
If you’re traveling to the South-48 and would like to do a signing at this store just go to our website and request a signing. Of course this goes for any Barnes and Noble store as well as all the other booksellers listed under the Book Signing tab on our website.
New Book Signing Opportunities
We just received approval for author signings for all Safeway and Albertson stores in Washington and Idaho. We have not yet added all these stores to the Book Signing tab on our website. However, if you would like to schedule a signing prior to the store being added kindly let us know and we’ll add it. This goes for other stores as well. If you’d like to do a signing in a store not listed under the Book Signing tab kindly send us the store name, address, city, state, zip, and any contact information you may have. And once again, Author Services will take it from there.
Book Signings Are Fun
We encourage you to visit our website, click on the Video tab and watch the Book Signings Are Fun video. You may want to watch this video before you go to your book signing. It’ll get you in a positive mood for your signing.
Book Signing Events
Once a book signing is approved it is added to the Book Signing Events tab under the Author Signing tab on our website. This is the best place to visit to keep track of your signing schedule and to follow other author’s signing schedule.
Book Signing Season
Next to Christmas, the summer signing season is the best time for signings; particularly in Alaska. Alaska’s population triples during the summer. Some say that there are three seasons in Alaska: summer, winter, and construction. How about a fourth season; book signing season?
Thank you again!!
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Jim Misko
Jim Misko’s novel, As All My Fathers Were <http://goo.gl/6l40Iq> is the GOLD WINNER for Popular Fiction of Benjamin Franklin Awards from Independent Book Publishers Association, a national organization of Indie book publishers.
Jeff Babcock Names Trail After His Granddaughter
We’ve attached a photo of Jeff’s wife, Peg, and his granddaughter, Alexia. They had just put up a sign marking The Alexia Puzzle Trail which was an old mountain bike trail that Jeff and Alexia hike over from time to time in back of their house. The trail is like a maze similar to the puzzles often found on restaurant placemats. Jeff and Peg decided to erect a sign on an old rock pedestal left over from the early fifties. Alexia was quite taken with their naming the trail after her. Next to Peg is their other hiking buddy, Jacques—their family dog.
Jake Jacobson
Jake Jacobson, author of two Alaska books, Alaska Hunting and Alaska Tales, received a nice review in the Alaska Dispatch News. The review is the result of Jake’s persistent followup with the book reviewer of the Alaska Dispatch News. Jake, an Alaska big game guide showed hunter determination to persuade ADN to publish a review of his book. http://www.adn.com/article/20150322/reading-north-earthworms-and-glass-ball
Facebook Best Practices
Included with this up date is a Facebook Best Practices information PDF. For authors engaged with our new sales and marketing tool, Author Campaign Method (ACM), following these guide are essential for success.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
A Tribute to Don Porter
Here’s a note from Deborah Porter, wife of Don Porter.
Last Saturday my friend Karen Kulik and I set up a booth in the local Bisbee outdoor market — A Tribute to the Author Don Porter. We handed out bags and bags of books and people made generous donations. We talked with many people who knew Don and had bought books from him over the years. I wanted to share the photos we took of Don’s booth.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Book Signings
We encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity for book signings. Here’s what Wikipedia says about book signings: “Book signing is popular because an author’s signature increases the value of books for collectors. The author may add a short message to the reader, called a dedication, to each book, which may be personalized with the recipient’s name upon request. . . . Sometimes an author will sign additional copies for future sale. An additional advantage to authors for doing this is that once a book has been signed, it cannot be returned to the publisher for a refund.
Our online author signing request feature is not working correctly. Please use it to identify the store location where you’d like to have a signing, then email your request to Author Services <authorservices@publicationconsultants.com>. Mary Ann will take it from there and let you know when the signing has been approved. If you’ve made a request using the online request form in the last couple of weeks please email <authorservices@publicationconsultants.com> and let Mary Ann know. We’ll let you know when the signing request form is functional again.
Obsolete Words
We trust that most of our authors will know what we’re talking about if we were to write, don’t touch that dial, carbon copy, you sound like a broken record or hung out to dry. If you don’t know what these phrases are taking about you probably don’t know what a telex machine is either. I going to make a social media post about these phrases along with some others. Feel free to comment if you’re following us on Facebook or LinkedIn.
Walrus With A Gold Tooth
Steve Levi receive a great review from the February Mensa Bulletin.
Walrus with a Gold Tooth: Crime in Anchorage, Alaska the Pioneer Way: Unorganized! by Steven C. Levi (Publication Consultants). Another entertaining work from our “Alaskan Authority,” this one covers the ups and downs of Anchorage during the two decades between World War II and the Great Alaskan Earthquake, a period when the town grew tenfold. Yet despite the economic boom, Anchorage was one of the few cities in America where the mob never established a firm foothold because the locals banned East Coast families by squeezing them out before they ever made it in. Levi, a 40-year resident of Anchorage, emphasizes that we all live in a transitory world, especially with its rapid technological developments, and that personal economic survival will depend more on reading the future than what is being taught in the classroom from textbooks written decades ago. Or, as he states more succinctly, “History is not the story of the past, it is the study of the future.”
R Mike Harmer
Mike Hammer, Author of How To Go Blind and Not Lose Your Mind, said, “A professional writer is an amateur who did not give up. I have not given up.” Mike’s short statement begs you to ask, “are you a professional or amateur?”
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Young Writers Conference
Saturday, April 25 is the date for the Mat/Su Young Writers Conference sponsored by Mat/Su School District–and strongly supported by Publication Consultants. As presently constituted, each class session will be 40 minutes long consisting of a 20 minute teaching presentation and a 20 minute time for the students to practice what they have learned. Authors will have opportunity to teach two or three sessions depending on the grade level they are working with.
If you’d like to participate in this year’s conference kindly let us know by return email. Also include the subject you anticipate teaching. At a later date his notice will also be sent to members of Alaska Writers Guild if additional authors are needed. We encourage you to respond promptly. Savvy authors view this as an occasion to develop their presentation skills while providing mentoring to young writers.
Again, if you’d like to participate in this year’s conference kindly let us know by return email and include the subject you anticipate teaching.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Author Campaign Method
We are continuing testing our new sales tool, which we’re calling, Author Campaign Method (ACM), to distinguish our method of sales and marketing books on the Internet from all other methods. The Author Campaign Method is based on these two Internet sales and marketing success principles:
You are the one that determines the lifecycle of your book. As long as you’re involved, the book has a life—when you become disengaged, the book dies. Your success as a writer and published author will be enhanced once you identify your niche and market to it.
We believe ACM will be the major way you apply these two principles. First, identify your niche. If you’re unsure of your niche, kindly contact me and let’s talk. We do not want to proceed with ACM with you until we have identified your niche. Remember, niches are riches. Second, commit to a daily involvement to your campaign. The minimum time commitment should be at least one hour per day letting people know about your book’s campaign. You do this principally using FaceBook, Twitter, and email. ACM provides an easy way to use and measure your efforts.
There is not a more powerful marketing tool than a personal recommendation. ACM technology leverages your social networks to help spread the word about your campaign; driving qualified and measurable leads resulting in sales. Publication Consultants, as your publisher, is able to provide the environment for the sale of your book, but you, the author, is the brand and readers want to connect with you. The face to the reader is you, the author, not the publisher.
Here’s an article explaining the psychology of sharing so instrumental to a successful campaign. We recommend you study this article and begin now writing your ACM content using what you learned here:
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-six-things-that-make-stories-go-viral-will-amaze-and-maybe-infuriate-you
We encourage you to also study and apply what is taught by this article to help you create effective social media posts:
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/create-perfect-social-media-posts-slideshare
About ten days ago we gave you two URLs for testing ACM. Using what we’ve learned from our test we have changed our test campaigns and invite you to look again at the tests: < www.OneLastCast.PublicationConsultants.com> and < www.ravenscove.maryannpoll.com>. You will notice subtle, but differences.
Within the next two weeks we will be inviting authors to use Publication Consultants’ Author Campaign Method. If you’re interested, please contact me and let’s talk. We will provide the environment. You provide the time and content.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Successful Book Marketing
There are two governing principles involved in the success of your book:
1) You should treat your writing as a business that requires your involvement throughout the entire lifecycle of the book. You are the one that determines the lifecycle of your book. As long as you’re involved, the book has a life—when you become disengaged, the book will die.
2) Niches are riches.
Your success will be enhanced once you identify your niche and market to it.
We’re in the process of testing a new social media sales tool to help sell books. The key to the tool’s success is becoming involved by spending at least an hour a day with social media. It will require you to write a weekly blog and be engaged with your friends and followers on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media pages you may have. Of course it will mean using your email as well. You can see two examples of the new tool by going to:
www.ravenscove.maryannpoll.com
www.OneLastCast.PublicationConsultants.com
After you’ve seen the examples and have questions and/or comments kindly let us know.
We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve proven this new sales tool.
Rejection Letter
Have you ever been tempted to write something like this note by Greg Levin?
Dear (name of agent or publisher), Thank you very much for your recent rejection notification. Unfortunately, I am unable to accept your rejection at this time. Please understand that I receive a high volume of rejection notifications and must be highly selective in choosing those that I am able to handle. The acceptance of rejection notifications is a highly subjective process. The fact that I have decided to pass on your rejection in no way signifies your rejection is sub-par, and I encourage you to continue rejecting authors’ queries and submissions. Just because I have decided to pass on your rejection doesn’t mean there aren’t numerous other authors who’d be happy to be rejected by you. I wish you the best of luck in your future rejection endeavors and want to thank you for allowing me to review your work. Sincerely,
Time and Tide
Dick Shellhorn received a nice review in the Cordova Times of his book, Time and Tide. Dick is in the process of preparing for a second printing.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Bonnye Matthews
Bonnye received a glowing, informative review of her new book, Tuksook’s Story, 35,000 BC. You can see the review by going to http://makeasceneak.com/Make_A_Scene/Make_A_Scene_Magazine.html and click on the cover, then go to page 25, you’ll see the piece that introduces Tuksook’s Story, 35,000 BC, the signing Saturday at Fireside, and other signings coming up.
Jim Misko
Jim received several complimentary reviews for his new book, As All My Fathers Were. Jim did a two week book signing tour in Nebraska, the setting for his new book. Here’s the links to just two of his reviews:
Alaska Wholesale Gift Show
Several authors have asked about the Alaska Wholesale Gift Show indicating that they may like to partner with other authors and display their books at the show. You can find the information about the show by going to <http://www.alaskagiftshow.com/homepage.html>. If you’re interested, kindly let us know and we’ll get interested author together.
Dick Shellhorn
The Cordova Times gave Dick some good press when his book, Time and Tide, was released earlier this winter. Dick has worked hard to get his book in the hands of as many readers as possible and it looks like his efforts have paid off. He’s talking about a second printing after the first of the year.
Amazon Author Central
Author Central is a free resource designed to help authors become more active participants in the promotion of their books. In Author Central you can manage an Author Page, update information about your books on Amazon.com, and view Customer Reviews and sales information for your bibliography.
If you don’t already have an Author Page on Amazon.com, Amazon will create one for you when you sign up for Author Central.
You can find out more at: http://authorcentral.amazon.com. To learn more about Author Central, visit the help pages: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help
Marthy Johnson
Marthy sends her Word for Word piece out each month to interested authors. You can view her latest offering at
http://www.marthyjohnson.com/newsletters. I’m sure if you sent Marthy an email <mjces@gci.net> she would send you her amusing and helpful author information each month.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
ReadAlaska 2014
We look forward to being with authors and readers at this year’s ReadAlaska at the Anchorage museum the three days after Thanksgiving; November 28, 29, and 30.
Earlier today we sent the following to all authors scheduled for this event:
1: A list and times of participating authors
2: ReadAlaska Signing and Selling Tips
3: Brochure Distribution Schedule
4: Brochure
If you’re planning on signing and selling your book at ReadAlaska, and you didn’t receive a copy of these items, we do not have you on the schedule. If you’re planning on participating in ReadAlaska 2014, and did not receive these items, kindly contact us by return email.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
ReadAlaska 2014
We look forward to being with authors and readers at this year’s ReadAlaska at the Anchorage museum the three days after Thanksgiving.
Earlier today we sent copies of their days and times to all authors scheduled for this event. If you’re planning on signing and selling your book at ReadAlaska, and you didn’t receive a copy of the scheduled date and times, we do not have you on the schedule. This is your last chance to register for the event. You can sign up for ReadAlaska by going to our website, click on Book Signings, Book Signing Requests, follow the prompts to ReadAlaska.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
The Lyin Kings: The Wannabe World Leaders
I.S. Petteice has released her new book, The Lyin Kings. In addition to the attached New Book Information, you may view the book’s trailer on the author’s website,
<http://ispetteice.com/video/lyin-kings-trailer>
Book Trailer
If you’d like an inexpensive trailer for your book we’ll be pleased to create it for you. All you need do is furnish us with a script (not more than 150 words) and appropriate royalty free pictures. The description on the back cover of your book may be the script, or a good place to begin. If you’d like music in the background, also let us know where we can find a royalty free copy. Kindly let us know if you have questions.
ReadAlaska 2014
We’re finalizing plans for ReadAlaska 2014. We’ve attached the front and back cover of this year’s flyer. There are still a few openings. If you’d like to join us kindly go to our website, click on Book Signings, Author Signing Requests, then follow the prompts. You’ll need to request all three days. We will have enough space so you can make a nice display for your books. The hours are Friday and Saturday from 10 AM to 6 PM and Sunday from Noon to 5 PM. We will display many of our titles, but of course, books that sell are the ones when the author is present and the author can autograph the customer’s copy. You’re encouraged to bring a table covering and small display item for your place on the table to attract people to your space. Bring your banner and stand.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Amazon Author Central
Author Central is a free resource designed to help authors become more active participants in the promotion of their books. In Author Central you can manage an Author Page, update information about your books on Amazon.com, and view Customer Reviews and sales information for your bibliography.
If you don’t already have an Author Page on Amazon.com, Amazon will create one for you when you sign up for Author Central.
You can find out more at: http://authorcentral.amazon.com. To learn more about Author Central, visit the help pages: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help”
Time and Tide
Dick Shellhorn had a successful release party for his new book Time and Tide. He made his release party an event by making a presentation about his book and the Cordova area. The first book was signed to his granddaughter, Ellie. Ellie’s signed copy was soon joined by more than 70 other signed copies. You can see more photos and learn abut Dick’s website at http://dickshellhorn.com.
Meeting With The Well Known
Like Dick Shellhorn’s release party, Carey Cossaboom’s release party, for Meeting With The Well Known, at the Sourdough Mining Company Restaurant was more event than release party. There are more photos of his release party event on his website at http://careycossaboom.com. You can also read his first blog.
Lawless Measures
Dressed as Walter Eloy Goe, the book’s character, Lyle O’Connor, author of Lawless Measures held his book release party at the same location as he did for his first book, Due Process. For reason’s unknown, Lyle’s guests asked that he not smile for their photo. Perhaps their image of Walter was one of a more serious person than the almost always smiling author. More information about Lyle’s books and photos may be found at http://www.lyle-oconnor.com. Walter’s dark side can be found at https://www.facebook.com/WalterEloyGoe.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Book Signings And Author Events
If you’d like to see what author book signings and author events are scheduled, kindly go to https://publicationconsultants.com, click on Book Signings-News & Events, then click on the drop down, Book Signings & Events. Here you can see your scheduled events and the scheduled events of other authors.
If you’d like to do a book signing, kindly go to https://publicationconsultants.com, click on Book Signings-News & Events, then click on the drop down, Author Signing Requests, and follow the prompts. We’ll take it from there.
Independent Book Stores
We recommend you put your books on the Independent Book Stores website. There are hundreds of ABA booksellers with websites and storefronts. These stores want to know about you and about your books. They welcome authors for book signings and will promote the author event if your book is listed on the ABA’s website. Here’s how to make sure your book is listed and is for sale at ABA member bookstores.
Adding titles or cover images to the ABA database:
First, log in to IndieBound.org using your personal account. If you don’t have an account on IndieBound.org, please create one at http://www.indiebound.org/join
Once you are logged in, kindly search for your title first, by ISBN, using the search form in the upper right of the site (13 digits only, no dashes or spaces). If your title is already listed, it does not need to be added. If you see that information is missing or incorrect, please email the necessary changes to addabook@bookweb.org (be sure to include ISBN and Title).
If your title (or cover image) cannot be found in the database, use the links below to add it:
1) To add a complete book listing, including a cover image, go to:www.indiebound.org/addabook
2) To add a missing cover image to an existing book, go to to:www.indiebound.org/addabook/cover
Just enter your data, upload an image, and submit!
Please allow time for approval by someone at ABA. You will receive an email when your book is approved. Once approved, it can take up to 24 hours for your book to appear in search results and on IndieBound.org, but it will be available on individual store websites, in book lists, etc. immediately.
Keep in mind that adding a book to the ABA shared database does not necessarily make the title available for purchase. If a customer clicks to purchase your title, they will be taken to one of the ABM member bookstores. It is then up to each bookstore to obtain the book for their customer. However, if a store cannot find your title available from the publisher or a distributor, they may inform their customer that the book is not readily available. The easier it is for the bookseller to find and obtain your title, the likelier that a store will fill an order for your book.
ABA also has an affiliate program www.indiebound.org/affiliate where you can actually earn money for referring people to member’s stores.
Jim Misko
Jim is conducting a book tour later this month in Nebraska, the setting for his new book, As All My Fathers Were. Here’s a link to a book review in the local paper announcing the new book and Jim’s book tour. We mention this for two reasons: 1) we know you are interested in what authors are doing, and 2) Jim has pre-sold a great number of books to booksellers in Alaska and Nebraska and you may learn how he did it so you can follow his path with your book. http://fremonttribune.com/cass-news/community/plattsmouth-is-setting-for-new-novel/article_9d6e75cd-3a2a-5680-8732-0940ba3dc7c4.html.
Rejection Letters
We thought you’d enjoy Greg Levin’s rejection letter response.
Dear (name of agent or publisher),
Thank you very much for your recent rejection notification. Unfortunately, I am unable to accept your rejection at this time. Please understand that I receive a high volume of rejection notifications and must be highly selective in choosing those that I am able to handle. The acceptance of rejection notifications is a highly subjective process. The fact that I have decided to pass on your rejection in no way signifies your rejection is sub-par, and I encourage you to continue rejecting authors’ queries and submissions. Just because I have decided to pass on your rejection doesn’t mean there aren’t numerous other authors who’d be happy to be rejected by you. I wish you the best of luck in your future rejection endeavors and want to thank you for allowing me to review your work. Sincerely, (Your name here. Or a made-up name – to ensure that you have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever having another agent or a publisher even THINK about accepting your manuscript.)
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Five Minutes With Marianne Schlegelmilch
Marianne received a most complementary review of her writing as a result of her reaching out with social media. We think you’ll be interested in seeing her five star review <http://fiveonthefive.edublogs.org/2014/09/17/five-minutes-with-marianne-schlegelmilch>.
As All My Fathers Were
If you’d like to see and review Jim Misko’s new novel please go to NetGalley to receive a free review copy.
Embed this URL in any HTML coding:
https://www.netgalley.com/widget/open?widget_id=53698_42987_14109048145418b2ee3823a_9780964082656_US
Alaska Writers Directory
For any of you who aren’t listed and are Alaska writers, you might want to check out <http://www.alaskawritersdirectory.com> to be listed. It’s not a time consuming process. Don’t know what the value is, but it’s gotta be better’n a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Bonnye Matthews: Award Winning Writer of Prehistoric Fiction
The Back Story on Marketing Fiction
An interesting piece for fiction writers is attached to today’s Author Update.
Amazon Author Central
Author Central is a free resource designed to help authors become more active participants in the promotion of their books. In Author Central you can manage an Author Page, update information about your books on Amazon.com, and view Customer Reviews and sales information for your bibliography.
If you don’t already have an Author Page on Amazon.com, Amazon will create one for you when you sign up for Author Central.
You can find out more at: http://authorcentral.amazon.com. To learn more about Author Central, visit the help pages: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
ReadAlaska 2014
We’re calling for reservations for ReadAlaska 2014, Saturday, November 28 from 10 AM to 6 PM, Friday, November 29 from 10 AM to 6 PM, and Sunday, November 30 from Noon to 5 PM. This year’s event promises to be even better than previous years and once again dominated by Publication Consultants’ authors and their books. We are again printing a nice brochure to give people as they enter the museum and will ask authors to hand these out as in years past. The brochure invites people to come upstairs and meet the authors. We also will have three large banners on stands placed in strategic areas in the museum.
As always, we will have everything set up, including books, ready for your arrival at your scheduled time. We’ll have enough space so you can make a nice display for your books. You’re encouraged to bring a table covering and small display item for your place on the table to attract people to your space. Bring your banner and stand. We will also have a central cash register and check out so you need not worry about taking money or credit cards.
Here’s how to schedule your reservation. Kindly go to our website, click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Requests, follow the prompts, and under the Location field, select ReadAlaska. Then put in your preferred day and beginning and ending times. Most authors choose to arrive when the day’s event opens and remain until closing time. Although we welcome authors whose schedule only allows attendance less than full time on the three days, by necessity, we give preference to authors arriving at opening and staying until closing. When making your reservation please put in the note section if you have location preference or would like to sit next to a given author.
ReadAlaska is not only the best book event in Anchorage for selling books and meeting people, it’s a wonderful social event for authors. We look forward to this year’s ReadAlasks and once again associating with authors. We hope to see you there.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Readerlink and Book Signings
Readerlink is our major book distributor. From Readerlink’s home page we read: “ReaderLink is the largest full-service distributor of hardcover, trade and paperback books to non-trade channel booksellers in North America, including the biggest names in retail across multiple retail channels.
“This broad customer base is unique in the industry and highlights our unmatched ability to service many different types of retailers: mass merchants, warehouse clubs, department stores, drug stores, grocery stores and others.”
We now have Readerlink’s procedure in place for book signings in Alaska and other locations. If you’re interested in doing a book signing anywhere in the United States kindly go to our website <https://publicationconsultants.com>, click on Book Signings, News, and Events, select Author Signing Requests, and follow the prompts. If you don’t see the store you’re interested in please let us know. We’ll add it.
If you live Outside, or are traveling Outside, and would like to do signings in locations other than bookstores, we suggest you go to <http://readerlink.net/Customers.aspx> and review some of Readerlink’s customers. If your book is appropriate for any of Readerlink’s customers, and you’d like to do a signing, kindly let us know about the store you’re interested in. We need to know the store name, address, city, state, zip, and if you know it, the person to contact and their telephone number and email address. The more information you can give us the better the chances we have of scheduling a signing for you.
You can continue to request signings at bookstores listed on our website.
We’re doing our best to have your book in as many locations as possible. However, if you don’t see your book in the store, it’s because the bookseller elected to fill their shelf space with other titles. The best way we know for getting your book on bookseller shelfs is to have a successful signing at the bookseller’s store.
We express our gratitude for your kind patience while Readerlink was establishing themselves in Alaska. We trust that the wait will be well worth it.
Publication Consultants
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Words of Wisdom
We’re seeking words of wisdom to use in our Social Media offerings so we can promote your books and you as an author. Following are three examples from three authors. If you’d like to contribute some of these bits we’ve be please to use them. They can be your original thought, something from your blog or SMM offering, or something a character from your book said. In our SMM offerings we’ll credit you and include an image of your book or of you.
A good writer is like a good mechanic in a sense. Faulty work causes poor performance. It’s like a movie with a good cast or lead character, but the script sucks. The potential for something good is there, but it isn’t brought forth. If someone doesn’t know good language, how can they fault someone else? Warren Troy, Alaska Wilderness Adventure Author, http://www.warrentroy.com
I wouldn’t buy the services of someone who didn’t care to learn his craft, whatever that craft might be. I wouldn’t go to a mechanic for heart surgery, no matter how good the mechanic is. A writer should know the rules of grammar. If he or she breaks them, they should break them knowing what they do. For example, I use fragments all the time—in dialog. People speak in fragments frequently. I use contractions. People use contractions in speech. If a writer doesn’t know the rules, serious people will not take that writer seriously. Using the rules and having something to say can move mountains. Bonnye Matthews, Award Winning Writer of Prehistoric Fiction, http://www.booksbybonnye.com
According to Kayla Hunt, author of CagedEagles, there are six qualities of good writing. One of the six qualities is to read. Read as many books as possible. Reading teaches different styles, ways to develop plots, and expands vocabulary. Authors that read often are better at their craft. Kayla Hunt, http://kaylahuntbooks.com
Jim Misko
I had a book signing at Costco on Saturday. Sold out the 40 books. Had two doubles, two triples and one quadruple. The advantage of having more than one book on the table. Thought you’d enjoy seeing what one buyer said just two days later. Don’t you just love good readers? May it go well with you. Alaska Jim
From: Carol Odinzoff Date: Monday, August 4, 2014 8:32 PM To: Jim Misko
• Subject : For What He Could Become
• Message : Bought your book and conversed with you at Costco in Anchorage this week. Thought I would start the book before the next semester of (Grad) school starts. Big mistake! I started it and it was only when he started drinking I put it down. But picked it up again the next morning and finished it that night. Well written, thrilling, thoughtful and threaded with truth. Handles the alcohol issue with grace and empathy. Hooray for Bill. Thanks for tackling it. Carol Odinzoff
From Bonnye Matthews
For any of you who aren’t listed and are Alaska writers, you might want to check out <http://www.alaskawritersdirectory.com> to be listed. It’s not a time consuming process. Don’t know what the value is, but it’s gotta be better’n a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Bonnye Matthews: Award Winning Writer of Prehistoric Fiction
Readerlink
We’re still working with Readerlink, but the progress is slow. They just bit off more than they could chew and it’s taking them longer than anticipated to put their system in place in Alaska. We don’t see any real movement for at least one more month. We’ll keep you posted.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
AutoCrit Editing Wizard
Several professional groups we’re members of have comments about AutoCrit Editing Wizard. On the surface it looks like it is an expensive editing tool. We sampled a short piece and it gave helpful information. You can try it for free, but of course when you click on additional help you’ll be asked to purchase a subscription. The price is reasonable if it will improve your work. We’re not recommending AutoCrit, but asking that if you try it, or already use it, kindly send us a report and we’ll compile the results and pass the information along.
Here’s what the website <https://www.autocrit.com> says about AutoCrit:
The AutoCrit Editing Wizard finds hundreds of problems instantly — even things that you and your critique partners have missed. The Wizard identifies slow pacing, overused words, cliches and many more problems typical of early drafts.
There is nothing to download and nothing to install. You can get started right now.
You’ll love the Wizard’s easy-to-read reports and the insights it provides on your manuscript. The AutoCrit Wizard makes editing simple.
The Wizard is available 24 hours a day and you receive your reports in seconds. No more waiting for your critique partner to return your manuscript.
You can have your chapter edited by morning.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Alaska Writer’s Guild
We express our thanks to the Alaska Writers Guild for highlighting two recent releases of Publication Consultants’ books: Walrus With A Gold Tooth, by Steve Levi and Tiny Pine Above Tree Line by Erica Malouf.
We also thought you may be interested in the guild’s newsletter and the upcoming writers conference.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
TNG/ReaderLink Update
The sale of TNG’s book business to ReaderLink was completed as expected on June 2, 2014. However, we’re still waiting for our first purchase order and book signing procedure. The few weeks after the purchase ReaderLink concentrated their efforts on determining the best way to proceed by either keeping the book inventory of TNG or beginning anew. Last week they made the decision to keep the inventory currently on the shelves in stores—but not purchase any of the warehoused books. Of course this meant that we received a huge number of returned books. As a result many author’s July royalty report will show returns. For some authors, book sales will mitigate all or some of the returns. Consequently, we’re asking that if your July royalty report shows an amount owing, and it’s more than $25, kindly send us your payment. This will be particularly important for this month’s royalty. As always, if your royalty is more than $25 we’ll send you a check.
Book signing are still available at Costco, Walgreens, Barnes and Noble, and most independent book stores. We encourage you to continue participating in events like craft fairs, markets, and other book selling opportunities.
We have a contract with ReaderLink and expect that they will begin purchasing books within the next few weeks. That’s what our Reader Link account representative tells us.
Thanks once more for your continued, loyal support.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Alaska Book Week
We express our thanks to Steve Levi, author of Cowboys of the Sky and Walrus with a Gold Tooth, for making us aware of Alaska Book Week, October 4-11, 2014. We attached the information to this email.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Book Signings
Publication Consultants’ authors are now able to schedule book signings at Walgreens in Alaska. If you’d like to schedule a signing at Walgreens kindly go to our website <https://publicationconsultants.com>, click on Book Signings, then Author Signing Requests, and follow the prompts.
You may also schedule signings at Costco in Anchorage. When scheduling a signing at Costco please schedule the signing to begin at 11 AM and end at 1 PM. This is the requirement of Costco corporate management. However, we have local management permission to remain in the store until all books or sold, and nearly all available books are sold. We’ll give you further instructions after your signing is scheduled and approved. We will furnish Costco a poster advertising your signing and they will post it in an appropriate place several days prior to your signing.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
2014 Independent Publisher Book Awards Results
We extend our congratulations to David Jensen for his Independent Publisher Gold Award
It’s Important to Paws was created as a way to encourage readers to pause, breathe and reconnect with the most important things in life. In my life, that means spending quality time enjoying the company of my family and friends. By family, I of course mean a home full of large, mature dogs (and our cat Oliver) that entertain us every day.
I came up with the title It’s Important to Paws while sitting upon a rock on top of Flattop Mountain in Anchorage, Alaska with my golden retriever mix, Layla. That accomplishment and remarkable connection with nature reminded me how important it is to pause every once in awhile. Layla and I realized at that moment that we have an incredible bond. Or maybe it was just me who had not
ANIMALS / PETS http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1791&urltitle=2014%20Independent%20Publisher%20Book%20Awards%20Results
Gold: It’s Important to Paws: Lessons Learned from Animal Companions, by David Jensen (David Jensen Photography)
Bonnye Matthews Radio Interview
Bonnye Matthews, Award Winning Writer of Prehistoric Fiction and author of Ki’ti’s Story, 75,000 BC, Manak-na’s Story: 75,000 BC, andZamimolo’s Story, 50,000 BC enjoyed the radio show interview opportunity on Radio Free Palmer earlier this month. You can hear the interview by going to http://radiofreepalmer.org/?cat=3. You may want to listen, learn, and ask the station for an interview with you about your books. Now Bonnye is able to use this link on all her social media marketing (SMM) offerings. It’s a positive way to increase reader awareness in your writing.
Rick Mystrom Radio Interview
Rick Mystrom, author of Kenni Psenak interviewed former Anchorage mayor Rick Mystrom about what he has learned over a lifetime of living with Type 1 diabetes. Mayor Mystrom discusses the two books he has authored, My Wonderful Life with Diabetes andWhat Should I Eat?, with particular emphasis on the second, What Should I Eat? The interview was broadcast on 89.5 FM on May 8 and 9, 2014. You can listen to the interview by going to http://radiofreepalmer.org/?cat=3.
BISAC Subject Headings
Once again we remind you of the importance of having four BISAC code numbers for your book to promote your book. Here’s what we recommend: Select four BISAC code numbers and send them to us. You select the code numbers and we’ll do the rest. To select your code numbers go to BISG https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-2013-edition, determine the major heading which best describes the content of your book, click on a heading for more specific headings within that category, cut and paste the number into an email, and send it to us. Example: BIO003000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Business. Be sure to send us four BISAC code numbers for your book. This will increase the opportunity of your book being discovered by a prospective reader.
Possible Venues For Book Sales
If you’re interested in selling books in venues other than bookstores and retail outlets, here’s a list of possibilities and their contact information.
Dimond Mall, $100 per day in a kiosk, call Shirley/Tanya/Mary at 344-2581
Sears Mall, $275 for 1 week, no single days, 264-6695
Elmendorf AAFES, must sign up for a week at a time, 20% of total sales, 753-6145
Saturday/Sunday Markets in Anchorage 05/10 to 09/07/2014, $95, 272-5634/ info@anchoragemarkets.com
Tuesday Market, Eagle River 06/03-09/30, VFW Post 9785, $15, Lynn 696-4839
Wednesday Market in Northway Mall 06/25-10/01, $50,, 272-5634 for information or @anchoragemarkets.com
Friday Fling in Palmer front of Visitor’s Center 05/23-08/29, $25-45 for 10×10, 355-9415
Wasilla Saturday Marketplace, $25, 5/17 to 8/30, Suzette Lord 357-2433
South Anchorage Farmers Market Wednesdays Dimond Mall, southanchoragefarmersmarket.com
Soldotna Central Peninsula Farmer’s Market on Saturdays, $10 season/$5 day, 262-5463
Homer Saturday Market & Wednesday Market, Janet 235-4288
Author Update Response
We have a favor to ask; when you read this Author Update kindly send us an email and let us know you received it. All your email needs to say is “I received it.”
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Book Signing Alert–Follow Up
We have been in communication with ReaderLink, and although they haven’t a firm procedure for book signings in Alaska, things are progressing. We’re confident that book signings and author events will be to our liking in Alaska and elsewhere. The ReaderLink connection should open the door to a host of possible venues hereto before not available to our authors.
Costco Book Signings
We have met with Anchorage Costco store management and they have been disappointed that there have not been author signings in their stores for nearly six months. They want author signings, so we worked out a way to meet Costco corporate requirements and local needs and desires. Therefore, we announce that authors are free and encouraged to schedule Costco signings in either or both Anchorage Costco stores. When you go to our website and request a store and date, please schedule your signing time for 11 AM to 1 PM. In the event all available books have not sold in the two hour period, store management encourages you to stay until all books are sold. So, when you schedule your signing kindly arrange your time so you can remain in the store until your books have all sold. If you have questions kindly contact me or Mary Ann Poll. There is an eight week advance notice requirement. We recommend that you schedule your signings now. You’re free to schedule multiple signings at the same store. Your signings just needs to be three months apart. Mary Ann is eager to schedule your Costco signing.
Publication Consultants Weekly Blog
SELL LIKE MARK TWAIN [Would you sell your book door-to-door?]
Samuel Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain, became one of America’s most famous authors. He also sold a lot of books, and they’re still selling well.
Just exactly how did he do this?
He used the social media marketing of his day: He became a journalist. One of his California stories [think: blogs], “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” became an international hit. This led to a newspaper asking him to go to Europe and the Holy Land and send back stories [blogs] from that part of the world.
All expenses were paid for the 163-day tour, and the ever more famous correspondent [blogger]. He delivered his stories by the revolutionary telegraph, which took only minutes to send. This was the Internet of its day, linking all parts of the world.
But even Mark Twain, best-selling author, couldn’t support himself from book sales alone. In that day and age, most authors couldn’t.
So Twain did something different from the usual bookstore sales. A little daring, but well-targeted. The middle class, becoming affluent after the Civil War, was his best audience.
When he published those overseas blogs as the book The Innocents Abroad, it would become a hit. But you couldn’t find it in bookstores.
In November of 1867, publisher Elisha Bliss contacted Samuel Clemens about writing a book based on his travel correspondence from his 163-day tour of Europe and the Holy Land. That book, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, would be both a critical and a popular success, selling more than 70,000 copies in its first year of publication. It would also be Mark Twain’s best-selling work during his lifetime.
The subscription publication industry blossomed in post-Civil War America. Tens of thousands of sales agents, many of them veterans and war widows, canvassed small towns and rural areas armed with a sales prospectus and a “book” containing sample pages and illustrations, and offering multiple binding options to fit every décor and price range. Prospective buyers selected a binding and signed an agreement to pay for the book when it was delivered to their door.
. . . but [Twain] had to contend with the lower status that subscription authors were accorded. Disguised as popular entertainment, his books were bought by the masses—“who never knew what good literature they were.”— http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/twain/exhibition/subscription/index.html
Twain’s other strategy was to do speaking tours, which of course made his book sales spike.
Ben Taroff in his book The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature says “ . . . And Twain and other authors of his day were rarely able to make a living just from writing books. In fact, he made most of his money from the lecture circuit, booking the largest lecture hall in a city and then boisterously promoting and selling tickets to his lecture.”
Would you sell your books door-to-door? Would you arrange speaking events to drive your sales higher?
It worked for Mark Twain.
Bonnye Mathews Radio Interview
Bonnye recorded an interview with the talk show host on Radio Free Palmer. The show will air on KVRF 89.5 FM on May 5 at 5:30 PM and May 7 at 8:30 AM. You can also hear the interview after May 7 on radiofreepalmer.org.
Bonnye also was interviewed at her signing at Fireside books in Palmer. You can see and here this interview by going to http://youtu.be/UzVCqcC2LB4.
Young Writers Conference
We express our appreciation to the following authors: Valerie Boever, Ken Bottcher, Lavon Bridges, Anne Canterbury, Mike Dillingham, Rebecca Goodrich, Cil Gregoire, Heather Johnson, Chris Kiana SR, Steve Levi, Bonnye Matthews, Tom Myers, Lizzie Newell, Lori Oswald, Krista Petersen, Julie Rahm, and Alice Wright. We enjoyed a wonderful morning with young writers in Palmer and then lunch with the authors at the Turkey Red Cafe. Thanks again for giving up your morning to lift a youth. We’ve heard from many of these authors talking about the conference. Here’s the response from Valerie Boever who’s note is representative of all the author’s offerings.
Thank you and Lois for a lovely day.
I enjoy the Conference and already look forward to another. To interact with young minds who desire the information is a rewarding experience. After having taught Jr. High English, with those who did not want to be there, the Conference reminds why I chose teaching as a career.
Lunch was delicious. It is nice to meet other authors in our group. I appreciate the opportunity.
Cheers! Valerie Boever
NetGalley
Marianne Schlegelmilch received a number of reviews for her new novel, Feather for Hoonah Joe. Here’s the latest one:
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Full Text: Feather for Hoonah Joe is the fourth in Ms. Schlegelmilch’s Feather series and, to my way of thinking, each one has been better than the last, making this one the best yet. The books make no pretense of being serious literature. They are fun mystery/adventures in an Alaskan setting, and anyone who appreciates a light read with interesting characters and plenty of plot twists and surprises—and especially any Alaskaphiles out there—should enjoy them. This latest one displays Ms. Schlegelmilch’s talent at its peak. She writes about Alaska with the authority of one who knows it well, even delving into the salvage of Japanese tsunami debris. She has obviously lived with these characters for a long time, knows who they are as people, and feels a good deal of affection for them. That affection shines through on the page and made this reader love them too (except for Elzianne, who is despicable but interesting like a good villain should be). I very much enjoyed the warmth that the main characters shared among themselves. I look forward to more from this author.
More NetGalley
If you’d like to review Break Point Down by Marthy Johnson, just click on the link. Feel free to pass the link on to others who may want to review the book.
https://www.netgalley.com/widget/open?
widget_id=46646_42987_13981952875356c4573dc4a_9781594331732_US
John and Mary Ann Poll
Yes, it is true, John and Mary Ann are moving to Texas. No, they are abandoning us–they’re only moving their office.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
First Something Fun
Steve Levi sent us a list of words with the question, what do each of the words have in common with each other? If you think you know the answer kindly send us what you think. Along with your answer, tell us which of our eBooks you’d like as a free gift. If you have the correct answer we’ll send you a free eBook of your choice.
Here are the words: 1. Banana 2. Dresser 3. Grammar 4. Potato 5. Revive 6. Uneven 7. Assess
Internet Presence/Social Media Marketing Management (SMMM) Bundle
We have attached a PDF file to this update titled: Internet Presence/Social Media Marketing Management (SMMM) Bundle. This bundle is primarily for authors who have the will, wisdom, and resources to advance their writing career and promote their works. It’s for authors with vision for themselves and their works and who are willing to invest in their future. Obviously there is a cost associated with the Internet Presence/SMMM Bundle.
If you’re serious about writing and about promoting you and your works, don’t just read the Bundle information one time. Read it as many times as it takes until you have a grasp of how important the Bundle can be to establish you as an author. Once you have the revolution vision, kindly contact us and let’s talk.
Independent Book Stores
There are eight independent book stores in Alaska with websites and storefronts who are members of American Booksellers Association.
Gulliver’s Books in Fairbanks: http://www.shopgulliversbooks.com.
The Homer Book Store in Homer: http://www.homerbookstore.com
Fireside Books in Palmer: http://www.goodbooksbadcoffee.com
UAA Bookstore in Anchorage: http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/bookstore
River City Books in Soldotna: http://rivercitybooksak.com
UAF Bookstore in Fairbanks: http://elearning.uaf.edu/bookstore
Parnassus Books in Ketchikan: http://www.ketchikanbooks.com
Old Harbor Books in Sitka: http://www.oldharborbooks.net
Hearthside Books & Toys in Juneau: http://www.hearthsidebooks.com
University of Alaska SE Bookstore: http://www.uas.alaska.edu/bookstore
Plus, there are hundreds of other ABA booksellers with websites and storefronts. These stores want to know about you and about your books. They welcome authors for book signings and will promote the author event if your book is listed on the ABA’s website. Here’s how to make sure your book is listed and is for sale at ABA member bookstores.
Adding titles or cover images to the ABA database:
First, log in to IndieBound.org using your personal account. If you don’t have an account on IndieBound.org, please create one at http://www.indiebound.org/join
Once you are logged in, kindly search for your title first, by ISBN, using the search form in the upper right of the site (13 digits only, no dashes or spaces). If your title is already listed, it does not need to be added. If you see that information is missing or incorrect, please email the necessary changes to <addabook@bookweb.org> (be sure to include ISBN and Title).
If your title (or cover image) cannot be found in the database, use the links below to add it:
1) To add a complete book listing, including a cover image, go to: http://www.indiebound.org/addabook
2) To add a missing cover image to an existing book, go to to: http://www.indiebound.org/addabook/cover
Just enter your data, upload an image, and submit!
Please allow time for approval by someone at ABA. You will receive an email when your book is approved. Once approved, it can take up to 24 hours for your book to appear in search results and on IndieBound.org, but it will be available on individual store websites, in book lists, etc. immediately.
Keep in mind that adding a book to the ABA shared database does not necessarily make the title available for purchase. If a customer clicks to purchase your title, they will be taken to one of the ABM member bookstores. It is then up to each bookstore to obtain the book for their customer. However, if a store cannot find your title available from the publisher or a distributor, they may inform their customer that the book is not readily available. The easier it is for the bookseller to find and obtain your title, the likelier that a store will fill an order for your book.
ABA also has an affiliate program http://www.indiebound.org/affiliate where you can actually earn money for referring people to member’s stores.
Amazon Author Central
We encourage you to utilize Amazon’s Author Central.
Author Central is a free resource designed to help authors become more active participants in the promotion of their books. In Author Central you can manage an Author Page, update information about your books on Amazon.com, and view Customer Reviews and sales information for your bibliography.
If you don’t already have an Author Page on Amazon.com, Amazon will create one for you when you sign up for Author Central.
You can find out more at: http://authorcentral.amazon.com or the help site https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/help.
Lastly, Something Else Fun: Ten Things I Know About You
1) You are reading this.
2) You are human.
3) You can’t say the letter ”P” without separating your lips.
4) You just attempted to do it.
6) You are laughing at yourself.
7) You have a smile on your face and you skipped No. 5.
8) You just checked to see if there is a No. 5.
9) You laugh at this because you are a fun loving person & everyone does it too.
10) You are probably going to send this to someone else.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Book Signing Alert
We announce a major change in the way books are distributed and the effect it will have on book signings at Fred Meyer and SafeWay. TNG, our major book distribution and book signing partner in Alaska has sold their book business to ReaderLink, effective June 2, 2014. In preparation for the change of ownership, both TNG and ReaderLink have asked that we not schedule any book signings after April 30,2014. This will also effect placing new titles in distribution. We have visited with the folks at ReaderLink and are enthused about new possibilities for expanded distribution of our books and increased venues for book signings. We also know that all change comes with a bit of stress and usually takes longer than expected. Kindly bear with us as we go forward working with ReaderLink. There will be no change in our relationship with other national distributors, Barnes and Noble, and independent booksellers. We’ll keep you informed as we learn more and the dust settles.
Here’s what ReaderLink says about themselves: ReaderLink is the largest full-service distributor of hardcover, trade and paperback books to non-trade channel booksellers in North America, including the biggest names in retail across multiple retail channels. This broad customer base is unique in the industry and highlights our unmatched ability to service many different types of retailers: mass merchants, warehouse clubs, department stores, drug stores, grocery stores and others.
The Fussy Librarian
If you have an eBook, the Fussy Librarian may be a way to promote you as an author and let more people know about your books. Just go to <http://www.thefussylibrarian.com>, scroll to the bottom of the page, click on For Authors, and follow the instructions. If you need our help in anyway kindly contact us.
Publication Consultants Weekly Blog
Net Galley: a New Service for our Authors
Here at Publication Consultants, we are always looking for ways to improve our authors’ reach into the world at large.
Getting books into the hands of reviewers nationally and internationally is now a little easier. We have found Net Galley, a fast and simple way for a reviewer or media person to find your book and read it for review, or to plan an interview, have you write an article or send them approval to publish an excerpt; whatever they would like.
Back in the old days, postage and personnel were cheap, so sending out a flock of books to the best reviewers was easy. And that was partly because only about 50,000 books a year were published. Now, more than a million are published in the United States alone, every year.
On the plus side, there are many more media, with many more reviewers, editors, and interviewers who need material each and every day, and often around the clock.
When you agree to make your books available to such media professionals, you fulfill a need of theirs. You become their book supplier, someone they can depend upon. Electronic means through the Net Galley site just makes it easier for them to review each of your new books.
We announce the availability, and those reviewers or TV and radio people can request a copy for a limited amount of time, usually about a month.
If this new service is of interest to you for your books, kindly send us an email right away.
Sleeping Through A Revolution
In June of 1965 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr gave the commencement address at Oberlin College. In part he said, “I’m sure that you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled Rip Van Winkle. The thing that we usually remember about this story is that Rip Van Winkle slept 20 years. But there is another point in that story that is almost always completely overlooked: it was a sign on the inn in the little town on the Hudson from which Rip went up into the mountain for his long sleep. When he went up, the sign had a picture of King George III of England. When he came down, years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. When Rip looked up at the picture of George Washington, he was completely lost; he knew not who he was. This reveals to us that the most striking fact about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not that he slept 20 years, but that he slept through a revolution.”
There’s another revolution taking place right now involving authors. For centuries authors have been at the mercy of a few large publishers. But that changed when personal computers, the Internet, and new and ever changing technology opened the door for print on demand, self publishing, and publishers like Publication Consultants. But this wasn’t a revolution; it was a door opener. The revolution I’m talking about is the social media revolution that levels the playing field for authors. Through social media marketing (SMM) an author today can reach readers in the author’s genre like never before in the world’s history. If you’re an author of more than one book, or have plans to further your writing career with more titles in print, you can have your own SMM revolution.
Publication Consultants has put together a SMM package for serious authors who have published, or desire publishing more than one book. Working with John Poll, of Authors Internet, and Lwasampijja Baker, Founder and Director at Tera Tech Ltd., we’ve tested the package’s principles with four authors for four months and are beginning to see positive results. We don’t expect to see immediate, big sales results; revolutions take time. However, here’s what the four authors told us:
“The most obvious way in which the program has helped is giving people from all over the world the information they need to see and potentially purchase my works. Since the program started, sales of my books, especially eBooks from Amazon and B&N have increased.”
Warren Troy, Alaska Wilderness Adventure Author, author of: Jester, Trails, The Last Homestead, and Wilderness Reckoning
“Baker is very responsive to anything I ask him to do, is always looking for more places to spread the word, and is technically adept and helps me understand social media.”
Marianne Schlegelmilch, One of America’s Most Gifted Writers, author of: Feather From A Stranger, Two Tickets and A Feather, Driftfeather on the Alaska Seas, andFeather for Hoonah Joe.
“I appreciate Baker’s work. I like that he posts on a consistent basis in my social media accounts; he has given me an idea for a blog when I’m stuck; he thinks all the time and frequently makes good changes; he is willing to help with items like getting my blog to feed through Author Central. He’s easy to work with and willing to help wherever he can. He takes a burden off me. I haven’t got as much time as I’d like to work the social media angle. So nice to know it’s happening with an hour or so from me a week. I can concentrate on writing . . . .”
Mary Ann Poll, America’s Lady of Supernatural Thrillers, author of: Ravens Cove, Ingress, and Gorgon.
“I am pleased that Baker has been prompt to respond to requests and suggestions, that he makes good and useful suggestions, and that he needs no prompting to keep the social media stream running. I get good feedback from readers.”
Carl Douglass, Neurosurgeon Turned Author Writes With Gripping Realism, author of: Last Phoenix, The Young Coyote, Anything Goes, Heaven and Hell, The Long Climb, ACADEMIA: The Law of the Jungle, The Vulture and the Phoenix, All in Jest, Gog and Magog, Sheep Dog and the Wolf, Finders Keepers, Losers Weep, Though They Come from the Ends of the Earth, Dancing with the Devil, The Trojan Horse in the Belly of the Beast, The End of the Beginning, and Uncharted Country, Uncertain Future
If you’re serious about advancing your writing career and marketing your works to the world, kindly contact us and let’s talk about your personal social media marketing manager package. But whatever you do, don’t sleep through the SMM revolution.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Mary Ann Poll
Mary Ann had a uplifting experience at a book signing at the Dimond Fred Meyers. A loyal reader, Lori Atuk, knowing that Mary Ann would be at the signing, found her and purchased a copy of Gorgon, Mary Ann’s latest book. It always nice when you find that your social media offerings and signing schedule is working and a fan takes the time to come to your signing and purchase a book. But, that’s only half of the story. After reading Gorgon, Lori placed the following message on FaceBook:
I finally finished reading Gorgon. I loved it as much as Ravens Cove and Ingress. But I’m so sad it’s over. Can’t wait to read your next book. It’s got to be longer next time. I could only drag this one out a week because I have been so busy. I really enjoy reading your books. I hope you keep writing even after the Ravens Cove saga is over. I haven’t met an author that can keep me so interested and craving to read more. You truly are special. Thank you for the amazing adventures.
Publication Consultants Blogs
As mentioned in a pervious Author Update, Rebecca Goodrich writes our blogs under our direction. Following is our blog number 120. We anticipate sharing our weekly blog with you each week as part of the Author Update.
What Joy for a Writer Exceeds Holding that New Book, Even if it’s the Third Book?
We were happy to deliver to Bonnye Matthews, award-winning writer of prehistoric fiction, the third book in her Winds of Change series. On LinkedIn she immediately posted that she wondered if anything could make her happier than this, her third novel.
Zamimilo’s Story: 50,000 BC continues her controversial saga of the early peopling of the Americas. Hotly debated by archeologists for decades, Matthews’ finely researched novels are beginning to mirror current academic theories and scientific research regarding early human history.
Or perhaps we should say that science and academia are beginning to mirror her novels.
Bonnye Matthews says this is her favorite book. And we’re sure that it is. And we are certain that it will be her favorite until she holds Book Four, Tuksuk’s Story: 35,000 BC, due to be published summer 2015.
You can see for yourself some of the wonderful research and discoveries that pertain to Bonnye’s books by getting in touch with her on social media: (Click on the social media icons)
Twitter: @BonnyeMatthews
Alaskana Books
Alaskana Books sells to new owner, closes doors. What is thought to be the largest private collection of books about Alaska has been sold to an Anchorage collector. Click HERE to read the full story.
Margaret and Midnight
Valerie Boever, author of three Margaret and Midnight books, enjoyed a doubly nice experience by seeing her work in Make a Scene magazine. She was able to write her own review and see it published.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Bumppo
Bumppo, author of Everlasting:Adventures of an Alaskan Déné Girl, received an outstanding review of his book by Kirkus Reviews. Although the reviewer doesn’t know the difference between dog-sled puppies and sled dog puppies, it’s still a great review <https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/bumppo/everlasting-and-the-great-river>. Congratulations Bumppo.
Ollen Hunt
Ollen Hunt’s funeral was today and he was laid to rest with full military honors at the Fort Richardson National Cemetery. The ceremony included a 21 gun salute. It was fitting service for a wonderful man and friend. I was pleased to offer the eulogy at the funeral.
BISAC Subject Headings and Author Bios
We express our thanks to you who responded to our request for four BISAC numbers. If you have not sent us your four BISAC code numbers please send them as soon as possible. Perhaps this is the most important thing you can do to promote your book.Here’s what we recommend
1: Rewrite your bio and send it to us. Your bio should be more about marketing than about you. This is where you have opportunity to let your readers and potential readers know your passion, motivation, and qualification for writing your book.
2: Select four BISAC code numbers and send them to us. You select the code numbers and we’ll do the rest. To select your code numbers go to BISG <https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-2013-edition>, determine the major heading which best describes the content of your book, click on a heading for more specific headings within that category, cut and paste the number into an email, and send it to us. Example: BIO003000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Business. Be sure to send us four BISAC code numbers for your book.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Computer Spell Checkers
The following was sent to us by Steve Levi. Thanks Steve.
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew
BISAC Subject Headings and Author Bios
The Nielsen Reportrecorded a 55% increase in sales when all metadata was furnished to booksellers. This includes the Author Bio and more than one BISAC code. “The bare minimum (ISBN, Title, Author, Publisher, etc.) just doesn’t cut it anymore.” Especially for Ebooks, where the bibliographic data is the consumer’s only source of information, a marketing centered bio and multiple BISAC code numbers are essential for increased sales. In this fast-paced digital age, there’s just a second to grab the customer’s attention and you can increase your opportunity by updating your bio and selecting four BISAC code numbers for your book. Perhaps this is the most important thing you can do to promote your book.
Here’s what we recommend
1: Rewrite your bio and send it to us. Your bio should be more about marketing than about you. This is where you have opportunity to let your readers and potential readers know your passion, motivation, and qualification for writing your book.
2: Select four BISAC code numbers and send them to us. You select the code numbers and we’ll do the rest. To select your code numbers go to BISG <https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-2013-edition>,determine the major heading which best describes the content of your book, click on a heading for more specific headings within that category, cut and paste the number into an email, and send it to us. Example: BIO003000 BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Business. Be sure to send us four BISAC code numbers for your book.
Young Writers Conference
We could still use a couple more authors interested in participating in the Mat/Su Young Writers Conference on April 26, 2014. You will enjoy teaching students hungry to learn from a published author. And, the conference gives authors opportunity to sell a few books and broaden their customer base. Following the conference we’ll all meet at the Turkey Red Cafe and Bakery, 550 South Alaska Street in Palmer and enjoy a buffet lunch together complements of Lois. If you haven’t already told us you’re a participant, kindly let us know now so we can finalize the buffet reservation and conference assignments.
Seven Things I Learned From a Foreign Email
We think you’ll be interested in reading Bonnye Matthew’s blog post <http://blog.booksbybonnye.com>. Bonnye is the award winning writer of prehistoric fiction and author of Ki’ti’s Story, 75,000 BC, Manak-na’s Story, 75,000 BC, and her new, at the printers, book, Zamimolo’s Story: 50,000 BC.
2014 Spirit of Youth Awards
Heather Johnson will receive a Business & Government award for her recently published book, Hidden Voice: A Story of Discovering Strengths, about helping youth build self-esteem and deal with bullies and negative comments. The 15-year-old Mat-Su Central School student is a delegate to the People to People Ambassador Program, member of the National Association of Professional Women and an instructor at this year’s Alaska Young Writers Conference.
Samuel Allred, 14, is being honored in the Overcoming Challenges Award. Allred has battled a rare kidney disease since he was a toddler. He created the non-profit organization Project Comfort that makes travel-sized pillows and distributes them to hospitalized children all over the United States. During the past three years he and his community have made more than 3,000 pillows. He is also the author of Opening Hearts, a book that aims to provide hope and encouragement for kids who are chronically ill.
Book Signings
When we compute royalty report it’s obvious which authors are scheduling book signings. And some authors are doing signings independent from us. For example, Burt Bomhoff, author of Iditarod Alaska, sent us a photo and signing report for a recent signing he conducted in the Valley where he sold 46 books.
We suggest you go to our website and schedule as many signings as possible to fit your time and marketing plans for your book. Although we’re not able to schedule Costco signings right now, there are ample opportunities in other venues. Perhaps your enthusiasm for signing will increase if you view the Book Signings Are Fun video on our website. Book signing really are fun–and profitable! Just ask Burt Bomhoff.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Heather Johnson
Heather Johnson, author of Hidden voice, will be interviewed by Mari Frank on Prescriptions For Healing Conflict on Monday, February 3 at 8:30 AM (California Time), 2014, on KUCI 88.9 FM and streaming on WWW.KUCI.ORG. Heather will discuss the following topics and more: 1. Issues of Bullying, 2. A Teen’s Perspective, and 3. Rising Above Bullies. This should prove to be a fascinating interview.
Sheldon Gebb
Sheldon Gebb, author of In the Footsteps of My Father, received recognition for his generosity and a nice review for his book in the Whitehorse Star. We express our congratulations to Sheldon and our appreciation to him for sharing the Whitehorse Stararticle.
Marcela Hubard
We feel that book signings are the best way to promote your book and you as an author. New author, Marcela Hubard, who wrote the children’s book, Black Bear, is living proof. Marcela introduced her book with three successful signings in Fred Myers, Carrs, and Walgreens. Her success is due to her enthusiasm and table set up. Notice the bear and salmon in both in front of Marcela’s table and also behind her. We don’t know if we’ve ever talked with a more pleased first time author about book signings.
Book Signing
We encourage you to take advantage of the many signing opportunities available through Publication Consultants. Just go to our website <https://publicationconsultants.com>, click on BOOK SIGNINGS, click on Author Signing Request, and follow the prompts. Feel free to request any listed venue (except Costco) and we’ll take it from there. Also, it may be good if, while you’re at our website, you click on VIDEO and watch the Book Signings Are Fun video.
Thanks
We extend or gratitude to you for you continued support of Publication Consultants. We had our best year ever in 2013 with more than 52 books; an average of one new book a week. Thanks to our new authors and to seasoned authors who recommended us to your friends.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Blog Talk Radio
In a recent Blog Talk Radio show, two of our authors, Bonnye Matthews, author of Ki’ti’s Story, 75,000 BC andManak-na’s Story: 75,000 BC and Polly Bigelow, author of When Raven Dances,explore the distinction between writers and authors. We also discuss the benefits of becoming a published author, some of the pitfalls to avoid and much more. If you’d like to listen and learn kindly click HERE.
Publication Consultants Blog
As you may know we’ve enlisted the services of Rebecca Goodrich’s, Ghostwriters, to assist us with our blog. We are pleased
with the regular stream of information important to us, our authors, and potential authors contained in these blogs. Our most recent blog may be read by clicking HERE.
We’ve also packaged two books together as an Author Publishing Starter Kit. Bringing Your Book to Market explains how Publication Consultants works with authors. Becoming A Published Author is the first person account of more than 30 of our authors about how they became a published author. If you’d like a free copy for your self or would like us to send a free copy of the Author Publishing Starter Kit to someone else just click HERE. When you check out kindly enter Getting Started in the coupon area. All we ask is that you pay the postage.
Book Signings
We know of no better way to keep your book before the reading public than book signings and other author events. However, signings continue to be the agony and ecstasy of book marketing. For example one of our authors had a promising Christmas season signing at one of the big box stores and circumstances proved to make it a bust. On the other hand, Randy Zarnke, author of Alaska Tracks, sold 30 books at a recent signing at Barnes and Noble in Fairbanks. He would have sold more, but that’s all the books that were available. The store has invited Randy back and have placed an order for more books. It’s pretty difficult to predict how successful a signing will be. But, like fishing, you need to keep your line in the water. We encourage you to go to our website and view the video, Book Signings are Fun; and keep your line in the water by scheduling a few signings.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Homographs and Heteronyms
Homographs are words of like spelling but with more than one meaning. A homograph that is also pronounced differently is a heteronym.
No wonder good writing is difficult.
Book Review: When Raven Dances
Polly Bigelow’s book received a wonderful review in the Seward City News <http://sewardcitynews.com/2013/12/fiction-book-reveals-sewards-ww-ii-history-through-a-childs-eyes>. Polly’s positive book review demonstrates the success an author has by contacting the media, giving them a copy of the book, and being available for an interview. An author is a celebrity in the mind of many and the media is willing and anxious to report and advance the author’s celebrity status.
Autographed Copy Stickers
Booksellers and market savvy authors know that autographed copies help sell books. When finishing up at a book signing, offer to autograph remaining copies and ask if the store has autographed copy stickers. If the store doesn’t have stickers, you should have a supply of your own to put on your books. Also, when you’re in a store and see your book displayed, ask store personnel if they’d like you to autograph the books; and again ask if the store has autographed copy stickers. If they don’t, then be prepared to supply your own autographed copy stickers. If you don’t have autographed copy stickers you can order them through AAA Label Company. The cost is $7.25 for a roll of 1,000 stickers with a three roll minimum order, plus $6 shipping.
Book Signings
We continue to encourage authors to schedule book signings. Just go to our website, click on Book Signings, follow the prompts, and schedule your signing. We’ve attached a PDF file copy of Tips For Making A Book Signing Successful. You should find this helpful, not only about what to do at a signing, but also pre and post signings tips. When scheduling a signing at Costco please be wise in selecting the date and time. All Costco signings are for two hours only. Of course you may ask to stay longer if the 20 book sales requirement has not been achieved. There are no time restrictions at other signing venues with the exception of Barnes and Noble. It’s beneficial if you’ll let us know how the signing went and include a photo with you and a purchaser with your banner in the background.
ReadAlaska
We extend our gratitude to the 29 participating authors at this year’s highly successful ReadAlaska. Daryl Pederson, of D & M Photography, who provided the photos for his daughter’s book, A Is For Alaska, graciously photographed all of the authors who were present one afternoon at ReadAlaska. We’ll be sending you your copy of Daryl’s ReadAlaska photo in a personal email.
Author Personal and Publicity Photograph
Every author needs a professional publicity photograph. This is especially important for authors with a new book which requires a professional photo for the back cover. Professional photos are expensive–real expensive. However, we’ve arranged with Daryl for a special price of $95 for author’s publicity photos. This is a bargain. To schedule a photo session for your professional publicity photo kindly contact Daryl for an appointment. Daryl understands what is needed.
Daryl Pederson
D & M Photography
1411 West 33rd
Anchorage AK 99503
Phone 907-563-8072
Cell 907 717-5999
dandmphoto@gmail.com
For the special price, just let Daryl know that you’re a author with Publication Consultants.
Thanks again for allowing us to be your publisher.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Thanksgiving
Perhaps one of the most important traditions associated with Thanksgiving has been lost to history. We in America have been blessed so abundantly we forget the humble circumstances surrounding the first feast of thanksgiving. Even the poorest of our circle of friends, family, and associates have more wealth than the Pilgrims could even dream of.
Those who gave thanks at Plymouth by sharing a feast of gratitude left us another part of their heritage. As they approached the harvest season, they would determine if they had had a bounteous year or a lean harvest. If the storehouse was full, they had a feast of thanksgiving. If the larder contained less than what was adequate for winter, they had a fast. For them it was either feast or fast.
As we look back at 2013 with the perspective of 12 months, we pause and reflect on our many blessings at this season of thanksgiving. We find that our harvest has been ample. Even if our circumstances were otherwise, we’d still celebrate this Thanksgiving with as much feast as we can muster. As we partake of the foods of the holiday and offer our prayers of appreciation, we’ll remember our real blessings. If all we had were but water and a cracker to eat, we could not fast. We would call it a feast because our of association with so many fine people like you.
We wish you and your’s the a most Happy Thanksgiving.
Heteronyms
A friend sent this to us and we thought you would enjoy it.
Homographs are words of like spelling but with more than one meaning.
A homograph that is also pronounced differently is a heteronym.
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture..
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert..
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.
8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong for me to wind the sail.
18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear..
19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
ReadAlaska
We invite you to visit us at ReadAlaska and meet many of our published authors. We also ask that you send a copy of the attached brochure to your mailing list so others will be aware of the event.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Promoting Your Book
Here’s a comment from best selling author, Trish LaSage: All three of my books have been best sellers on Amazon. What has been successful for me is to write books that are helpful to people in some way, educational, or books that make people curious to find out more about the subject material. I would then say that PR is extremely important. I only spend 6 weeks writing each book. I have only written one or two books per year since I started writing professionally two years ago. I spend the rest of the year on PR (writing blog articles and placing them on the walls of the more than 150 groups that I’m a member of on Facebook with a copyright notice on the bottom that includes a link to my website so as to not get reported for spam for advertising, writing magazine articles, appearing on radio shows, participating in other authors’ book launches as a joint venture partner, leaving my comments on other authors’ articles, etc.).
Anchorage Daily News
Here’s the ADN website address where you can list your book signings and author events for free: <http://events.adn.com/listings>. You can also pay for increased coverage, but at least take advantage of the free listing of all of your book signings and other author events.
Don and Lanna Langdok
Don and Lanna, authors of Cheechako Sunrise, Sourdough Sunset, sell out every time at their book signings. We asked them to tell us their secret. Here’s what they told us.
1. Neve, ever sit down! Greet all prospective buyer on your feet. Approach them and let them look at your book–put it in their hands. I’ve stood for 4-6 hours at every signing. My husband sits at the table with the inventory and handles the money exchanges. If you need to rest, use a stool by the side of the table to lean on. Be ready to get up when someone approaches.
2. Be friendly! Engage them into the conversation regarding the book. Regardless of who they are; male, female, young or old. We’ve sold book to an 80-year-old Eskimo man, a 16-year-old, rapper kid, a big burly Homer fisherman, and to a professional women on her lunch break. Treat them all the same regardless of their financial appearance–with dignity and with a smile.
3. Peak their interest. Give them key lines regarding chapters in the book, and/or show them pictures relating to the stories. Always listen to their comments and answer any of their questions. Those who con’t purchase right away may want to buy the book in the future. Give them a business card with your website address. Always thank them for taking the time to look at your book!
4. Have a carton of your books signed ahead of time with a sincere quote and your signature. Do the personalizing for the purchaser at the time of you sell the book. This saves valuable time and allows you to sign multiple books for several buyers. Always use an erasable jell pen to correct mistakes–misspelled manes or poor penmanship on our part. (This has been an invaluable tool. Keep two on hand.)
5. Tell the, without a doubt, that they will enjoy reading your book. Share previous reviews with them. Once they’ve made the purchase ask them to go online and make a comment. Encourage them to share the book with others. It’s all good advertising for the next sale. Finally, and most importantly, thank them sincerely for buying your book.
Note: These techniques must work because our sales have been really good. At every book signing we’ve sold a case of 20 books–plus. One one signing we sold 35 books. We normally average five books per hour on a four hour signing. This is all new to us as we’ve never had a book published before. Each signing has been a lot of fun and we enjoy meeting so many people of different backgrounds. All leave as friends!
Don and Lanna Langdok 2013 new authors of Cheechako Sunrise, Sourdough Sunset.
Rick Mystrom
Rick Mystrom’s new book, My Wonderful Life with Diabetes, received a wonderful review in the Frontiersman this week. Here’s the address where you can read the full article, <http://www.frontiersman.com/arts_entertainment/mystrom-memoir-shares-story-of-living-with-diabetes/article_88dfe542-429d-11e3-a1d8-0019bb2963f4.html>
Everlasting
Everlasting:Adventures of an Alaskan Déné Girl by Bumppo was reviewed in the Homer News prior to his release party. The review was most complementary about the book written by, as Bumppo’s tag line reads, Alaskan sea captain writes bold tales of culture and spirit. <http://homernews.com/homer-features/arts/2013-10-03/%E2%80%98everlasting%E2%80%99-sails-onto-the-printed-page>.
Blog Talk Radio
Here’s another comment from an author who listened to my interview on Blog Talk Radio <http://www.blogtalkradio.com/yournewself/2013/10/04/getting-your-book-published> with Cherilynn Stone. “I listened to the Blog Talk Radio and I felt like I got to know you in that hour. Thank you for doing that. I loved your stories. My book isn’t published yet but I was inspired to start another one.” Pam Hefley, author of A Blueberry Deer
Ron Walden
In the last week Ron Walden, Alaskan True to Life Crime Writer, author of five novels including his latest book, Poachers Paradise, has conducted four book signings: Soldotna at the Fred Meyer store, Costco on DeBarr, Costco on Dimond, and Fred Meyer in Anchorage. Sales were slower at the Fred Meyer store in Anchorage, but on the other three occasions, Ron sold all of the books available (at least 32) for him at the signings.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
It’s Important to Paws
Wired for Story, Blog Talk Radio with Cherilynn Stone
Your Ever Evolving Self
Author’s Book Signing Banner
It’s Important to Paws We extend our congratulations to David Jensen, author and photographer, for his extended full page coverage in the Anchorage Daily News <http://www.adn.com/2013/10/25/3142568/new-book-celebrates-pets-with.html> about him and his new book, It’s Important to Paws. David’s release party is Friday at Admiral’s Place Banquet Room – 9359 Independence Drive Anchorage, Alaska from 6 to 8 PM. All authors are invited. Wired for Story Here’s some comments from authors who participated in our Wired For Story webinar:
I agree that learning only one thing is worth the time and the small amount of money. Lisa is very good and was able to pour a lot of information into an hour.
Mary AnnPoll
America’s Lady of Supernatural Thrillers
Author of Ravens Cove, Ingress, and Gorgon I did enjoy the webinar. I’m glad I took it. She is well organized and speaks well. I used the points as she progressed to judge my third book. It was helpful. My third book, I already know, is my best so far. Part of the reason is that I’ve met the points she was making. There is much tension. The question I asked deals with the last point she made. My story twist at the end will be that his action which was finally delivered after he was white headed, virtually reflexively after many years of withholding vengeance, results in the death of the very woman whose abduction affected him so severely. He ends up unaware of the consequence of his action, while his friend finds out about it and decides it will avail nothing to tell him. I was happy to hear that the ending I plan, which is realistic if not happy, is plausible for a decent story.
Bonnye Matthews,
Award Winning Writer of Prehistoric Fiction
Author of Ki’ti’s Story, 75,000 BC and Manak-na’s Story, 75,000 BC The webinar was great. Ms. Cron communicated very useful information in an attention holding and vivacious way. She is a keeper.
Carl Douglass
Neurosurgeon Turned Author Writes With Gripping Realism
Author of eleven published novels
Thanks so much for making this webinar. Lisa’s knowledge and love of her craft will help me acquire the necessary skills so that my Protagonists are viewed as characters who conquer their giants.
Judi Johnson
Aspiring Author
Blog Talk Radio with Cherilynn Stone, Your Ever Evolving Self Thanks to Cherilynn for inviting me to be her guest on her radio program. I enjoyed the opportunity to visit with Cherilynn and her two co-hosts. It was an enjoyable hour. If you missed the program and would like to hear the interview you can go to <http://www.blogtalkradio.com/yournewself/2013/10/04/getting-your-book-published>. After the interview we received a few comments from listeners. Here’s a couple of them.
I listened to your broadcast interview and I was impressed. I almost called in to say that your initial response to new authors is outstanding. I feel wanted with you – part of the family.
Merle Martin
author of I’m Only Her Father Hi Evan, our dear friend.
I just finished listening to your interview on blog spot and felt like I was right there in the room with you. It was very good, enjoyable, informative, well presented, and I felt like I was right there in the room with you. Your voice, your photo, and great common sense information to us listeners. Just wanted to remind you, what big fans Weston and I are of you and Lois, and all you do for everyone.
Diane Fields, wife of Weston Fields, author of The Dead Sea Scrolls, a short history and The Dead Sea Scrolls: Volume 1, A Full History.
Author’s Book Signing Banner
Here’s another testimony of the effectiveness of our Author’s Book Signing Banner:
The banner seems to be what really attracts people’s attention, as even if they’re not interested, nearly everyone walks by and looks at the banner. Some walk buy, stop and look at the banner, then look at my books on the table and scratch their heads and think. lol. It gives me an opportunity to say hello, give them a card, and tell them about my book etc. Not everyone buys, but they are being made aware of it at least.
Dan Griffin, author of Village of the Full Moon Curse Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426 evan@publicationconsultants.com Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Attachment
Here is the attachment we referred to.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Social Media Marketing
Here’s an article from Book Business magazine that may enlighten you about social media marketing. It’s the best we’ve read so far. This is a low resolution copy. If you’d like a high resolution copy kindly let us know.
We’d enjoy your comments after you’ve read it.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Book Signings Are Fun
We placed our Book Signings Are Fun video presentation on our website. Just click on Videos in the menu, make sure the sound is on, and enjoy seeing yourself and other authors at book signing. Or click the button below.
Click Here
We want to do more of these types of videos and will appreciate your suggestions for improvement.
Burt Bomhoff spent successful signing time at the Saturday Market, Ron Walden, frequents gun shows and enjoys selling and signing books at these events, Bonnye Matthews enjoyed her signing at Barnes and Nobel in Anchorage, Heather Johnson associated with the Channel 2 TV personalities at the Alaska State Fair, and Lois and I visited with Mary Ann Poll during her recent Fred Meyer signing. All are pictured here. To create your own signing fun, visit our website, click on Book Signings, and follow the links.
By working with Mary Ann Poll, and other authors, we developed a new Tips For Making A Book Signing Successful. We think it will be worth your time to review and apply the suggested signing tips given by experienced authors. We have attached a PDF copy of the suggestions to this email. Once again, if you have any suggestions that will help other authors, or will improve Tips For Making A Book Signing Successful better, kindly let us know.
Release Party Video
We were invited by the Alaska Writers Guild last month to make a presentation about release parties. We were joined by six authors: Tom Myers, Mary Ann Poll, Bonnye Matthews, Jim Misko, Ollen Hunt, Bill Hauser, and Peggy McMahon. It was also nice to have Lois helping out to introduce Becoming a Published Author and Bringing Your Book to Market to the assembled writers. She also brought along AlaskaAlaska, a fun card game we invented. All are pictured here. The six authors set up a table, complete with their books and banner, as they would at a release party. Guild members asked many questions following the presentation and the authors shared their release party and becoming a published author experience and knowledge in answering the questions. We extend our warmest word of appreciation to the six authors who gave of their time and their expertise in assisting us.
We also introduced our new audio visual Release Party instruction video. The audio follows the release party printed presentation we’ve been using to assist new authors to better prepare for their release party. The printed presentation is a result of the good work and assistance of Kayla Hunt, who has consented to help authors with their release party. The printed presentation, along with the audio video is a powerful tool for new authors–as well as more experienced ones. We recommend that every author view the audio visual on our website. Here’s the direct link.
Click Here
The presentation promises to help authors with every book signing, not just release parties.
We thought you’d enjoy the four following emails from Randy Zarnke, author of the new book, Alaska Tracks.
On August 12, 2013, at 9:30 AM, Randall Zarnke, author of Alaska Tracks, wrote:
I might be getting ahead of myself, but I’m curious about the process for ordering more books. I’m getting nothing but positive reports from folks who have read the book. I’m hopeful that the momentum will increase following our signing event here in Fairbanks on September 6.
On August 26, 2013, at 3:41 PM, Randall Zarnke, author of Alaska Tracks, wrote:
Local interest for our book has been high here in Fairbanks and seems to be building. Do you have any feel at this early stage for the level of interest in our book among retailers around the State?
On September 5, 2013, at 4:35 PM, Randall Zarnke, author of Alaska Tracks, wrote:
You outlined a campaign and provided materials (posters, invitations, etc) to help make it happen. It’s working. We’ve gotten coverage by radio, TV and newspaper all week. People are calling, e-mailing and stopping me on the street to talk about the book. I have high hopes for a successful event tomorrow evening.
On September 6, 2013, at 10:23 PM, Randall Zarnke, author of Alaska Tracks, wrote:
Tonight’s event was overwhelming (in a positive way). Sold 225 books in three hours. I never stopped signing during that period. We definitely want to order another batch. The only question now is how many.
We’re including a photo of Randy’s release party and him signing books. Notice the line of people waiting for their turn to talk with the author and receive their signed copy.
Do we need to say more about following the pattern for release parties?
Atiska Ataska, Charlie’s In Alaska Book Review
Anne Canterbury and Glenda Field were the recipients of an outstanding review in the Frontiersmen of their book, Atiska Ataska, Charlie’s In Alaska. You can read the complimentary review by going to:
Click Here
When you have a book signing, release party, or other author event, kindly send us a photo. We enjoy seeing you and what you’re doing.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Awards and Contests
We’re in the process of establishing a place on our website to list author’s awards and contests. If your book has received an award or won a contest kindly let us know:
Author’s Name
Book Title
Name of the Award or Contest
Date of Award
We’d like to showcase recognition for your book including Battle of the Books. We’re also in the process of establishing ways to assist you to apply for awards and recognition.
Release Party
During our presentation at the Alaska Writers Guild general meeting on Tuesday, August 20 at the library we’ll introduce a new audio visual production outlining Publication Consultants’ release party suggestions for a successful beginning for new books. Following the guild presentation we’ll fine tune the production and have it available for new authors and for authors with new books. As part of the fine tuning we’ll be able to replace some of the visuals. If you have a good photo of your release party, and would like to have it included in our new production, kindly send it to us. We’d love to include it. We’ll need it by Wednesday, August 21.
Words From Steven Wright
David Brown, former president of Alaska Writers Guild, sent us interesting and entertaining words and definitions we thought you’d enjoy reading. We have attached the list to this note. Thanks David; it was fun.
Becoming a Published Author
At the conclusion of our guild presentation we’ll be autographing copies of the second edition of Becoming A Published Author. Everyone who attends the guild’s meeting, and our presentation, will receive a free autographed copy. If your story is part of Becoming a Published Author, you’re invited to join us and autograph your story.
Costco Book Signings
We’ve adjusted the hours for signings at Costco stores. Authors signing at Costco may now schedule signings for three hours instead of 10 AM to 6 PM. Of course the goal for any signing is to sell the most books possible–or sell out and go home early. Most authors signing books with the 10 AM to 6 PM Costco schedule sell out and go home early. Authors scheduling the shorter times will be allowed to stay longer if available inventory has not sold. Shorter hours and flexible times may make signings at Costco more available for authors.
Book Signing Note
Not only with Costco, but with almost all other signings, if all books have not sold during the scheduled signing times, if your personal schedule permits, we encourage you to stay longer if you’d like. Just ask store personnel. Most of the time the store is willing.
Barnes and Noble Signings
We’re enjoying many signings at Barnes and Noble and have a great many locations listed on our website under the tab, Book Signings. If you’d like to have a signing at Barnes and Noble, and you don’t see the desired location listed, just let us know and we’ll add it, and then you can request the signing. Our Author Event Coordinator, Mary Ann Poll, will take your request and schedule your signing if possible. Please note that the Anchorage Barnes and Noble is not accepting requests until April 2014. We’ve attached a photo of Jim Misko at a recent Barnes and Noble signing. Jim calls this a “triple.” The happy customer purchased all three of his books.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Book Signing Emergency Notice
Our wholesaler, the firm who delivers books for signings, let us know that their employee vacation schedule will impact book signings for a couple of weeks at the end of august. Any signings you would like to schedule through September 2nd needs to be requested no later than Tuesday, (tomorrow) August 13th. We encourage you to act quickly to schedule signings for the last two weeks in August. Beginning August 14, you will need to schedule signings to occur on or after September 12th. To summarize, if you’d like to schedule a signing to occur prior to September 12, kindly schedule it by the close of business tomorrow, August 13. This does not impact Barnes and Noble and Costco signings.
Fun With Your ISBN Number
You can have exciting fun with your book’s ISBN number by placing it in the address bar of your web browser. What we’re saying is do a Goggle search for your book’s ISBN number. Don’t put anything else in the space–just the ISBN number without any dashes; i.e., 9781888125801. We think you’ll enjoy the ride. We’d like to hear from you about what you found.
Hidden Voice Media Success
Heather Johnson, author of Hidden Voice, has, and is, enjoying a great deal of media play. We’re attaching a copy of her scheduled appearances and an example of her new news release.
Blog Number 77 How to Hold a Book Launch Party? [Guild meeting August 20, 2013]
Following is another blog created in my behalf by Rebecca Goodrich.
Come on down to Anchorage’s ZJ Loussac Library on August 20th, if you’re in the neighborhood. I was volunteered to do a talk on book launches for the monthly Alaska Writers Guild meeting. It’s open to the public, free of charge, so even if you’re not a writer, you can satisfy some curiosity about book launch parties. (Note: we still have space for two more authors who would like to join us at the guild meeting by setting up their book signing display and showcasing their book. No need to bring your table. Just your banner, table covering, and display items is all you need bring. Oh yes; books for course.)
I suppose they asked me because I’ve produced more than 100 of the dang things, and have learned something about what works, and what doesn’t. As for book signings, we’re doing more than 120 this month alone.
I’ll tell you how we evolved to the simple and effective program we’ve had in place for our authors for some time now. It’s easy. They tell us where they want to have an event, and when, and we set it up. [Well, it’s easy now, but there was a lot of unseen work and trust-building that went into developing the relationships we now have with Costco, Walgreen’s, Fred Meyer, and many other stores.]
Bookstores, too, by the way. Fireside Books in Palmer, Mosquito Books at the Ted Stevens Airport, and Barnes and Noble.
Not just in the Anchorage, Alaska area, either. Just because we’re the largest state in the Union doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten the other 49. Nor have our authors. They’re all over the place, having events and selling their books, and so are the book events we arrange.
If there’s a venue an author wants that we haven’t already set up a relationship with, we ask for just a little more lead time to set that up.
To demonstrate a good book-signing table at a launch party, several authors have agreed to come and set up in the first floor lobby of the library. They’ll have their tables, banners, business cards, and of course they will have their books.
So come a little early and meet some real live authors and take a look at their books for yourself. You’ll even be able to buy them and get them autographed.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Anchorage Young Writers Conference
This year’s Young Writers Conference, Generation You: Writers of the Future, will be on Saturday, October 26th, 2013. The conference will be for students in middle and high school (6th- 12th grade). The conference will be at Clark Middle School, again. It’s a beautiful building, plenty of parking and easy to get to. The conference will start at 9:30 a.m. with three sessions: two before lunch and one after. Each session will be about an hour.
If you’d like to be one of the participating author please let us know by return email so you can be part on the registration form and part of the advertising. Please include the following in your response.
How many sessions are you willing to do? 1, 2, or 3
Which session(s)? 9:30 – 10:30 AM, 10:40 – 11:40 AM, 12:50 – 1:50 PM
What is the title of your interactive writing session? (Last year, kids really gravitated towards “catchy” titles.)
Please send a short “blurb” describing your session.
The Mat/Su Young Writers conference will be in the spring next year which allows authors to participate in both conferences.
Alaska Writers Guild Presentation
We have two opening for authors to participate with us at the Alaska Writer Guild meeting on August 20. If you’d like to participate you’ll want to arrive at the Wilda Marston Theater in the library and set up your table at 6:30 PM. The library will furnish the table and chair. You will need to bring your table covering, banner, a few books, and whatever other display items you use at your signings. The guild announcement is attached. All writers, published and unpublished, are invited to attend the free meeting. Let us know by return email if you’s like to participate with our presentation.
Release Parties
We’re attaching invitations to two upcoming release parties. You are cordially invited to attend these author events and help Jim and Lyle celebrate the release of their new books. We encourage authors to support other author’s release parties. Two good ways to do this is to send the attached notices to people on your email mailing list and include the notice in your blog and social media postings; and, by attending the party.
Book Signings
Book signings continue to be a most important way to introduce your book to potential readers and fans and to advance your writing career. To schedule a signing go to our website, click on Book Signings, follow the instructions, and we’ll take it from there.
Dale Wilderness, now living in Colorado, visiting friends and family in Alaska, and author of Drift in Your Pillow’s Eyes, conducted a number of book signings while in the State. We commend him for his signing success. He signed and sold all available books at several of his signings. As always, it’s a mixed emotion experience to sell out at a signing. You feel good about public acceptance of your book, but you wish you had had more books on hand.
Sheldon Gebb, author of In the Footsteps of My Father, began his summer signing tour in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory and included stops in Fairbanks and Anchorage. Sheldon also enjoyed signing success by selling all available inventory. If you like to meet Sheldon, check the signing schedule on our website and join him at one of his remaining signings. Sheldon lives in California.
Speaking of California, David Kunkel, author of Locked Up Abroad, recently moved to California and took up residence on a yacht anchored in a marina. David has continued his successful Alaska Costco signing successes in the area around his yacht with sell-out signings at Costco.
There is always a danger in highlighting an author about their signings as we don’t want to leave anyone out. We appreciate the eagerness with which authors approach signings. If you go to our website and check out the author signing schedule you’ll see a great number of signings by dedicated authors. For example you’ll see Bonnye Mathews’ ambitious signing schedule. Bonnye, author of the Winds of Change series, considers every signing a success and demonstrates an exuberant, excitement at signing. Although she hasn’t sold out at a signing, which is more difficult when you have more than one book, but she has come darn close.
Other authors with ambitious signing schedules include Heather Johnson, author of Hidden Voice, Janet Boylan, author of The Day Trees Bent to the Ground and In the Light of the Night and Dark of the Day, Lyle O’Connor, author of Due Process, Warren Troy, author of Trails, The Last Homestead, and Jester, Bill Hauser, author of Fishes of the Last Frontierand Letters from Alaska, Don Johnson, author of The Lost Tree of Life, Glenda Field, author of Atiska Ataska, Charlie’s in Alaska, Marianne Schlemilgh, author of Coho Waterboy, Raven’s Light, Gaston’s Crow’s Nest, Solo Flight, Driftfeather on the Alaska Seas, Feather from A Stranger, Two Tickets and A Feather, and Slugs Forever!, Monica Estill, author of The Bossy Boulder, Jim Misko, author of For What He Would Become, The Cut of Pride, and The Most Expensive Mistress in Jefferson County, Cil Gregoire, author of Anthya’s World and Crystalline Aura, and Dan Griffin, author of Village of the Full Moon Curse. We also note that Mary Ann Poll, author of Ravens Cove and Ingress, wearing two hats: Author Events Coordinator and author has scheduled signings which will include her new book, Gorgon as soon as it’s released. In addition, Erin Rivard, author of Agattu, The Alaskan Caribou, living in Korea and visiting family in Alaska has conducted a series of successful signings. We also note that Dale Wilderness has scheduled a signing at Barnes & Noble in Colorado Springs for November 16. That’s looking ahead. We express our gratitude and admiration to each of you.
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to www.PublicationConsultants.com
Here’s a portion of a note sent by Burt Bomhoff, author of Iditarod Alaska, to Deborah Bonito, Manager Mosquito Books. “Thank you for the book signing event Jim and I participated in at Mosquito Books. I’m new at this so it was a special treat to work with your staff and to interact with many people traveling through the airport. I hope the event was profitable for you and not too much extra work for your staff. I would be honored to participate in another book signing any time you wish.” Burt’s thank you note is representative of thank you notes sent by other grateful, professional authors when ever they have a signing.
Sherry Ellis, book reviewer for Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, recently reviewed Burt’s book under the headline: “Bomhoff book reads like stories told around the campfire.” She concluded the review with. “The behind the scenes look at the preparation, knowledge and tenacity these mushers must possess is absolutely a treat for the reader. The “chicanery” (a term Bomhoff often used) that several of the mushers would pull off is a fascinating read in itself, and then the fact that the author honestly never held it against any of his buddies over the years is amazing.”
Webmaster, John Poll, gave us information about an article http://techland.time.com/2013/05/01/physical-books-are-dead-long-live-physical-books/ titled, Physical Books Are Dead — Long Live Physical Books. If you’re an author interested is knowing about what some see as the future of books, you’ll be interested in this article.
Here’s a comment about Author Signings procedures on our website. “I finally went on the website and registered for a few signings. What a user-friendly process it is! Alice Wright, author of Alaska Animals We Love You.”Alice’s comment is typical of comments we receive. Alice’s “few signings” contributed to the more than 120 scheduled author book signings Mary Ann Poll, author events coordinator, is currently managing for Publication Consultants’ authors.
Included with this note are two more release party notices–one immediate and one in the future. We encourage authors to support other author’s release parties. Two good ways to do this is to send the attached notices to people on your email mailing list you think will be interested in attending and meeting the author; and, by attending the party if you’re able.
Marianne Schlegelmilch, author of seven books published by Publication Consultants, will soon release her eighth book, Slugs Forever!, a fund raiser for the Independent Living Center. Marianne’s illustrator is confined to a wheelchair and created the illustrations by drawing with the brush held between her teeth. Slugs Forever! made national and international news a few weeks ago and now illustrator, Maggie Winston, does it again: http://peninsulaclarion.com/news/2013-07-06/a-mothers-journey-friends-help-reach-goal-of-independence#.Udo2FBJGbc4.email.
And finally, here’s the kind of note all author like to receive.
“I have enjoyed reading Courtrooms, Cartridges, and Campfires. I treasure it! I can honestly say it was one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read! … You are a great writer and your humor is so vividly exhibited in your writings! The hell with being a lawyer – be a writer all the time!
“John E. Frampton
“Interim President and CEO
“Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports”
Keep in touch,
Evan Swensen
Publication Consultants
Publishing the works of authors worldwide!
8370 Eleusis Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99502
(907) 349-2424 Fax (907) 349-2426
evan@publicationconsultants.com
Publication Consultants, book publishers, has established a legacy of providing authors opportunities for expression, preserving histories and stories, and bringing joy to readers and writers; and, doing so in an atmosphere of mutual respect and integrity. If you’ve written a book, if you’re writing a book, if you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you know someone who is writing a book go to <https://publicationconsultants.com>.
We extend our congratulations to Erin Rivard and Heather Lehe. Their books were selected for the 2013-2014 Battle of the Books.
Erin’s book, Agattu: The Alaskan Caribou, was recently released. The back cover reads: Agattu is the biggest animal around, and proud of it! Until Mr. Moose confronts him and Agattu’s worst fears come true—he’s no longer the tallest. Agattu takes drastic measures to be taller than Mr. Moose, and ends up in the middle of a lake! It isn’t until he see’s his reflection that he realizes he is special just the way he is.
Heather’s book, Colony Kids, came on the market in time to be selected as an alternate battle book last year. The back cover reads: It’s 1935, during the Great Depression, and Paul’s family is out of work and out of money. They have nothing but a little ramshackle farm in Minnesota. Now that’s gone, too. Suddenly, an incredible opportunity opens up for 202 families, including Paul’s, but it means moving far away, to a land few people know anything about. Will his family go? Will Paul have to leave his friends, family, and beloved dog, Rascal? Then Paul meets tomboyish Maggie and adventurous Erik, also kids of new colonists, and together they face the unique realities of living in the far north. Based on true stories, follow the trials and adventures of Paul, Maggie, and Erik as their families start over in hopes of building a new life in a strange land so far away. Will they make it?
Mat/Su Young Writers Conference
This year’s Mat/Su Young Writers Conference is schedule for Saturday, April 27. Because of the popularity, enjoyable experience, and opportunity to sell books and help kids, we’ve already heard from some or our author who have asked to be included in this year’s faculty. Our authors have participated in this wonderful conference for almost 20 years. If you’d like to participate kindly let us know by return email.
The Rationale for the conference is to:
· Promote district curriculum and the Alaska Writing State Standards goals related to composition using the six-writing traits and reading.
· Provide instructors with a highly motivating and meaningful activity as a vehicle to encourage creative writing.
· Promote opportunity to fulfill needs of student interest and gifted abilities in the area of composition.
· Provide a shared, common experience for students, staff and parents; and an opportunity to see how different schools approach the activity. This provides a forum for idea sharing for the teaching staff.
· Provide modeling of the writing process and publishing process by known Alaskan Authors.
· Increase community awareness and understanding of the school district efforts to develop writers.
We’ve attached more information about the conference to this note. Again, please let us know by return mail if you’d like to participate in this year’s conference.
Book Signings
There is not substitute for a face to face conversation with your readers and potential readers. Simply put, if you don’t plan on having book signings you’re planning on not selling books. As an author, you can not be a spectator in the marketing of your book. If you want to advance your writing career, you must become the parade. Book signings assist you to become the parade! It’s all about sharing your book with readers and potential readers. To schedule a signing for you and your book, go to our website, https://publicationconsultants.com, click on Book Signings, select Author Signing Request, and follow the prompts. While you’re on the website you may want to select Scheduled Book Signings and see when and where authors have scheduled signings.
We remind you about Mary Ann Poll, our new Author Events Coordinator. Already we’re receiving positive comments from authors telling us how easy and good it is working with Mary Ann. Sign up for a book signing and you’ll experience Mary Ann’s professional hand holding all the way to the signing table in the store. Mary Ann also walks the talk. You can see her signing schedule on our website. And did we mention, Mary Ann’s third book is in the polishing process.
New Books
Peggy McMahon’s third book, Mama Will You Read To Me, went to the printer this week. We’re excited for Peggy. It’s a thrill for us and an author to see the work finally come to an end and know that soon the book will be in the hand’s of readers.
We have more new books in the publishing process than we’re every had before at one time-a lot more! We look forward to these new titles coming to market and sharing the joy with the authors.
Best Regards,
Evan Swensen
Heather Johnson
Heather John, age 15 and author of a new book, Hidden Voice, received a fine review in the Frontiersman on March 14. Heather will have her release party Friday March 22. Heather’s website <http://heatherjohnsonbooks.com>, is maturing and her book may be purchased directly from the site. The review, by Heather Resz, begins: “WASILLA — Where other teens struggle in silence to find their way through the tangle of pre-teen and teenage years, Heather Johnson, 15, found her voice and is offering to show her peers the way forward. Johnson will launch her book at a signing event from 2 to 5 p.m., March 22 at Piccolino’s Restaurant, 551 West Parks Highway, in Wasilla.”
If you’d like to see and read theFrontiersman’s release you can find it at <http://www.frontiersman.com/arts_entertainment/wasilla-teen-pens-new-trans-media-book/article_a48d49c0-8d1b-11e2-a1ce-0019bb2963f4.html>.
Author Signing Request Form
Some authors have reported trouble scheduling signings using the Author Signing Request Form on our home page. If you are experiencing difficulty here’s how to solve the problem in almost every instance. If you’re using Internet Explorer, and unable to use the Author Signing Request Form, usually, simply updating Internet Explorer resolves all issues. Many authors are successfully using Chrome, a free download from Goggle. Fire Fox work fine as well as Apple’s Safari.
As you review the Scheduled Book Signings on our home page you’ll notice that the number of signings are increasing. Most authors use the Author Signing Request Form and find it a pleasant, satisfactory way to schedule signings. We think you will too.
Book Signing Report From Jim Misko
Had a fantastic day at Palm Desert Costco. Sold all 40 books in 6.5 hours. That is one every 9.74 minutes. Not quite as good as John P. Hagen, who sells one every 5 minutes at golf tournaments, but his is a specialized book and his affection ado’s come through the gate at 165,000 per tournament.
Total statistics: Sold 40 books, 10 For What He Could Become, 10 The Most Expensive Mistress in Jefferson County, and 20 The Cut of Pride
I had 3 doubles; 4 triples and six e-book requests. I interacted with 42 people so the doubles and triples boosted my averages. I got 40 names and email addresses to add to my buyers list. Every buyer today gave me freely their name and email. Good.
I did not take any pictures because I forgot to do that. Hmmm.
An interesting thing. A woman came by and said she had bought my book THE CUT OF PRIDE in Hawaii at a book signing at Costco in Kauilui and that I signed it for her. I have not been there for 20 years. She described the book and the plot, said it was new, and the author was signing it. I have her telephone # and we will contact each other to resolve this.
Thanks for making this opportunity available to me and others.
Book Signing Follow Up
We’re refining the book signing request procedures, scheduling and confirmation systems, and follow up. We appreciate your feedback and returning the after signing survey.
Once again, we enjoy publishing books and bringing them to market and grateful for the trust placed in us by authors.
Battle of the Books
Alaska’s Battle of the Books selection will be finalized this Friday in Valdez. Two of our authors have books on the working list: Heather Lehe’s, Colony Kids and Erin Rivard’s, Agattu the Caribou is being considered. Colony Kids was an alternate last year. We offer our congratulations to Heather and Erin and wish them well.
Social Media Marketing
We’ve arranged with Cherilynn Stone for 50% discount for Publication Consultants author for her Seven Step Social Media Marketing Workshop. The price offered to the public is $499. Our authors can participate for the reduced price of $199. To register for the workshop for the special price, call Cherilynn, (907) 250-7425 and let her know you’re coming by way of Publication Consultants. To receive the negotiated, reduced price, you will need to call Cherilynn and register by Friday, March 22. This is a wonderful opportunity to kick start your social media efforts.
Best Regards,
Evan Swensen
Many of you have been receiving emails from Mary Ann Poll about book signing schedules. We are pleased to announce that Mary Ann has accepted the appointment of be our new Author Events Coordinator, replacing Dawn Swensen. Dawn pioneered the position and faithfully served our authors for many years. Dawn is completing her education and obtaining her teaching certificate. She’s been helping out in the classroom for the past three years and will be a full-time teacher this fall. We wish Dawn well in her new career. And with equal enthusiasm we welcome Mary Ann. Mary Ann comes with a business office history and author signing experience. Already she’s applied her skills to the scheduling process and streamlined the approval procedure.
Concurrent with Mary Ann’s appointment and streamlined approval procedure, we confirm that we have polished the Author Signing Request Form on our website, and it is fully functional. You’ll find it a delight to use. When you’re ready to have a book signing go to the form and select the State, City, and Location and enter your request. If the venue isn’t listed, please send an email to authorservices@publicationconsultants.com and let us know the information. We’ll add the venue to the form and let you know when it’s available for use.
We reported several months ago that Costco’s book signing contract company was experiencing serious personnel problems. They seem to have the problems resolved and are now scheduling author signings again for Costco. The Costco store on Dimond is being remodeled and will not be available for signings until after the May 1. But, now is a good time to schedule your signing. Again, if you’d like a signing outside of Alaska let us know if the location you’re thinking of is not on the website and we’ll add it.
We’ve been working with Jerry Simmons, a book marketing consultant. We shared our Author Event Information sheet with Jerry and asked for his impute. He didn’t suggest any changes, but made this comment: “The Author Event Information is an excellent tool for your authors. Well written and to the point, if they follow your advice they can have successful book signings.” We encourage you to review it and follow the advice for successful signings.
Marianne Schlegelmilch, Author of Original Alaska Fiction, was recently recognized in the Homer News about her new book, Slugs Forever! A tale from an Alaskan Backyard:http://homernews.com/stories/013013/news_collaborate.shtml#.UQpJd6VmB5g. We have published seven of Marianne’s books.
Also featured in the Homer News was an article about Steve Wolfe. The headline read: Coach Wolfe to be inducted into National Wrestling Hall of Fame: http://www.homernews.com/stories/013013/sports_wolfe.shtml. Steve is the author of three wonderful books with a wrestling theme from his years as a high school wrestling coach.
Sam Allred, author of Opening Hearts, was recently honored with The Prudential Spirit of Community Award http://spirit.prudential.com/view/page/soc/307?lp=306&reqid=3350.
Since our last author update new books have arrived in our warehouse:
Warren Troy, Alaska wilderness adventure author, continues the Alaska homestead adventures with his new book, The Last Homestead: Further Adventures of Denny Caraway, Alaskan Homesteader. He held his release party at Great Northern Guns.
Former Eagle River resident, Erin Rivard, is the author and illustrator of her new children’s book, Agattu: The Alaskan Caribou, A Story About Self-Worth. Erin held her release party near her hew home in Lakewood, Washington.
David Kunkel, author of Locked Up Abroad: An Alaskan’s True Story of Adventure, Incarceration, and Escape, published the second edition of his book which included 16 more pages than the first edition.
Ollen Hunt received books from his ninth printing of Buffalo Soldier,
Carl Douglass completed the six book series of his Saga of a Neurosurgeon when we received the last four titles: Heaven and Hell: Garven Wilsonhulme takes on all comers in the jungle of modern competition; The Long Climb: Young M.D., Garven Wilsonhulme, engaged in a social poker game of winner takes all; ACADEMIA: The Law of the Jungle: Surgeon in training, Garven Wilsonhulme, fang-and-claw competition for glory; and The Vulture and the Phoenix: Neurosurgeon, Garven Wilsonhulme, the final great fight.
Burt Bomhoff, author of Iditarod Alaska: Life of a Long Distance Sled Dog Musher, saw his book for the first time last week just a few days after the start of the Iditarod. Burt will announce the date and time for his release party in a few days.
We are taking a new approach to social media marketing training. We’ve discovered that the most productive training is one on one or in small groups with about equal skills. Keeping this in mind we’ve arranged with Cherilynn Stone to provide each of our authors with a free one-hour consultation to develop their social media marketing procedure. In just a few days Cherilynn will have an online assessment you can fill out to begin your free consultation. Cherilynn says, “In this consultation, we will discuss your business goals as they relate to social media and your online marketing. I will answer questions and tailor an internet/social media marketing plan tailored to you.” We encourage you to take advantage of this free consultation. We’ll let you know when the assessment form is up and running.
We’ve added a new feature to our website. If you click on Book Signings and then select Scheduled Book Signings you’ll find a schedule of signings. This way you can see right away if your signing has been approved. You can also see where your fellow authors are signing and if you’ll have company at your signing. We don’t schedule more than two authors at the same venue at the same time. Kindly let us know what you think about this new feature.
Once again we express our gratitude for the trust you’ve placed in us and we’ll do all we can to prove worthy of that trust.
Best Regards,
Evan Swensen
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