The next time I publish a book (later this summer, I hope)I'm going to schedule it better. "Shift Happens" came out at the end of the month. That's the time I'm under the most deadline pressure and releasing the book just added to the craziness.
As a result, some my articles were late and I've done a sloppy job on the release marketing. I'll have to do better next week.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Blogging
Had lunch today with Joseph McDaniel, long time friend and blogger extraordinaire. Boy did I learn a lot!
Joe is one of Arizona's leading bankruptcy attorneys and he blogs like a crazed animal to support his practice and for private projects like the Shotokan karate dojo where he holds a black belt. He has a keen analytical mind and he's applied it to carefully studying blogging and working out techniques and have boosted him to the top of the search engine lists.
Two of Joe's main techniques are targeting and consistency. Joe has several blogs with each one targeted at a different audience. This precise targeting helps him hold readers' interest and keeps them coming back. He assures they'll come back by giving them fresh,meaningful, content at least twice a week.
A lot of work? Yep, but it's paid off for him. He figures he gets about twice the daily visits by potential customers as most bankruptcy attorneys similarly situated. He also finds that people who come in often already know him from his blogs and he already has the beginnings of a positive relationship before they walk in the door.
We spent two hours talking -- mostly Joe talking and me listening. We covered a lot of ground and agreed to do it again soon. Next time I'll take better notes.
Joe is one of Arizona's leading bankruptcy attorneys and he blogs like a crazed animal to support his practice and for private projects like the Shotokan karate dojo where he holds a black belt. He has a keen analytical mind and he's applied it to carefully studying blogging and working out techniques and have boosted him to the top of the search engine lists.
Two of Joe's main techniques are targeting and consistency. Joe has several blogs with each one targeted at a different audience. This precise targeting helps him hold readers' interest and keeps them coming back. He assures they'll come back by giving them fresh,meaningful, content at least twice a week.
A lot of work? Yep, but it's paid off for him. He figures he gets about twice the daily visits by potential customers as most bankruptcy attorneys similarly situated. He also finds that people who come in often already know him from his blogs and he already has the beginnings of a positive relationship before they walk in the door.
We spent two hours talking -- mostly Joe talking and me listening. We covered a lot of ground and agreed to do it again soon. Next time I'll take better notes.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
The URL for Shift Happens
Several people have asked me for the URL for "Shift Happens", so here it is.
http://www.amazon.com/SHIFT-HAPPENS-Publishing-Paradigm-ebook/product-reviews/B005CX94YI/ref=sr_cr_hist_5?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addFiveStar
I think you don't need any of the stuff after the word "ebook" but I don't have time to experiment now.
http://www.amazon.com/SHIFT-HAPPENS-Publishing-Paradigm-ebook/product-reviews/B005CX94YI/ref=sr_cr_hist_5?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&filterBy=addFiveStar
I think you don't need any of the stuff after the word "ebook" but I don't have time to experiment now.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Still the scanning saga continues. . .
Now I'm looking into scanning service for Obsidian Harvest. And boy, what a long strange trip that is.
So far I haven't found anyone who will scan my document (pages cut from a magazine) and give me a .txt or .doc file of the results. My last hope is Office Max. They won't give me a text file but they will provide a .pdf of the pages. I'm pretty sure I can use Omnipage to OCR the file.
The first problem I ran into is that scanning services either weren't interested or couldn't do it. My lousy 28 pages is just too small for them to mess with. As one of them put it: "Now if you had 2800 pages. . ." The mind boggles. It's not just that my job is small, the pages are physically small -- digest size, which is about half a regular sheet of typing paper. Scanning services are mostly set up to scan letter or legal size pages and running a small page through the scanner runs the risk of jamming the document feeder.
Finally, after several turn downs, I thought of OfficeMax. They could do it for 25 cents a page, which is quite reasonable, and would give me a .pdf of the scanned file for further work.
So in theory this new approach should work. But in theory scanning the story in with the OCR software on my HP printer should have worked as well.
Oh well, at least I'm accumulating a lot of information for my next book.
So far I haven't found anyone who will scan my document (pages cut from a magazine) and give me a .txt or .doc file of the results. My last hope is Office Max. They won't give me a text file but they will provide a .pdf of the pages. I'm pretty sure I can use Omnipage to OCR the file.
The first problem I ran into is that scanning services either weren't interested or couldn't do it. My lousy 28 pages is just too small for them to mess with. As one of them put it: "Now if you had 2800 pages. . ." The mind boggles. It's not just that my job is small, the pages are physically small -- digest size, which is about half a regular sheet of typing paper. Scanning services are mostly set up to scan letter or legal size pages and running a small page through the scanner runs the risk of jamming the document feeder.
Finally, after several turn downs, I thought of OfficeMax. They could do it for 25 cents a page, which is quite reasonable, and would give me a .pdf of the scanned file for further work.
So in theory this new approach should work. But in theory scanning the story in with the OCR software on my HP printer should have worked as well.
Oh well, at least I'm accumulating a lot of information for my next book.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Experimenting with press releases
I'm trying the tack of promoting my ebook "Shift Happens" by using press releases. So far I've sent out three and we'll have to see what kind of response I get.
Press releases to promote book is tricky. Generally it doesn't work for fiction, but in theory a well prepared press release should help sales of non-fiction books. We'll see.
Besides, it gives me an opportunity to use a skill from my time in PR.
Press releases to promote book is tricky. Generally it doesn't work for fiction, but in theory a well prepared press release should help sales of non-fiction books. We'll see.
Besides, it gives me an opportunity to use a skill from my time in PR.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
SHIFT HAPPENS IS OUT!
"Shift Happens: The New E-Publishing Paradigm And What It Means For Writers" has been published and is now available as a Kindle ebook on Amazon.
In the book I outline the earthquake changes to publishing in the wake of the growing popularity of ebooks and ebook readers. Perhaps most significantly for authors, ebooks turn the dynamics of publishing upside down by putting the author in the drivers seat rather than the publishers. Now authors can choose what and when to publish without having to get a publisher's approval.
The result is a new freedom for writers as well as the opportunity to make significant amounts of money from epublishing.
To see how this can work for you, order "Shift Happens"
In the book I outline the earthquake changes to publishing in the wake of the growing popularity of ebooks and ebook readers. Perhaps most significantly for authors, ebooks turn the dynamics of publishing upside down by putting the author in the drivers seat rather than the publishers. Now authors can choose what and when to publish without having to get a publisher's approval.
The result is a new freedom for writers as well as the opportunity to make significant amounts of money from epublishing.
To see how this can work for you, order "Shift Happens"
Friday, July 15, 2011
Scanners Live Not So Vainly
Well, I finally got Omnipage installed.
Nuance customer support still sucks, but after messing around the web site for a half hour I called the main number at Nuance and finally got transferred to tech support.
The tech support call was a story in itself. The line was bad and the guy on the other end was in India. Cultural differences reared their head in that I had trouble figuring out the question he was really asking. But we got it to work.
Why do these companies think that just because someone is fluent in English they're equipped to handle tech support? The guy was fluent, fortunately, but we kept missing each other's cues and the result was a "Who's On First" scenario.
Oh well, at least I get to check out how well Omnipage works.
--RC
Nuance customer support still sucks, but after messing around the web site for a half hour I called the main number at Nuance and finally got transferred to tech support.
The tech support call was a story in itself. The line was bad and the guy on the other end was in India. Cultural differences reared their head in that I had trouble figuring out the question he was really asking. But we got it to work.
Why do these companies think that just because someone is fluent in English they're equipped to handle tech support? The guy was fluent, fortunately, but we kept missing each other's cues and the result was a "Who's On First" scenario.
Oh well, at least I get to check out how well Omnipage works.
--RC
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