Monday, August 25, 2008

How to Turn Media Interviews into Book Sales

We came across a great resource to help authors prepare for media interviews. It’s a free audio recording with tips for authors offered by WildFire Marketing. Their website also has some great information under Free Resources for authors, speakers, and authors who are speakers!

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Author websites: Create an interactive community, Part 1

A number of our authors have great websites which they use to inform the public, provide information, and, of course, promote and sell their titles. One such website is the Basic Training website Sergeant Michael Volkin has for his books The Ultimate Basic Training Guidebook and The Ultimate Interactive Basic Training Workbook, found here.

Sergeant Volkin has incorporated just about every website feature you could imagine: book sales, e-newsletter, forum, blog, articles, a radio show, and more!

One of the obstacles he faced was how to get his website higher up in search engine page rankings. (Type Basic Training into Google and you get more than 35 million hits.) Who digs through more than a few pages when looking for something? The author has done some great search engine optimization work to get his website higher in search engine results with a good outcome.

Volkin’s website and the additional content he offers are perfect examples of how to create a website community where users go (and come back to) for information.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Upcoming Review of Once a Marine in ForeWord Magazine

For those of you not familiar with it, ForeWord magazine is a great publication that reviews books by independent publishing companies. We were pleased to hear recently that they will be reviewing Once a Marine by Nick Popaditch in their September/October issue. This is our second book to be reviewed in their publication. (They reviewed our upcoming Major League Baseball book in the Sports by the Numbers series for their baseball section in the Spring.)

If you don’t submit your books for review here, you should start. Here are their
submission guidelines.

They also have an award program and ForeWord Connections where you can create a database of your titles, submit books for awards, and more.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Armchair General magazine interviews Ted Savas

We received a nice surprise when we opened the September issue of Armchair General magazine: an interview with Ted Savas in their “10 Questions” section. We knew it was coming, but of course it is always nice to see the final product in print form. =) In the interview, Ted Savas discusses his background and passion for history, how he entered the publishing business, the conception of Savas Beatie, and where the company is headed. You can read the full article here. Thanks to Armchair General for such a nice piece.