<!– p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }a:link { color: rgb(0, 0, 255); } –> Have you written an e-book or are you seriously considering doing so in the near future? If you are planning on writing an e-book anytime soon, there are some things you need to ask yourself. Do you have what it takes to commit to writing such a piece? If so, why haven’t you begun already? If you are reluctant to start writing your e-book, here are some things that every e-book author should know. Examine Yourself First, take a look at your overall attitude, skill, and knowledge. Authoring an e-book isn’t too different than writing a traditional book (often called “p-books” in the Internet publishing world) in the sense that you will need to be ready with the basics – knowledge, preparedness, dedication, and drive. Of course, this article will not provide you with every little thing you need to know about yourself and the e-book writing process, but it will give you a good start and an idea of where you stand so far. When writing an e-book, your knowledge of the subject area, experience with the issues presented in your work, and familiarity with the targeted audience must be assumed. This non-conventional, reflective look will help you maximize your existing abilities. When writing an e-book you need to keep in mind that the overall project will ultimately be a culmination of some major aspects of writing traditionally as well as for electronic media with one very big difference – your e-book is meant to be read on a computer screen, not the paper page. That means writing is just one aspect of the entire process. The Presentation Because an e-book is a digital product, potential readers will not be able to pick up the book in the store or library and hold it. Many customers will pick up a book and read the dust jacket description to get an idea of what the book is about. Here’s where the digital book cover comes in. It must still be visually appealing with good photography or graphics and include enough information to give a customer an idea of the “big picture”. The Target Market Think about the technological expertise of your target audience. Though reading an e-book doesn’t require any special technical skills, it does assume that the reader has access to a computer and knows how to download information from the Internet. If readers are not familiar with at least the basic principles of using the web, your e-book may not be appealing. Overall your e-book whether fiction or non-fiction must be an interesting read. Will readers want to read what you have to say? Is your story attention-grabbing? Do you know what you’re talking about? While appealing the audience is integral, you still have the upper-hand over new or first-time traditional book authors. Why is that? It is much easier to sell an e-book online than it is to get a book published. This means you have more control and can even market yourself a little more effectively. Once you’ve completed your e-book you will need to consider marketing and advertising plans. Do the Research All e-book authors are required to do an incredible amount of research, just like any other author. If you are planning on writing an e-book, chances are you’ve already conducted quite a bit of research and preparation. But remember, there is always room for improvement. Personal experience, previous articles you’ve written, book and website resources, videos, seminars, training sessions, and workshops are all good sources. However, in order to excel in writing e-books you must have excellent research skills. It is imperative when writing non-fiction that your information be relevant, current, and accurate. Put On Your Entrepreneur Cap Writing an e-book isn’t just about your love of writing, good research, and having something to say. It also comes down to the entrepreneurial spirit. Do you have it? When you write an e-book you will need to promote it, just like any other digital good. As an e-book author, you essentially launch yourself into the world of business – the business of YOU. An active involvement in every aspect of your e-book production and promotion is essential. You will also need to be involved in selling the e-book too. If you don’t do anything other than write it, the chances are you will be the only reader of your e-book. Writing an e-book can be rewarding, both personally and professionally. You can share your knowledge while making a living. But every e-book author needs to know that nothing comes for free. Time will be your biggest investment – research, writing, marketing, and selling ebooks all are processes that take time – but you will also spend some money. You can make a pdf format and protect it with pdf password; this will help you to protect your book from free download. As the old business owner adage goes, “it takes money to make money”. You will need to invest money in the publication and marketing of your e-book, but when done right, you will gain many returns for both your time and money in the long run.
Archive for December, 2010
What book should I buy?
I plan to buy a book on Marketing for my Internet business which has been online for some time but no sales have been coming in. Should I focus on book on marketing strategies or any other type of books? I plan to do not online an online marketing campaign but also offline ones like viral marketing, above-the-line, and below-the-line. Can anyone recommend a good book, with title and author?
Buying books on Amazon?
I want to buy three books by Madeleine L’engle (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet), because I already own “Many Waters.” My problem is the I usually buy books used from Amazon, and I want to make sure that the books I buy will be the same edition as the book I already have. The “Many Waters” book I have is published by Yearling/Dell, it’s paperback, pastel colors, and I believe was published to celebrate 35 years since the series was first published, but I could be wrong. Is there a way to know what edition Amazon sells? Is there a way to ask sellers of used books on Amazon what edition they are offering? Any help appreciated!!
Using SEO for Niche Marketing
What is Niche Marketing? What is SEO? Let’s see if we can answer these questions. Niche marketing with SEO isn’t quite self explanatory – so here’s a simple overview. A niche is simply a product category that people are looking for and that doesn’t have overwhelming competition on the supply side of the demand/supply equation. The ideal niche is one that has great demand and little or no supply available. Such niches are rare. You could spend a lifetime looking for one and never find it – so don’t count on this if you are planning to do niche marketing. Fortunately, niche marketing with SEO doesn’t require that one’s niche be ideal to be good from our perspective – just good enough. Most people who set up marketing websites don’t research the competition very thoroughly while picking the market in which they are going to operate. This is a good thing for those of us in the know about online market research. By picking a niche with relatively high demand and low supply, and by “optimizing” our website to attract the notice of the search engines, we can compete successfully in the marketplace. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It consists of two parts: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization is mostly a matter of picking a keyword for your page that matches the informational theme of the page. A web page with the theme “niche marketing” would have “niche marketing” in the keywords meta-tag in the Page Source” view of your browser. Off-page optimization is effected by the recognition accorded your web page by other webmasters – primarily expressed as links from their websites to yours. Search engines are able to track both optimization factors – and they give more weight to the latter than to the former. A page will have matured when other niche marketing websites, known to be authorities, contain links pointing to the page. SEO is a big subject and you will see it referred to repeatedly throughout many websites concerned with niche marketing. The first question that should occur to you at this point is – What Am I Going to Sell? Rather than pick a product that is familiar to you – or one that you can create yourself – both of which are very tempting choices – I strongly suggest that you decide at the outset to pick one that you know people want. In other words do the market research first – find out what people are actually looking for and that can be sold profitably – and then decide what to sell. If your research leads you to a subject that is not the most familiar, don’t let it throw you. Learn the subject and then sell it. It is likely that you will find a niche in an area with which you already have some familiarity, because you are likely to start with something familiar as you begin doing the research. It is best if this is so, because you can write most capably about a subject about which you care passionately. What Do I need to Know to Do Niche Marketing with SEO? In simplest terms you need to know: * How to set up a website properly, * How to select the search engine keywords that will bring traffic to your website, * How to structure your website to be ranked highly by the search engines – so it appears on the first page of “results” that a search engine displays when a visitor searches for your keywords, * How to “monetize” your web traffic to create multiple streams of income, and * How to lead your sites visitors to a decision to buy what you are selling – without using a heavy-handed sales pitch. This is called “pre-selling”. The first of these questions is answered very thoroughly by sources that I will reference in subsequent articles. It is a big subject – bigger than I can include in this article. The choice of keywords has also been covered by many writers on the subject. Each has his own angle on how to do the research, and some provide useful tools either free or at modest cost. How To “Monetize” Your Website To monetize your website is simply to connect your site’s readers with an opportunity to buy something in such a way that you make money in the process. There are a number of good choices in this regard, and you can use more than one of them. For starters, you can directly sell something via your website using your own merchant account or PayPal account. Your product might be a tangible item that you are prepared to drop-ship to your customer – or it might be a piece of software, an e-book, or an information product that you will deliver immediately as an electronic file. Then again, you might sell a product produced by a company of whom you are an affiliate. There are many good affiliate programs available. In this case you simply include on your website a link that takes the reader to a website provided by the product supplier. The link identifies you to the supplier, so if the reader becomes a customer, you get a commission on the sale. Such commissions can run as high as 75% and be very profitable to you. And/or you might contract with a product or service provider to be paid a fixed fee for each referral that you send their way via your website. And/or you might sell advertising space on your website, either using Google’s Adsense program, which will pay you on a per-click basis, or through one of several other available programs. Some of these pay you on a weekly or monthly basis and can be more lucrative than Adsense ads. A Note On Monetizing One of the most common mistakes that beginners make when setting up a commercial website is to monetize the site too soon. Until the site contains enough [...]
free on line information on basic electrical theroy?
how do i find this kind of information on the internet or should go back to buying books
Posted in Historical Fiction Books 
Tags: Basic, electrical, Free, Information, Line, theroy 
1 Comment »What are some tips on avoiding bending a paperback book?
Paperback books, right? You open them, and overtime they get bent. I know the no-brainers to avoiding them, like turning the page 360 (folding it around) or laying the book flat bending its spine instead of using a bookmark… though no matter what paperback book I’ve read before, it’s always gotten bent. And I need tips on PREVENTING bending the cover, NOT flattening them after it got bent. I got a pretty important book yesterday, in paperback, and I don’t want to dare open it until I know how to minimize cover-bending. Oh, and I know this has nothing at all to do with books and authors, but I’m sure the people who answer in this section have experience when it comes to reading books, so I think I’ll get the best answers here. If you know a better section, tell me.
Posted in Historical Fiction Books Tags: avoiding, bending, Book, Paperback, some, Tips 5 Comments »The Great Search Engine Marketing Scam
I am a professional search engine marketer. As such, I make it my job to investigate new tools and technologies that relate to the business of driving traffic to web sites via search engines. My company makes use of various tools to promote our clients’ web sites, and they provide great leverage on our time. We would have to charge much more for our services if we did not make use of certain programs. But there is one trend in the marketing of a lot of search engine marketing tools that I find disturbing. The core message is generally that using [insert search engine marketing product] will give you top search engine rankings in a matter of days. The message is absolutely true. The problem I have with the basic marketing message is that a very key part of the Internet marketing equation is being left out: that rankings for keywords that generate zero or little traffic are of little value. So the magnificent performance demonstrated by certain tools or certain Internet marketing experts is an illusion. You don’t need any special software to rank highly for a keyword with no competitors. However… I am not at all saying that some tools are not worth using. Many of them are. But don’t expect to blast your web site with traffic overnight. The value in the tools is in getting wide distribution of content that results in the spread of your company’s brand and the creation of new links to your site. If you combine an aggressive, multi-pronged link building campaign with strong content and keyword-specific on-site optimization, you can be very successful with your search engine marketing. BUT NOT IF YOU SKIP THE KEYWORD RESEARCH PHASE. What you need to do is pick a small set of keywords that receive a reasonable amount of traffic (“reasonable” being relative to your industry) and that are in a reasonable competitive situation. Avoid keywords that are rarely if ever used, and avoid keywords that have many millions of competitors. Success is found in the middle ground. So the great search engine marketing scam isn’t that search engine marketing tools don’t work – the scam is the claims they make and how easy they make things seem. Don’t get the idea that it is going to be easy to drive a lot of traffic to your site. A typical campaign using these tools might look something like this: 1. Do keyword research. 2. Optimize web pages. 3. Write articles and other content. 4. Use tools to distribute articles and create social networking content. 5. Create videos. 6. Use tools to distribute videos. 7. Use social bookmarking tools to promote web pages. 8. Repeat the process on a regular basis. If you try to promote your web site using content distribution on a wide scale without using automation tools, you will be limited in what you can get done. It just takes too long. You need to get as much leverage on your time as you can. When you write an article, you need to get it to as many article directories as you can. When you create a video, you need to get it to as many video sites as possible. That’s why you should use some search engine marketing tools. I am not going to make any particular product recommendations, but if you are really going to be an aggressive, proactive online marketer, you need something to distribute articles, something to distribute videos, and something to add your listings to social bookmarking sites. There are some tools that integrate all of this functionality into a single package, and there are lots of tools that do one thing very well. It may take some experimentation to find what works best for you. One thing to keep in mind is that there is still a good bit of work involved in distributing content with these tools. Articles don’t write themselves (unless you use PLR articles, which I high recommend against), videos don’t create themselves, and accounts at social networking sites don’t create themselves. If you don’t have time to properly configure and use search engine marketing tools, you are still better off leaving that work to professionals. If you are looking to learn more about keyword research and the paid side of search engine marketing, check out my company’s brand new book Scientific Search Engine Marketing: Strategies for Maximizing Your Pay per Click Return on Investment, available on Amazon.com or at our web site via digital download. To learn more, visit http://workmedia.net/scientific-search-engine-marketing/.
Collectible Dolls that make Great Gifts
People have been making and buying dolls for their children for thousands of years. The first dolls were modeled after the gods and were used as instructional aides. Years later, dolls became playthings for children of both sexes. They were made of primitive materials, often clay, wood, or fur. Unfortunately, few specimens have been recovered from the prehistoric period. However, archeologists have uncovered dozens of dolls from ancient Egypt. Since most of them were found in graves or tombs, these dolls were well-preserved. Historians also remind us that whenever an Egyptian was buried with an item, it meant that it was a cherished or prized possession. These early Egyptian dolls were made of flat pieces of sanded wood that were often painted and decorated with hair. The hair was made of strings of wooden beads or strings of clay. The earliest of these dolls were found in tombs dating back to 2000 BC. It was not until Greek and Roman times that dolls were made specifically for girls. They played with them for several years and then, when they were old enough, they offered them as gift to their favorite goddess. Most of the dolls that have been recovered from these periods were found in the graves of little girls. But even in the most primitive dolls, historians have noticed a common theme. The focus of doll making, whether done by a parent or a professional, has always been to make the dolls as lifelike as possible. Dolls with removable clothes and moveable limbs that date back to 600 B.C. have been uncovered. Centuries later, Europe became the hub of the doll making universe. In fact, dolls were so popular by the 16th and 17th century that, for the first time, there was such a thing as a professional doll maker. Of course, dolls were still made of wood, but the craftsmanship and attention to detail was beyond anything that had been produced in the past. By the 19th century, a new material hit the scene. It was called porcelain, and it was made by firing special clays at extremely high temperatures. Of course, these dolls were not children’s playthings—they were quite fragile. Oftentimes, they were used as simple decorative pieces. But the most important innovation in the history of doll making had nothing to do with a material—it had to do with the subject. Before the late nineteenth century, most dolls were made by and modeled after adults. But the famous French “bebe” doll of the 1880s depicted a much younger girl. After bebe dolls, almost all dolls were modeled after children. In the later, lean years, rag dolls were a common and inexpensive gift mothers could make for their daughters. They were generally constructed of linen or cotton and they only took a few hours to make. More often than not, they were a little girl’s first toy. And when those little girls grew up, many of them began collecting dolls as a hobby. One of the most respected doll makers in the country is the Franklin Mint. Known primarily for their coins (they are a mint, after all), the company has been producing limited edition dolls for adults for decades now. Each doll is handcrafted by an experienced artisan, often from vinyl. The Franklin Mint calls them Portrait Dolls, because they are modeled after a famous picture of a fictional or historical figure. For example, the Scarlett O’Hara Final Farewell Vinyl Portrait Doll captures the moment when Scarlett utters her famous valediction, “After all, tomorrow is another day.” These dolls are only available for sale while supplies last, and they typically sell out fast. After that, the doll is retired, i.e., it will never be offered again. Because the supply seldom meets the demand, many collectors are forced to purchase these dolls at higher prices on Internet auction sites or at estate sales. What makes them so special? Aside from their rarity and fine craftsmanship, the dolls also capture a famous historical image. This makes them instantly recognizable and gives them sentimental value for collectors who are fans or admirers of the subject. Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, and Jackie Kennedy are perennial favorites. One of the most exciting new dolls to be offer by the Franklin Mint in several years is the Michele Obama Official White House Portrait Doll. Shortly after her husband came to office, Mrs. Obama posed for an official portrait in the Blue Room of the White Office. The doll captures that historic moment, along with the poise, elegance and natural beauty of the First Lady. Fitted with a black dress, black pumps, stud earrings, and a faux pearl necklace, the doll stands exactly 16 ½ inches and is made of vinyl. The Franklin Mint limited the dolls to 9,900 worldwide. The next time you’re looking for a great gift for either a deserving young woman or a doll collecting friend or relative, consider the impressive history of doll making and a few of these great dolls.
Can I check the bestseller of books through Amazon.com?
Sorry I am new to Amazon.com and is there any way to check the bestseller of fiction and non-fiction books? I just can’t find the proper way to do so… OR it is impossible to do so? Thanks.
Can you recommend some good non-fiction history books by lesser known authors?
By lesser-known I mean writers who aren’t huge bestsellers like David McCullogh, Joseph Ellis, Stephen Ambrose, Antonia Fraser, Shelby Foote, Bruce Catton, Douglas Southall Freeman, etc. I’ve already read them. And by history I mean topics like European royalty, Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval Civilization, kings, queens, generals, popes and battles, NOT the history of chewing gum or a biography of Kurt Cobain (although such studies have their place)! I’m going to the bookstore, so I’d appreciate some feedback. Thanks, fellow history buffs!
Posted in Historical Fiction Books Tags: Authors, Books, Good, History, Known, lesser, nonfiction, recommend, some 3 Comments »