Plug Your Book!, Steve Weber [the unexpected everything TXT] 📗

can listen.

Just like blog-reading provides insights for building your own blog, listening to podcasts will inspire ideas for producing your own audio content. Here are some directories where you can sample what's available:

iTunes: # www.Apple.com/itunes/podcasts. Here you can sample or subscribe to podcasts. Yahoo Podcasts: # Podcasts.yahoo.com. Listen to podcasts using your Web browser, or download files. PodioCast: # PodioCast.com. Serialized audiobooks. LibriVox: # Librivox.org. Free audiobooks from the public domain.

To record material for your podcasts, all that's required is a microphone and PC. Free software for recording and editing podcasts is offered at #www.Audacity.Sourceforge.net#. Another option is #www.HipCast.com#, which lets you create podcasts through your Web browser or telephone, then post it to your blog or Web site. For Mac users, GarageBand is a good podcast tool.

Here's a guide for making your own podcasts:

#www.How-To-Podcast-Tutorial. com#

Waiting for results#

Building a Web site can be a lonely process, much like the early phases of writing a manuscript. Don't expect a big response in the first month or even the next six months. Often it takes an entire year for an author site or blog to gain momentum. But if you concentrate on producing a useful site with quality content, word will get around.

As you build your site, keep one general idea in mind: Unless you're already a superstar, don't make your Web site about you. Make it about the reader. Provide compelling content that solves problems, entertains, sparks curiosity, or inspires. Everything else will follow.

Resist the temptation to pack your site with fancy features like flashy graphics or voices or music that plays automatically. Usually these doodads have the opposite effect than what was intended--they make your site slow, irritating, noisy and hard to read.

When to launch your site#

Launch your site as soon as you can. It's impossible to be too early, and it's never too late. By all means, don't wait until your book's publication date. Having a Web site is not only a valuable tool for publicizing a book, but for writing a book, too. More on that later.

"The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out," says bestselling author Seth Godin. "Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility, and build the connections you'll need later."

Blogging for authors

Julie Powell moved to New York to become an actress. A few years later, she realized she was 30 years old, working a dead-end job to pay the bills, and still had no acting prospects. Then, on a visit to Texas, she borrowed her mother's copy of Julia Child's landmark 1961 cookbook_, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1_. Back in her cramped kitchen on Long Island, Powell cooked one of the recipes for her husband, who enjoyed it so much he urged her to attend culinary school and become a professional cook.

Instead, Powell decided to teach herself, and let the whole world watch. She vowed to cook each of the book's 524 recipes during the following year, and write a diary about it on a Web log, or blog. Powell wrote about killing lobsters, boiling calves hooves, and making homemade mayonnaise, but she didn't confine herself to cooking. For good measure, she heaped on details of her sex life, recipes for reviving a romance, and snide remarks about her backstabbing coworkers.

As Powell began one entry: "My husband almost divorced me last night, and it was all because of the sauce tartar." Her storytelling was so good, word got around fast and thousands began reading her blog--regardless of whether they cared about French cuisine. A write-up in the New York Times brought thousands more readers.

By the time Powell was winding down her project, publishers were knocking on the door with book contracts, and her blog turned into the bestseller _ Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen_. More than 100,000 copies sold its first year, a monster success for any memoir, let alone a book by an unknown, chronically unemployed actress.

Here's a humorous online trailer featuring Powell chatting about the book and how it happened:

#www.Blip.tv/file/78726#

Blogging is a relatively easy way for you to publicize your book and even improve your writing while you're at it. If you can write an e-mail, you can write a blog--it's the easiest, cheapest, and perhaps best way for authors to find an audience and connect with readers. Blogging is an informal, intimate form of communication that inspires trust among your readers.

For the same reasons that traditional advertising is usually ineffective for selling books, a blog can be highly effective for book promotion. People interested in your topic seek out your message.

What is a blog?

Put simply, a blog is a Web site with a few interactive features. You don't have to call it a blog unless you want to. It's possible that within a few years, nearly every Web site will have interactive features, and people simply won't call them blogs anymore.

You needn't know anything about computers to blog. Simply type into a form, and presto--the whole world can see it. Your blog is a _content management _ system--a painless way to build and maintain a platform where readers can discover and enjoy your writing.

A blog can be a part of your Web site, or it can be the Web site. The main thing that distinguishes a blog from a plain old Web site is that a blog is frequently updated with short messages, or _ posts_. Readers often chime in with their own comments at the bottom of each post. This free exchange of ideas is what makes blogs a revolutionary tool for authors: A successful blog is a constant stream of ideas, inspiration, perspective, and advice--it's a real-time, global focus group.

Why blogs are better

Some authors who already have a book for sale resist the idea of blogging and the "extra work" it entails. Their reasoning is, "Why create more deadlines when your book is already finished?" Well, blogging can help you maximize the effectiveness of things you're probably already doing, like answering e-mails from your readers.

Compared with other types of Internet publicity content such as static Web sites or e-mail newsletters, blogs provide three big advantages:

Blogs are easy to start and maintain.

The short, serialized content of blogs encourages regular readership, repeated exposure to your books, and more sales.

Blogs rank high in search-engine results from Google and other providers, making them easy to find.

Why do blogs get so much traffic from search engines? First, blogs are topical. When you're writing about the same topics and ideas day in and day out, your site becomes packed with the keywords your audience is searching for. Stay at it awhile, and it becomes nearly impossible for your target audience to miss you, thanks to Google and the other search engines. Most new visitors will find your site by using a search engine, after looking for words and topics contained in your Web pages.

Another reason blogs are so easy to find is that search engines usually rank them higher than other types of Web sites. Thus your links can show up at the top of search results, which is where most people click.

Google and the other search engines give extra credit to blogs for a couple of reasons:

Blogs are updated frequently, and the assumption is "fresh" content is more valuable.

Blogs tend to have many links from other Web pages with similar content. The assumption is that because other bloggers and Webmasters have decided to link to your content, it's probably valuable.

Your visibility in search results is key, since about 40 percent of your new visitors will likely arrive via a Web search. If your site ranks highly in Web searches for the keywords related to your book, you'll have a constant source of well-qualified visitors and likely book buyers.

Breathing the blogosphere

Step 1 in becoming a blogger is to consume some blogs yourself. Reading other blogs gives you a quick feel for what works, what doesn't, and the techniques you'll want to apply to your own blog.

There are millions of blogs, and finding ones that suit you can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. There's no easy way to filter out low-quality blogs--you've just got to sample what's out there.

A good place to begin is by browsing for blogs about your hobbies, pastimes and passions. You can find a list of the most popular blogs here:

www.Technorati.com/pop/blogs

You can drill down into niche territory by browsing #www.Technorati.com/blogs#, where you'll find a menu of subjects on the left. You can also search blogs by keyword at these sites:

www.Blogsearch.Google.com www.Feedster.com# www.IceRocket.com

Once you've found a few blogs of interest, it's easy to find more. Bloggers tend to link to one another, both within their blog posts, and often within a side menu of links known as a blogroll.

A handy tool for keeping track of all your blogs is a newsreader or aggregator, which saves you the trouble of poking around the Web, looking for new blog posts. Instead, your newsreader gathers and displays updates for you. One free, easy-to-use reader is:

www.Bloglines.com

You'll quickly learn which blogs you've subscribed to are must-reads, and which can be ignored or deleted.

Connecting with readers#

It's natural to be apprehensive about starting a blog. When you first begin, it may feel like being on stage without a script or a view of the audience. Don't worry, feedback will come soon enough. Remember, there's no right or wrong way to blog. The only rule is your target audience must find something worthwhile.

One way to ease into blogging is to start with a temporary blog at #www.Blogger.com#, where you can set up a free practice blog in five minutes. Take a dry run for a week or two, then make your blog public when you're ready.

Good blogs are addictive, which is one reason they're so effective for authors. Many book buyers must be exposed to a title six or seven times before deciding to buy. With a good blog, getting repeated exposure won't be a problem.

A lively blog is like a focus group and writing laboratory rolled into one: It provides you with constant feedback, criticism and new ideas. Your blog readers will pepper you with comments and e-mails. When you've struck a chord, you'll know immediately from the response. When you lay an egg, you'll know that, too, from the silence.

Just as theater companies try out new productions in the hinterlands before storming Broadway, authors can fine-tune their material on their blog, says technology writer Clive Thompson:

Ask writers who blog regularly--like me--and they'll tell you how exciting it is to be wired in directly to your audience. They correspond with you, pass you tips, correct your factual blunders, and introduce you to brilliant new ideas and people. The Internet isn't just an audience, it's an auxiliary brain. But you have to turn it on, and it takes work. You can't fake participation and authenticity online.

Indeed, the true power of blogging is the momentum created by your audience. Once your blog has 100 frequent readers, it has critical mass. It may take six months or a year to get there, but from there it's all downhill. Members of your core audience begin competing to hand you the most useful, compelling ideas by writing comments on your blog and e-mailing you directly. That's when your blog becomes electric, a magnet attracting new readers. Your core audience swells as word of mouth goes viral. #Blog comments: pros and cons#

Most blogs include space below the author's posts