With all the news about E-books . . .

. . . you should be paying attention, whether you’re an author, a would-be author, a speaker (with or without BOR materials) or a coach whose expertise is currently limited to a local clientele. It’s becoming increasingly clear that for you an effective E-Book strategy is vital to your success!

Only a few short years ago, E-Books were just about irrelevant. Today, with the advent of e-readers and an earthquake of change in the publishing industry, E-books have become an extremely powerful — and easily accessible — tool for starting a small business, generating revenue, building up an email list, generating leads for your business, test marketing a book, increasing profits and expanding your reach.

Thanks to my friend David Riklan, who is the founder of SelfGrowth.com, here’s an opportunity for you to take part in a no-cost online seminar that he will be presenting later in the month of August. It’s an hour-long presentation based upon his own startling experience with E-books as business-builders and promotional tools. It’s titled “The Power of E-Books and E-Book Marketing,” and it will take place later this month (August) — at three different times on the 10th and 11th to give you the most flexibility for attending.

While building his imposing web presence, David developed an astonishing strategy using E-Books that helped him generate massive revenue, increase traffic to his website, and help build up an enormous set of email lists totaling more than 950,000 subscribers!

In one 24-hour campaign, he generated $108,142 in revenue from E-Book sales alone! He has used this same E-Book strategy to help make his website the #1-ranked Self Improvement site on the Internet! SelfGrowth.com now gets over 1 million visitors a month.

In addition to the incredible financial rewards that he has earned, David has used free E-Books to get many thousands of qualified subscribers to his web site and newsletters, and he even used his first E-Book to test- market his successful print book.

Best of all, he created an informative, useful nonfiction E-Book from scratch in less than one week! Sound enticing? During this informative free TeleSeminar, he’ll teach you how you can do the exact same thing — and more, regardless of whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction!

He has room for only 500 callers on his bridge line, and I know that there will be a full house for this event, so if you’d like to attend this exclusive seminar, sign up now, while space is still available. The cut-off could be just hours away.

To enroll right now, go to: http://tinyurl.com/2d27nxr. You will receive complete information about the date(s), time(s) and contact number for this exciting “workshop” by return e-mail.

Announcing: Merry-Go_Round Media Blitz

We want you to be among the first to know that our Author’s Roost Merry-Go-Round Media Blitz campaign is being set up right now to kick off in October, and you can be a major beneficiary!

All Author’s Roost members will soon have a powerful, new promotional tool working for them (automatically and as a part of their membership!) as we begin our four-times-yearly contact program with over 6,500 media representatives and event planners.

We’ll be in regular contact with network, regional and local TV show hosts and line producers, radio talk shows, Internet publications — including broadcasters, bloggers and newsletter publishers — plus print newspapers and magazines, free-lance writers, and event planners, speaker bureaus and other sales channels for professional speakers.

Our plan is to make regular contact (every October, January, April and July) with these influential people, companies and programs, inviting them to use The Author’s Roost as a source for the talent they seek for their specific businesses.

And as time passes, we also want to update our list and grow it to encompass even more media people who might be interested in YOU!

Your plan should be to

* join us;

* establish a detailed profile for yourself;

* keep it updated regularly via our user-friendly, instant-update content management system; and

* check our Home Page at least weekly for new developments in writing, speaking, coaching, consulting and all of the other communication specialties we serve.

So, if you’re already a member, smile! Then contact your friends, colleagues and associates and tell them about The Author’s Roost.
(By the way, check out the second paragraph below and see how you can actually make your membership pay you!)

If you’re not yet a member but are an author, speaker, coach, consultant, trainer, seminar leader or workshop producer, check out our whole site and consider joining us as we grow.

And no matter who you are, if you would like to convert your interest in The Author’s Roost into cash in your pocket, take a look at our AR Affiliate program: click here.

We’re moving right along, and we’d like you to come with us in one way or another. Come on over and say “Hello, there!”

April Fool’s Day — but this is a no foolin’ subject

All excited about e-books these days? Perfectly natural — it’s what you’re hearing about all over the Internet. But wait a minute!

Futurist Joan Foltz turned her attention to the long-term prospects for the publishing industry at a meeting we attended yesterday, and here’s a summary that you shouldn’t miss, thanks to Phoenix PR pro Linda VandeVrede.

http://www.lindavan devrede.com/ book-publishing/ the-future- of-book-publishi ng-and-ebooks- 2/

One of our members needs help

Jeanne Eck, an Author’s Roost Beta Member (one of the first ones!), needs a little help. Reproduced here is the email she sent us today. If you have just a few minutes, follow her lead and perhaps give her a boost toward staying “in the running” for the award she references:

Help!
I have entered a worldwide contest for a publishing contract with Hampton Roads, one of the top publishers in the field.
This is a fabulous opportunity for doors to be opened for my work that few writers ever have the opportunity to access.
For the past year, I’ve been working on a novel called “Silver Strands.” I decided to submit it to the contest because it is so unique and timely. Of course, winning the competition will also help “I Am Happier to Know You” which, thanks to my distributor is selling so well I will have to do a second printing!
Because today’s authors must show upfront that they can market their books, a major component of the first stage of the contest  is to demonstrate my willingness and ability to do so in the first phase of the competition by attaining a flood of votes from everyone I know. Stages 2-4 will center more around my writing ability.
This is where I need your help. There are 2500 entries, but only 250 authors will be chosen to go forward to round two. I can do the writing, but I can’t do the voting. If you would please go to http://www.nexttopspiritualauthor.com/index.cfm
You can listen to my audio about “Silver Strands,” read a small blurb and sign up and vote for “Silver Strands. Your vote  will get me into the next stage of the contest. Clear instructions are there. My contest account # is 542. You can only vote for “Silver Strands” once.
Please pass this information on to everyone you know who will be willing to help.
Love and blessings, Jeanne
—————————————————————————–
I Am Happier to Know You is an award-winning finalist in the Spirituality/General Category for the Best Books 2006 Book Awards. It is available at: http://www.jeannemeck.com

Just Another Day in Paradise

“Live and Learn” — an expression I used to have fun with. But when it’s me who is doing the learning, things sometimes get complicated and reason deserts me.

Today it’s more about the Author’s Roost website, and this time it’s about “spam.”

Seems as though one of our members — only one! — began to receive spam (pornography) via a form we had mounted on our site to make it easy for members of the media to contact our members for quotes, stories, interviews, book reviews, etc.

We thought it was a wonderful idea, and we still do. But we apparently didn’t set up appropriate screening for incoming material. Once it had begun, try as we might, we couldn’t get the flow of obscene mail to stop. Needless to say, the member became first disconcerted, then angry.

We worked with our webmaster; we worked with our hosting provider; we worked ourselves up into a lather. And finally, our web developer, after suggesting a number of possible solutions (none of which worked effectively) suggested the only answer we really didn’t want to use  –  a “Captcha” system that cannot be penetrated by the “robots” that send out all the trash our poor client had been receiving.

Why didn’t we want to use “Captcha”? Because when someone from the media is looking for the kinds of information our members can provide, the media representative is usually up against very tight deadlines (I know, I spent nearly ten years in broadcasting and hosted one of the first audience-participation telephone talk shows broadcast in New York state — yes, I know, that was a lot of years ago!).

There are times when even the few extra seconds needed to copy the little letters and numbers from the “Captcha” screen into the verification block can become an obstacle to making contact at all — and we certainly don’t want that.

However — and this is a big one — since nothing else was working, here was the only practical solution. So we are implementing it, much against our own better judgment.

If you have any ideas, comment back, please! We can use all the help we can get.

The Ides of March

Paul here:

I never realized the number of “issues” that arise when putting together an organization like The Author’s Roost. Working with so many people, all of whom are technical specialists of one sort or another, is both an education and a confusion — all at the same time.

But as we move through each day, solving little problems, nurturing new ideas and suggestions from members and friends, the rewards are enormous. Not only do we learn “easy ways” to get things done, but we learn how to pass them along to members and site visitors.

Take our newest member service, for example — the “Hello, there” program.

Some time ago, we began wondering how we could help members to promote themselves in their own neighborhoods, cities or regions.  “Well,” we postulated, “who knows a local scene better than the person who lives there.” Made sense to us. And we also knew (from asking members and from personal experience) that many authors — and newly minted speakers — aren’t very well equipped to promote themselves. There seem to be two basic reasons for this.

First, an author writes out of a need to express, or perhaps to teach. But “marketing” often doesn’t figure in; few writers have the knowledge, experience or insight into industry facts and trends to know what might work and what might not. And yet, the objective, long term, is to sell books. Same is true for speakers selling their talk topics — at least until the newbie speaker accumulates the experience and confidence to “self-sell” effectively. Which bring me to the second point, which is:

Most of us find it embarrassingly difficult to talk about ourselves in “selling” terms. It’s all about feeling somehow guilty about imposing our will on others. We want to be liked; we don’t want to offend; and we all too often won’t do the things that will market us effectively because we feel that we’re “pressuring” or “bragging” or another equally unseemly perception. No matter that we’re wrong in fact, we’re just trapped in feelings of insecurity.

That’s why we so often hire others to do our “dirty work” (unfortunately, many authors and speakers think of their sales, sales promotion and marketing campaigns in just this way!). Publicists, online marketers, and advertising specialists all cost money, and there are precious few who can or will produce outstanding results.

With this as background, we came up with an interesting, simple, self-protective way to get around the “call reluctance” that so many of our members experience when trying to sell their products.

We call it the “Hello, there” program. Simply stated, it’s an authoritative, third-party “introduction” that we make to the event planners, program chairpersons, booksellers, etc. who are local to each of our members and who can provide our people with terrific exposure if only they can find a way to make contact. Well, we do it for them. Want details? Here they are.

“Go Live” Day — Plus One

Server problems, switchover delays — We’re a little more than 25 hours overdue, but it does look as though the Author’s Roost site will be up and running late on Tuesday, February 2.
Lots more content to add, lots more members to attract — but we’re moving in the right direction and have lots of loyal beta testers and charter members to thank for that. I promise, we’ll live up to your expectations.

Welcome to The Author’s Roost blog

First day on the new blog. We’re still in beta test on the Author’s Roost site, and our landing page is about to update (January 4). . .

http://www.authorsroost.com

so this is the time to experiment.

More later . . .