Recently, Mario Lurig, the creator of NovelRank, left a comment on LLBR and added all of our reviewer’s books to his site. Mario’s site tracks your book’s sales on Amazon, and his service is free. It’s a great tool for authors and Mario is always posting lots of useful information on the blog portion of his site. Look for a post later today highlighting the “best and worst of Lulu.” We caught up with Mario to learn more about NovelRank and how it works.
One of the things I absolutely love about reviewing books, is I get to hear from excited authors about fun things that are happening with their work. Sometimes it might be an upswing in sales, or interviews which help broaden the exposure.
April Hamilton, founder of Publetariat.com, a website designed for indie authors, recently interviewed me about my thoughts on self-publishing, my personal use of Lulu, and the creation of the LLBR. I’ve always been a fan of April’s, ever since both of us participated in the very first ABNA contest. It’s amazing to look back and see how far both of us have come since then, and to see what we have accomplished. To me, Publetariat is my online newspaper of information when it comes to self-publishing. Before visiting all of the other review blogs, I usually stop there at least once a day.
Here at LLBR, we love to hear success stories from self-published authors and from writers who are using Lulu.com to their advantage. Recently, we were introduced to a website called Theo-Saurus. They provide specialized children’s books for their customers and use Lulu mainly as their printer. We contacted Leah Herde, writer and owner of Theo-Saurus, to learn about about her business and how it works.
Reviewer LK Gardner-Griffie recently came across Lulu author P.J. Cowan’s Storefront and instantly fell in love with her children’s book collection and each books’ amazing illustrations which were provided by artist Mike Motz. After a visit to Mike’s website, we discovered he’s illustrated quite a few Lulu books and a big part of his work is helping authors bring their books to life.
Read an E-Book Week is March 8th through the 14th, but you don’t need a Sony E-reader or Amazon Kindle to participate. There are lots of Ebooks available from Lulu which can be downloaded right to your desktop as a PDF file.
Let’s start 2009 with a success story! I had the pleasure of reading Robert Toonkel’s book, Chappaqua, in August as part of our Back to School focus. Just yesterday, I noticed Robert’s book had gone live on Amazon since the review. I decided to cross post our review to his Amazon page and also noticed the book had a new cover.
To start this month off, LLBR caught up with Mick Rooney, author of Academy which we reviewed earlier this year. Mick returned to Lulu this month with a new book, Filigree & Shadow. His author blog has always been a wealth of information covering not just his Lulu experiences, but also other news and events about other mainstream POD publishers.
Earlier this year, we had the pleasure of first discovering Will Entrekin’s work while reading his self-titled book, Entrekin, for one of the first reviews for this blog. In his book, Will has an essay called “What I Saw That Day,” which recounts Will’s personal story of being in Manhattan on the day of the World Trade Center attacks seven years ago. Recently, we visited with Will again to interview him about that essay and to talk about his plans to blog it on the anniversary this year.
Do you love to read?
Do you support the POD community?
Can you be critical, yet positive?
Do you like to review books?
If so, we'd love to hear from you. LLBR is looking to add a few more reviewers to its team. Email us at llbookreview@gmail.com for details.
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