Congrats to fellow LLBR reviewers, LK Gardner-Griffie and Dan Marvin! Both of their books made the Top BookBuzzr Books list for August 2009 according to the BookBuzzr newsletter today.
It’s been a busy summer for me! Working in the textbook industry for me is like the month of December for retailers, except our rush season starts July 5th and lasts for almost three months as college bookstores prepare for students to return to campus. After coming home from a grueling day, the last thing I wanted to do was to look at a book, much less anything related to books. But Facebook and its many “Oregon Trail” like games helped to distress my busy mind supplying a numbing sensation and much time wasted watching virtual crops grow.
I was excited to get an email from Amazon.com’s Author Central Team yesterday announcing they had finally given a bit more spotlight to the Author Central program. As you may recall, in the past if you had an Amazon Connect blog it could be found right at the bottom of your product page. Amazon decided that blogs probably ate up too much selling space, so they launched a new program called Author Central.
I posted about Amazon’s new improved Author Central pages this time last month. While setting up my own page, I decided to email Amazon and ask them about my Amazon Connect blog being removed from my book’s pages. I received a reply today:
John Buckman is one of my favorite people. For over a year now I have been a member of and passionately promoted his website called BookMooch. BookMooch is an online book swapping community where you list books you want to give away to gain points to mooch books you want from other members. You earn more points from members who mooch books from you. The only expense is the cost to ship your own mooched books. To date, I have given away almost 80 books on BookMooch and received 62 other books I wanted to read.
The Publetariat Vault brings literary works already proven in the commercial marketplace to the direct
attention of acquisitions pros, thereby reducing their risk. For authors, this means no query, no agent, no
“connections” are needed.
Have any other authors out there received an email from Amazon saying your new Author Central page is ready? I received mine earlier this week. I immediately signed in to take a look. I added a picture, a biography, and also updated my bibliography to include the books that LuluPress has listed on Amazon now including an early chapbook of my poetry I put together in 2006 as a gift for my Mom and Dad.
We’ve mentioned that we now would like to post online previews of your work along with the written review, so that any readers of the review can not only see what our opinion is, but can check the work for themselves and see whether they agree or disagree.
I’m always on the look out for a good marketing tip to share with our authors! Yesterday, I was given a reusable “green” shopping bag from a university bookstore and as soon as I saw the word “bookstore” printed on the bag I thought it would be an excellent promotional item if authors printed a picture of their book’s cover on the bag.
Yesterday, I posted about an email blast I got from Lulu saying my book had been picked to be part of the Amazon Marketplace program. Today, I have more information to add to that for the authors who are in the dark just as much as I am over the information presented in this Lulu email, or lack thereof.
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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