Nonfiction Ink

Your website home page is a powerful marketing tool that, when designed effectively, can help establish your expertise and credibility, grow your business, and increase sales. Home Sweet Home Page gives a quick (this is a short 70-page booklet) overview of the most important elements of a website home page to help experts and authors develop websites that accurately convey brand, resonate with the target market, convert visitors to customers, and produce sales.

Author Carma Spence-Pothitt lays out the “Five Deadly Mistakes”:

1. Lack of Clarity – no clear purpose

2. Lack of Professionalism – wrong colors, fonts, or images, and poor navigation or layout

3. Lack of Invitation to Continue the Conversation – not collecting visitor information with an opt-in form

4. Lack of a Reason to Continue the Conversation – no compelling opt0in incentive to lead prospects into your marketing funnel

5. Poorly Written Copy – lack of strong headlines and enticing sub-heads, inappropriate voice, and content that is difficult to read

Spence-Pothitt outlines why these mistakes are deadly and provides “The Fix”  – easy to understand advice and tips to take immediate action. Home Sweet Home Page includes examples of effective website home pages and additional resources to study.

By Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman, Michael Larson, and David L. Hancock

Guerrilla Marketing For Writers offers proven, non-traditional marketing tactics to help authors sell their books before and after publication, based on the “The Fifteen Most Important Marketing Secrets”:

1. Content that delivers
2. Commitment to a marketing program
3. Investment in your marketing campaign
4. Consistent marketing
5. Displaying confidence
6. Patience with your marketing plan
7. Using an assortment of marketing strategies
8. Understanding that profits come subsequent to the sale
9. Providing convenience for customers
10. Adding an element of ‘amazement’ to your marketing
11. Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaign
12. Involvement with readers
13. Interdependence between you and your alliances
14. The technology and skills to promote
15. Consent from the people you market to

The authors begin with an overview of how the publishing industry works and then delve into the most powerful weapons in your arsenal for selling your book:

• You
• Your Networks
• Word of Mouth
• Viral Marketing
• Platform
• Talks
• Tours
• Publicity

The book details 100 low-cost and no-cost marketing strategies including: your elevator speech, TV, radio, and print interviews, satellite tours, media/speaker’s kit, press releases, strategic alliances, webcasts, giveaways, surveys, reading and discussion groups newsletters, articles, audio, and video. Each strategy is accompanied by “guerrilla tactic” tips, such as this one related to business cards, “Double the width of your card and fold it in half, so you have four sides for information. And if you leave it flat – voila! – it’s a bookmark.”

The authors intersperse real-life “war stories” throughput the text and include an information-packed resource section with a Sample Media Kit, a Publicity Campaign Timeline, a detailed Publicity Questionnaire, and a list of the Top 100 Markets in the U.S. For authors needing a few more marketing “weapons”, Guerrilla Marketing for Writers delivers.

The Business of Books in an exceptional resource. Author Claudia Suzanne covers the entire process of getting a book to market: developing the concept, research, pitching, landing a book deal, writing, editing, book design, production, distribution, fulfillment, and marketing and promotion. Suzanne also provides an insightful explanation of the three publishing options (traditional publishing, self-publishing, and vanity presses/subsidy publishers) and an extensive and useful list of links and resources. A great book I can recommend to both clients and students to help them gain an understanding of the book industry.

The title of The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Writing Business Books is misleading, since the book doesn’t actually teach the reader how to write a business book. Only 10 pages of the book (in the brief chapter “Voice, Point of View, and Style”) deal with any aspect of writing a book.

Instead the author provides material (divided into six sections) on:

1. Testing your business book idea
2. Writing your proposal and sample chapter
3. Finding an agent and other helpers
4. Finding a publisher and negotiating a contract
5. Writing and publicizing your book
6. Using your published book to enhance your career

And while the content is well presented, I am left wondering, “Where is the material promised by the book’s title?” There are much better, and more thorough, books on the topics of:

Developing book proposals: Bulletproof Book Proposals by Pam Brodowsky and Eric Neuhaus, Michael Larson’s How To Write a Book Proposal, or Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write by Elizabeth Lyon

Finding a literary agent: How To Get A Literary Agent by Michael Larson, and my own The Complete Guide To Hiring A Literary Agent

Publicizing and marketing your book: From Book To Bestseller by Penny Sansevieri, Steve Weber’s Plug Your Book, and 1001 Ways To Market Your Books by John Kremer

Too bad The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Writing Business Books doesn’t deliver on the topic of writing business books – I’m sure many entrepreneurs aspiring to write business books could use a good business book-writing manual.

Written by a respected literary agent and a published author, Bulletproof Book Proposals provides succinct, clear, to-the-point instructions for crafting a winning book proposal. Authors Brodowsky and Neuhaus break the process into 10 simple steps:

* Defining your idea
* Choosing a title
* Crafting the opener
* Defining your market
* Analyzing the competition
* Developing a platform
* Selling yourself
* Creating chapter outlines
* Writing sample chapters
* Packaging your proposal

with exercises to help you accomplish each step effectively.

While there are numerous resources available that teach writers how to develop a compelling book proposal, what sets this book apart from the rest is the inclusion of 12 real-life book proposals that successfully landed book deals. Each proposal includes commentary from the author, editor, and agent on why the proposal sold – making Bulletproof Book Proposals an invaluable resource.

Aspiring authors often put off writing a book because they can’t seem to find the time.

In Time To Write, author Kelly Stone offers practical advice and solid methods, along with a heavy dose of inspiration, to help writers stop procrastinating and get to writing.

With tips from more than 100 successful authors, Time To Write is packed with valuable information on:

* Time management
* Creating a writing schedule
* Action plans
* Motivation strategies
* Establishing writing routines
* Outlining and achieving goals

Warning: once you read this book you’ll have no more excuses for not finding the time to write.

Check out Words by Webb to read a review of my latest book The Complete Guide To Hiring A Literary Agent.

Write It Sideways is reviewing my book The Complete Guide To Hiring A Literary Agent today. Check out this great blog.

Literary agent Katherine Sand’s book Making the Perfect Pitch offers a series of short articles and tips from top literary agents designed to help aspiring authors “catch a literary agent’s eye”. The chapter on “Pitching Collaborative Projects” is an informative and enlightening overview on the topic, but the short chapter on “How To Find and Contact an Agent” is too basic – most writers searching for agents will require more extensive detail on the subject.

This book is not a step-by-step guide on how to craft a pitch (the query letter, the synopsis, the book proposal); the book’s strength and value lies in the significant insider information provided by literary agents on what they look for in a pitch, their preferences, dislikes, and advice about pitching “do’s and don’ts”. You’ll get insights from 40 well-known and respected literary agents and experts, including Donald Maass, Jane Dystel, Michael Larson, Sheree Bykofsky, Jeff Herman, and Harvey Klinger.

Line By Line: How To Edit Your Own Writing demystifies line editing and enables authors to polish their own manuscripts. Author Claire Kehrwald Cook walks writers through the process step-by step from how to read and evaluate a sentence, to how to condense sentences to succinctly and clearly convey meaning. Along the way she tackles all the usual suspects: weak verbs, prepositional phrases, modifiers, structure, ambiguous words, parallelism and correlative conjunctions, punctuation, and subject-verb disagreement.

Most helpful are the extensive glossary of ‘questionable word usage’ and the numerous examples that help guide readers during editing. Used alongside a good book on grammar (such as Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips For Better Writing) and a professional developmental editor, Line By Line is a valuable resource for any writer wanting to craft a well-written manuscript.