All of the articles and folks I spoke to emphasis one thing and it may seem simple, but incredibly important that your work is good.  Like other product manufacturers what you are selling has to be a good product.  If reading your book is not interesting or engaging no one will buy it, so have a great idea, make sure your writing is specific to the genre and don’t try to write one book that covers fiction and non-fiction.  E-book lists give the readers a taste before they buy and you want your taste to be a mouthful!

Create an interesting cool cover for your book. Not many people realize that an e-book needs have a cover like a print book, and the best most professional cover art you can add to your book is going to make an impact. Cover art for an eBook needs to look good small (icons and thumbnails) and stand out among the crowd. You might want to work with a professional graphics designer to get a good image, for an e-book you just need an image with decent resolutions but not so that it sticks out as a sore thumb, there might be a great book that is the next Moby Dick but no one read it because of bad cover art.

Don’t try to recover all the hourly wage you missed while writing your book, price your e-book inexpensively.  Making a killing in the e-book market is not going to be with one book sale, the best results show that being in the $0.99 to $2.99 range is most successful, plus you avoid (okay you didn’t hear this from me first) the higher royalty costs from Amazon for Kindle e-books, 70% , applies to e-books between $2.99 and $9.99. You might want to go somewhere between to be head above the flood of lower priced books.

Run away from companies, publishing or otherwise that do not allow you control over setting the price of your e-book.  Deciding what you are going to price your book for is a critical part of the process.  What route are you seeking for the sales of the e-book, wide distribution and maximum exposure or maybe you have new ideas or emerging technology, then you should price it higher.  As the author you should be the one to decide what route to go.

Lastly marketing is all about creating a buzz about your e-book.  E-book publishing has made the marketing of a book the job of the author, along with self promotion to get wider audiences and readers.  Before in the print world an author had an agent, a publicist, and a publishing house to do most of this work for them, but now self-publishing has opened the door to marketing for authors and their own books. You need to learn and use social media applications to get your e-book on to computers, iPads, Kindles, Nooks and other devices. You need to use Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to gain followers and readers. The largest part of this that most authors find daunting is marketing is not a one off situation; it has to be maintained almost daily to get the word out.

Sometimes home workers (okay I dont have a big hip hip hooray for that title but it is what it is) and freelancers spread themselves too thin across a variety of tasks/skills. I believe that being all things to all projects isnt always the best mantra to chant.

Oddly when we apply for conventional jobs we look for positions that focus on one specific skill or experience but when deciding to make the leap  into the freelance pool we scramble to create a laundry list of services to offer. Graphic designers are doing book layouts, Software developers are building apps for everything from the netbook to my Kitchen Aid, SEO experts are branding everything that grows out of the ground.

Why not become an expert in one at one thing, rather than the typical “Jack of All Trades” which is followed by “master of none”, be the expert. If you are a logo designer, be the bestest, fastest, most innovative logo designer ever! There are so many new businesses, service companies and professionals hitting the market that logos are now a trade unto itself.

If you have projects going now take a look at your clients, are they appreciative of your time and your hard work? Then plan to concentrate on finding more clients like them that will enable you to get more work done during the day and you will certainly see a growth in your income.

Another indicator of where you should focus your time and work is what area of your work is generating the most income, for example again logo design comprised the marjority of income during say a 30 day period, but the projects you worked on for template design or psd to HTML did not; it is clear that logo design is going to be more profitable and I would wager a dollar that you enjoy doing it more than the other two.  Not going to be a huge shock to you but maybe logo design is something that you enjoy doing and consequently you spend more time on those jobs.

I find that  my work as a theme/template developer is something that I enjoy emmensely, I have a minor in art and “painting” a look for a website is a way for me to enjoy what I do. That is where my focus is and it is where the majority of my income is generated. However there are other skills and experience I have that turn a dollar now and then, so I look at those opportunities closely before accepting them.

Most importantly find what works for you, dont get discouraged it might take some trial and error but be persistent.

It takes time for Technorati to complete the promotion process for your blog but is well worth it considering the company you are keeping and the immediate benefit from having your blog listed, they promote to other sources looking for content as well, some of the blogs posted at Technorati are Huffington Post, TechCrunch, TMZ, BuzzFeed, and the Official Google Blog.  To read about how to add your blog click here.

How to proceed, first of all create an account at Technorati, its free and really easy to do. Once that is completed you can add details about yourself in the profile, wise move s that when your blog is claimed your information is their so folks can see other things you are writing about or doing.

Now you have your account and are ready to claim your blog.  At the bottom of your profile page is Claim Your Blog. Type in the name of your blog and click the Claim button. Then you add Blog Title, URL (this should be already filled in if you typed the url in the blank by Claim button), Feed url (if you are adding your Writers Cafe blog then you will use: http://www.tweekniks.com/yourblogname/feed/ in this blank, you need to know what goes where “yourblogname” is email me and I can help you.

After than you can add 3 additional linking blogs, ones you write for or those of friends.

In the Site Description you want to add what your blog is about, how you started it, about yourself or other interesting facts. This should be used as a metadata section to add to the promotion of your blog.

Site Categories is another way to define and add tags for your blog, you may not find exactly what your main theme or focus is but be sure to pick the limit of three as close as you can get, for one thing I noticed there is not category for women. I have already notified them that I really feel there should be such an additional catagory.

Now here is where you can really shine in Site Tags! Add them all make sure you have something in all the spaces to take complete advantage of this.

Then you click the next step button and the Blog Claim Status information appears.  Once you reach here an email is sent to you with a token  to be added to a blog post and the post published so that the Technorati bots/spiders can review your blog find the token and know that your claim to this blog is as the blog owner. This prevents a script being written to add multiple blogs.

While I have posted Writers Cafe as a group and all 19 of your blogs individually to several promotion sites and feed lists I can not do Technorati for you because as I said above it requires a token be placed in a published blog post.   If you want to reach more readers and more opportunities to be read or your content used and be paid for it listing on the Technorati site  might be worth the time.

3FCFFGTXF8FS

Compete and Win in 10 Categories!

• Inspirational Writing (Spiritual/Religious)
• Memoirs/Personal Essay
• Magazine Feature Article
• Genre Short Story (Mystery, Romance, etc.)
• Mainstream/Literary Short Story
• Rhyming Poetry
• Non-rhyming Poetry
• Stage Play
• Television/Movie Script
• Children’s/Young Adult Fiction

Entry Fee: Poems are $15 for the first entry; $10 for each additional poem submitted in the same online session. All other entries are $25 for the first manuscript; $15 for each additional manuscript submitted in the same online session.

Add $5 per manuscript to all entries submitted after May 2, 2011. Entries submitted after May 20, 2011, will not be accepted.

1. Go to Appearance/Menus and click on Create Menu

2. Name the Menu and then go to Custom Links

3. Type in http://www.tweekniks.com/

4. Click Save Menu

5. Go to Appearance/Widgets and click on Custom Menu and chose the menu you just created from the list.  Dont put a title in the Widget and the link will just show up as a link, however you can add a title if you want to add other links to this menu besides the back to Writers Cafe.

6. Move the custom menu to the sidebar.

And you are set to go!

I would ask that you go slowly and read carefully all of the steps. If you have questions before I get all the lessons or information on this post please email admin@tweekniks.com and I will be happy to answer them. As I add each section I will send an email out to the group.

Share and Follow How To Publish to Social Media Sites, Facebook and More

Reading is where you set the settings for what your blog looks like on the Front page, for example if you look at the main page of Writers you will see that the page posted there is “Whose Writing”, this is not a post but a page that we told the blog we wanted to use as our custom Front page.

As you can see from the image, I chose a static page that I had already created to be the home page for the main blog and chosen the first post “All About Us” to be the first blog post that shows up when anyone looks at the site.  Default is (if you log in and look at your own blogs ) to be your latest posts.

The next setting you can change is how many blog pages show up, the standard is 10 pages (posts) will show up on the Front page of your blog. If you look at my blog, Kates Space,  I have changed this setting to 2, so only 2 posts show on the Front page of my blog. At the bottom of the page there is a link that says Older posts,and will take the reader to older entries I have written.

If someone signs up for your RSS feed they will get links to 10 posts from your blog and you can change this number as well.

Next you can set whether in your feed they will see the full text of the post you wrote (article) or just a summary and they will have to click to come to the blog to read the full entry.  I ask that you not change the Encoding for pages and feeds field as that will then prevent anyone from reading or linking to your blog.

So there you go, very simply you can control the number of posts seen on your Front page, the rest will appear as pages when the Older Entries link is clicked.  And anticipating your question, no we cant change the Older Entries link and no we cannot alter how that appears.

When you click the button it will ask you to login to that media so you will need accounts on any of the ones you are interested in posting too, such as Facebook, Twitter and so on. The more places you post your work the more people will be able to see it.

Happy writing!

]]> http://www.tweekniks.com/blog/2011/01/sending-your-work-into-the-world-how-to-post-to-facebook/feed/ 0 http://www.tweekniks.com/blog/2011/01/adding-a-blogroll/ http://www.tweekniks.com/blog/2011/01/adding-a-blogroll/#comments Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:19:37 +0000 admin http://www.tweekniks.com/?p=272 1.       Login to the Admin (http://www.tweekniks.com/yourblogname) and go to Links menu on the left side of the page.

2.       Chose Categories and then Link Categories

3.       Create a Category and name it BlogRoll – you can add a description of the category if you want to.

4.       Now you have your category in the Links section named BlogRoll

5.       Click on Add New,  type in the name of the blog you want to  add to your BlogRoll, the URL, be sure you add the http://, the best way to do this is go to the blog and copy the url, then  past it into Web Address.

6.       Description – again you can add a description of the blog if you wish too.

7.       Category – as you can see your Link Category “BlogRoll” now shows up categories.

8.       Add Link – Click on this button to save the link, then go on to the next link you are adding to yor blog roll.

9.       Now go to Appearance, and click on Widgets. Here you will see all the elements you can add to your blog, find the Widget named Links, underneath that you will see in small type “Your Blogroll”, click on the Widget title and move it to the Sidebar where you want it to show up on your blog.