In random tech/social media news: Here are 10 Tips for being awesome online, a post on how to get more Twitter followers, and the best book editors on Twitter.

In all things iPad: From the New York Review of books, the iPad vs the Kindle. From Fast Company,10 essential iPad tips. For people who have an iPad and use Dropbox (like moi), DropBox has come to iPad. And from this past weekend’s Hacks/Hackers Unite Conference, a list of iPad media app ideas.

From SF Gate, three Bay Area authors use the Internet to get their books out.

In other news, agent Janet Reid foresees a publishing revolution in the arrival of the enhanced e-book.

Alan Rinzler hypes the benefits of creating an iPad app for your book.

Nathan Bransford had a great post on voice a while back and another on how to write a one-sentence pitch. Also, if you missed it, the one sentence, one paragraph, and two paragraph pitch.

Samuel Park sings the praises of wrieaders and answers the question we blogger writers ask ourselves every day: Does blogging help?

Intern deconstructs the novel.

Eric at Pimp My Novel says you don’t need an MFA to write literary fiction.

Agent Kristen Nelson answers the question, does age matter when you’re trying to get published?

Guest blogger for Rants & Ramblings, Mary DeMuth says writers must be three Ts in order to succeed: tenacious, talkative, teachable.

And in case you missed Betty White on SNL on May 8, you can see
here.

Happy Memorial Day to everyone!

Agent Nathan Bransford has a post on creating a Series Bible. A Series Bible is to a book (or series of books) what a script supervisor is to a movie—the person who makes sure a character’s hair looks the same in each scene and that they’re wearing the correct blouse, etc. to give the illusion of continuity.

And via Nathan, a post from the Gatekeeper on whom to thank in your acknowledgments.

Agent Rachelle Gardner asks what do you give up in order to write? And she has another great post about what goes into a publishing contract.

As usual, editor Alan Rinzler has a great post on eavedropping on conversations to help you write authentic dialogue, a practice I highly recommend. And another on building courage as a writer. His advice? Go skydiving!

Intern gives her thoughts on book trailers for unpublished books, which I found intriguing since I was considering making one myself.

Samuel Park writes about the future of books and why he thinks they’re around to stay. And he has another great post about the power of coincidence, or, how much luck plays a role in your getting published. I love Samuel’s blog. If you haven’t yet subscribed to it, go do it right now!

Roni at Fiction Groupie has a post on e-publishing and whether you should go that route.

Jane Friedman at No Rules talks about managing multiple identities online.

Last but not least, from Literary Agency Upstart Crow, can you boil your book down to 25 words or less? These people did.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you writing moms out there! I hope they serve you breakfast in bed!

From the Guardian via Elizabeth at Fog City Writer, is crowfunding the way of the future?

Also from the Guardian, is your reading suffering from multimedia overload?

Agent Rachelle Gardner warns writers to think hard before self-publishing while editor Alan Rinzler gives four reasons self-published books get picked up by traditional publishers.

From Galley Cat, the National Book Critic Circle Award Winners, which were handed out last night.

Also from Galley Cat, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood is writing the score for the movie adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

And a glimpse at Apple’s iBooks store.

Guide to Literary Agents guest blogger Peta Jinnath Andersen has a post on what to do once you’ve set up your writers’ blog.

Intern puts out a call for guest bloggers. This is your chance to MOCK Intern while garnering tons of new followers. Get on it!

And before I disappear for the weekend, what were your favorite links these past couple of weeks? Any one in particular?

Alicia Dunams is author of the Amazon bestseller Goal Digger. She is a dynamic speaker, book packager, and business coach.

In 2007, you self-published a book titled, Goal Digger: Lessons Learned From the Rich Men I Dated. Why did you choose to self-publish?

I shopped it around to literary agents and was told I didn’t have a big enough platform to sell a book, so I did it myself. I thought the whole literary agent/traditional publishing route was a block, and I was on a roll. The book was done, and I just wanted it out. The publishing of the book created a certain platform for me.

How can a book be used to build your brand?

I didn’t make money with Goal Digger, but because I published that book, in my first full year of coaching, I made six figures. When I wrote the book, I figured, okay, I wrote the book, how am I going to make money? Because I wasn’t making money selling $15 books. So I started picking up the phone. I called other authors who specialized in wealth creation for women—Loral Langemeier, Christine Comaford, and Marci Shimoff—and I decided to create a seminar. I did it all myself, but I had 13 speakers. I thought I’ll charge $300 and everyone will come—and they didn’t. I got totally burned out, and I think I was in the red. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was doing everything myself. I marketed the seminar, and a week before Loral Langemeier was in San Jose. I, along with a thousand other people, paid $1000 to see her. And I could hardly give tickets away to my seminar. That was in January, 2008. I wasn’t on any of the social networks. Facebook and Twitter were just getting popular in the business and networking community then.

How many copies of Goal Digger did you sell?

2500. I printed 3500 and I have about a thousand left. I found that it was tough to sell books, and it’s tough to be in the book peddling business. Writing the book is the easy part. Selling it it hard. You have to have an audience—whether your book is fiction or nonfiction. For fiction, it has to be damn good. For nonfiction books, you have to have a marketing plan in place, people following you. Whether you sell financial products or you’re teaching people how to clean their houses in ten minutes flat, you need to have a following.

You have to build an audience first and then release the product. Before you even write the book, you sell it first. First you create the cover of the book and start promoting it—start marketing it on Twitter—before you even write it. Then when people say, “I can’t wait to read it” you say, “Oh shit, I better write this book.” Because why create a product and have it sitting in your garage? The marketing of the book is more important than the book itself. You want to produce quality work, but you also want to know that the marketing is important.

What tools have you found to be the most useful in building your brand? Facebook? Twitter? Podcasts? Newsletters?

Marketing is a wheel with different rungs. There’s social media, TV and radio publicity … networking and word-of-mouth is huge. There’s traditional marketing, there’s having a blog, and there are press releases, but Internet marketing is the way to go.

They all feed into each other, so you have to have everything. If you’re on View From The Bay, you put it on YouTube, you put it on your blog, you put it on Facebook. One of my clients was on an extremely popular national TV show and sold only 423 books. I’ve had clients who’ve sold thousands of books by marketing them online. Because who’s watching daytime television? People are at work. They’re on the Internet. So you have to take that content and repurpose it. It’s all about repurposing.

Being a guest blogger or being on a podcast is important. People are looking for content—for topics and for products to review. Things don’t die on the Internet. After View From The Bay is over, it dies. Your blog articles can be book chapters and your book chapters can be blog articles.

How do you earn your income? Working as a business coach?

I operate as a business coach, but I help business owners become bestselling authors. I help them use their book as a core for their business. Once they create more revenue streams to their core business and their book builds a platform for their brand, they can create new revenue streams, such as speaking. They can earn online revenue or become high-paid speaking consultants. I prefer clients who already have a business and then they can make a book. For example, there’s a clinical psychologist who has a clinical practice. He’s so specialized in his business that he creates a book and sells the book. People want more from him because they can’t go to his office because he’s in Seattle, so I sit down with him and create an online membership package so people can have access to his most recent research findings from Hoboken, New Jersey. He’s creating a business where he’s making an hourly salary of $150 and now getting speaking engagements for $1000–$2000 a pop, selling his book at those speaking engagements, and getting thousands of people to download his package online.

What effects have you seen of the recent changes in the publishing industry?

There have been extreme changes in the publishing industry. People who have a built-in audience should self-publish. There are two reasons to be in the traditional publishing business—distribution and name recognition. It would be great to have Simon & Schuster or Harper or Penguin publish you, but you still have to do the marketing hustle. Distribution is something you can attain by going to a vanity publisher or becoming your own publisher. There are a lot of people who have pretty significant audiences who are self-publishing because they can make more money.

What do you think of e-books?

I think e-books are good for a lead generation tool to give away a special report or an excerpt from your book, but I think you have to have a real book to have credibility. To get on TV and get publicity, you have to have a physical book. A book being available on Amazon is a big thing.

Is there an e-book version of Goal Digger?

I do have an e-book version of Goal Digger, but it’s not in a Kindle version yet. I just haven’t done it yet.

Tell us more about your networking events.

I have a seminar this Sunday: Authors Who Mean Business—how to write and publish your business nonfiction book, how to market your message, and how to make more money. It’s a full-day seminar where people are going to leave with an outline of their book, a title for their book, everything they need to get them started. I’m going to walk them through marketing and monetizing. For $95.

Do you have another book planned?

I have thoughts of writing another book, but I’m going to do things a lot differently. I’m going to make sure I have my audience built out before writing it, plenty of pre-marketing. I wouldn’t write it until I knew what people wanted me to write about. The thing about Goal Digger is that it really needed a marketing push and I didn’t have time because I needed to make money. So I went into Plan B mode—consulting and coaching. I feel like there’s a lot of good content in there and if I put any kind of effort into it, I could sell a lot more. I marketed it for about three months and then stopped. I think you need a good three-to-six months lead up and then a year afterwards. In fact, rather than writing another book, I was thinking about doing a revised and expanded version of Goal Digger.

What are your long-term career goals?

To be retired by the end of this year. (She laughs) To continue to coach business owners and people who are passionate about what they do. I want to continue to support business owners, I want to build my business to a seven-figure-a-year business and expand.

Who are your inspirations?

Victor Cheng, my business coach. Tim Ferris, The 4-Hour Workweek. Daniel Pink. The Three Cups of Tea guy (Greg Mortenson), Leaving Microsoft To Change the World (author John Wood), anyone who is doing social entrepreneurship. I think when you focus on doing good, it automatically comes.

Have you read Free by Chris Anderson?

No. Everything that’s valuable is free, but costs time. You can sit on Twitter all day and it’s free, but you haven’t done your grocery shopping or done your job.

What’s a typical day in the life of Alicia Dunams?

I wake up, get my daughter ready for school and get her off to school. I come back, write my e-mail newsletters—one I write daily and two I write bimonthly. Then I’ll write a blog entry, or have someone on my team help me research and write a blog. I have a virtual assistant who does administrative and marketing initiatives for me and who also does client work. She writes success quotes and she helps me with setting up appointments. I have a team of ghost writers, editors, and graphic designers who help me on all my client projects. I connect with my team and then I do two or three client calls a day on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. I usually go to two networking events per week—either in person or social networking. I’m in some networking groups in San Francisco and I go to one-off things and talk business with people. I meet up with friends who are business owners. It’s all about building and sustaining relationships. I end my day around 3 and pick up my daughter and I try not to work at night. And I usually take Fridays off. And I try not to take things too seriously.

Do you have any marketing advice for unpublished authors?

Really starting their marketing strategy is important, either by getting a team or doing it themselves. Provide really great content and value to your subscriber list. Don’t publish your book and expect everyone to buy it. Give them value. Share your life with them for years and years and years. You’ve got to romance them a bit. Give a lot of things for free—speak for free, give content out. I give a lot of knowledge. And you definitely have to start marketing before you write the book. The only thing you should write is the title and the subtitle. If you’re a nonfiction author, write the book, but don’t expect to make money from the book. Think about what your business is, how you’re going to monetize your book. Unless your book is really good or becomes a bestseller, the way you’re going to make money fast is through your business.

1. Too slow. The color control screen is supposed to be what slows it down, but I also love the color.

2. Depressing to read. The e-ink has the look of a cheap newspaper, a dark gray on light gray that has no sex appeal at ALL. I want a full-color display, not just a little color control screen at the bottom.

3. Click-it page turn. I want a touch screen page turn feature like the iPhone has, with an image of a real page turning. When I clicked on the side of the nook screen to turn the page, the screen flickered to a dark gray, and then to the new page on top of the old page before settling on the new page for good. NOT cool. (And I’ve heard all e-readers do that, so I don’t mean to pick on nook.)

4. Limited e-books to choose from. Although nook claims to have three times the number of e-books that Amazon has, the one book I wanted to buy was available for the Kindle and not nook. Wassup with that?

5. No Word docs. WHAT? Why doesn’t nook support Word documents? The other e-readers do, and I want to be able to read manuscripts on my e-reader.

To be fair, nook is probably equal if not better than the Kindle 2 and the Sony e-reader. All I’m saying is that as much as I want an e-reader, they still have a ways to go, and with second and third generations likely to be out within the year, I can wait. And now that I’ve tried nook, I am dying to see Apple’s Tablet. Come on, Mac Daddy, show us your stuff!

Jade Park wrote a great post about rejection.

This news is a month old already, but I still find it fascinating that a Georgia court awarded a woman $100,000 after she claimed that a childhood friend portrayed her as an “alcoholic slut” in her novel. NOVEL. As in FICTION.

Sierra Godfrey talks about finding the nerve to submit your manuscript.

JA Konrath at a Newbie’s Guide to Publising makes 11 e-book predictions for 2011, many of which I agree with. (In fact, it’s prediction number four that makes me hesitant to get nook because I know the next generation of e-readers will have video to accommodate Vooks and other multimedia.)

Here’s a quote from a great post about the Rick Moody Twitter saga: “So much of the dialog that happens on Twitter and on the literary blogs feels masturbatory to me. It’s the same couple hundred people talking about the same issues to the same audience. Is that what I’ve been doing these past few years? Is that what the book business is at this point? If it is, then to quote the modern day philosopher Bunk Moreland “We ain’t about much.” Bunk Moreland, for those of you don’t know, is a character on the best TV drama ever written, The Wire.

Via Nathan Bransford, are unhappy writers better writers?

From Mashable, the journalist’s guide to maximizing social media ROI.

From Media Bistro, search optimization tools for book publicity.

Say good-bye to Borders UK.

And last but not least, as a mother of a toddler who loves both books and iPhone games, this video that I found through Upstart Crow is pretty awesome (and I love the song!):

1. Big Machine by Victor LaValle—I know Victor and love his work

2. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery—Recommended by my hairdresser/writer friend and looked interesting in the bookstore

3. Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman—I work with Po, and I’m a mom who was fascinated by the topic

4. All That Work and Still No Boys by Kathryn Ma—I know Kathryn and love good short stories

5. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Bartlett—I know Allison, and I knew my dad would love the book, so I bought it for him

6. The Slippery Year by Melanie Gideon—I know Melanie and had read her book and loved it, so I bought copies for my sisters

7. The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality by Andre Compte-Sponville—This was a staff recommendation at Booksmith on Haight St., and it’s research for a book I’m working on

8. The Age of Orphans by Laleh Khadivi—I went to school with Laleh, and she’s a fantastic writer

9. Going to See the Elephant by Rodes Fishburne—I know Rodes, and this is another one I knew my dad would love, so I bought it for him

10. The Ramen King by Andy Raskin—I know Andy, and had read chapters from this book and loved it

I’ve also purchased many children’s books, mostly French, for my son. Books I plan to buy once I have an e-reader:

1. No-Impact Man by Colin Beavan—Heard about it on NPR

2. God Isn’t Great by Christopher Hitchens—Saw it in a bookstore and need it for research

3. Memoir: A History—Read an article about it linked from a tweet

4. Hold Still by Nina LaCour—I went to school with Nina, and she’s a great writer

My favorite this week was an inspiring post over at Market My Words about how she (Shelli) went from having no blog followers and many rejection letters to having 350+ followers and a book deal in just one year.

Nathan Bransford has a fabulous post about the top ten myths about e-readers.

At Media Bistro, one writer talks about how she uses search optimization tools for book publicity.

Rachelle Gardner’s guest blogger, Jim Rubart, is doing a four-part series on marketing at Rants and Ramblings.

Jessica at Book Ends Literary Agency talks about
the difference between writers who write for the sake of writing and writers who write to get published.

And finally, a video that has been making the rounds (here via Media Bistro and The Rumpus). From the New Zealand Book Council, the best book trailer ever: