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Meghan Ward

I'm a freelance writer and book editor who specializes in memoir. For more info, visit my website.

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Should You Hire A Social Media Coach?

I teach social media and blogging classes here at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. In these classes, I explain to writers how to write a great blog post, how to market their services through their blog, Facebook and Twitter, how to create a community of enthusiastic fans of their work, and how to manage their [...]

Does Publicity Sell Books? The Debate Continues

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post titled “If Publicity Doesn’t Sell Books, What Does?” in which numerous published authors offered insider tips on how they publicized and marketed theirs books, and numerous writers responded. This week, Paul J. Krupin, a publicist who blogs at Direct Contact PR, offers his perspective on the publicity debate. [...]

If Publicity Doesn’t Sell Books, What Does?

UPDATE: The winner of The Edge of Maybe contest is …

KRISTAN!

It was a tough decision for Ericka, so she took her top six choices and randomized them. Kristan, please email me your latest address, so I can forward it to Ericka. And everyone else, if you’re in the Bay Area, don’t miss Ericka’s [...]

Penguin Publicist Holly Watson Talks Shop

Holly Watson is a Publicity Manager at Viking Penguin books and is based in Los Angeles, where she has been living since 2003. Since beginning her career in New York City as a Publicity Assistant in 1997, she has worked with a wide range of authors, including: T.C. Boyle, Stewart O’Nan, Terry McMillan, Garrison Keillor, [...]

Email Marketing For Cool People

Today my good friend Alta Peterson over at Alta Peterson Communications has written a wonderful guest post about e-mail marketing. If you think e-mail marketing isn’t for you, think again. Every writer I know uses e-mail marketing once her book comes out to blast an ad with the book cover on the front to all [...]

Best Social Media Books for Authors

A few years ago, I read Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” and the paragraph that stuck with me more than any other was a story about a woman who interviewed Kiyosaki (in Singapore, I think) for a news article. After the interview, she mentioned that she had written a novel, that she’d gotten good [...]

What is your social media influence score? (And does it matter?)

You’re working on building your author platform. You’re blogging, you’re tweeting, you’re Linked In, and you’re posting to your Facebook author page. But how can you tell if all those hours spent on the social media treadmill are having an impact?

On your blog, you can monitor how many unique visitors and page views [...]

How Do You Present Yourself To The World?

We’ve talked about branding and how important it is to present yourself professionally online through your website, blog, Tweets, and Facebook page. But what about in person? How do you present yourself to the world? Are you the kookie artist with the wild hair and the scrappy jeans? The clean-cut professional who wears twin sets [...]

Link Love

It’s been two weeks already since I posted links! Here we go:

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 [...]

Link Love

A note about links. I love reading other people’s links because we all follow different blogs and others post great links that I may have missed. That said, I find it really difficult to keep up with everyone’s blogs and to post all the best links here every Friday. I don’t like to post only [...]