This week has completely flown by and I’m shocked that it’s already time for my Thursday-Must List again!

Thursday-Must List

Warriors in Pink
I had such a great interview with some folks at Ford yesterday about the AMAZING things they are doing for Breast Cancer Awareness (for October and beyond.) For 15 years, Ford has supported Susan G. Komen and breast cancer awareness. Their line up of Warriors in Pink apparel is rockin’ – so no matter how you are supporting this great cause, you can look good doing it. Check out their Warriors in Pink site and apparel. My fav is this Warrior Cap but I love the Warrior t-shirt, the new scarf and so many of the items! Follow Ford’s Warriors in Pink on Twitter.

And check out these 10 other great pink products that support breast cancer awareness.

Dana’s story
Speaking of breast cancer, I want to introduce you to fab mom, wife, career woman, reality star and breast cancer survivor, Dana Hooper. I’ve had the honor to get to know Dana over the last several months through the Real Moms reality show I help promote – Dana is one of four real AZ moms from the show. She went public about her breast cancer on the show and is such an inspiration to all. Please check out Dana’s story and watch her on season one of RealMomsGuide.

Author Susan Crandall
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting women’s romance and suspense novelist Susan Crandall for lunch. I’m doing a feature on her for The Indianapolis Star. We met in person not too far from her Indiana hometown and talked about her 9 books, reading, writing, growing up in Indiana and so many wonderful things. Her newest book – Sleep No More - will be published soon and I devoured it in hours. It’s got everything women want: suspense, romance, danger, passion and characters that are relatable, going through real-life things. You can stop by Susan’s site to register for a chance to win a copy of her new book (beware, however, once you read it you will want to immediately go out and buy all 8 of her other books). Also, several of you have already taken my advice to become a fan of Susan Crandall on Facebook, so thank you! If you haven’t, please become a fan of Susan Crandall here. And follow Susan Crandall on Twitter. You will love her work!

Birthdays
Today is my aunt’s birthday – my aunt who I adore. My aunt who bought me my first bra, embarrassed me in front of high school boyfriends, shares my love of reading, helped me plant a garden. My aunt who showed so much love and forgiveness and grace when my dad died – who also made me get up and dance in front of all the old folks at the nursing home because life is what it is and sometimes you just got to dance. So Happy Birthday Auntie!

And speaking of birthdays, my fast friend, Chick Lit Is Not Dead blogger, and client Liz Fenton has this funny and relatable post on her husband’s Birthday Blunder that is a must-read. Not only did it make me laugh, it made me realize I am also high maintenance when it comes to birthdays and gifts. Thank you for the laugh Liz.

Happy Thursday, y’all!

Related posts:

1. Thursday Must List
2. Thursday Must-List
3. It’s Saturday and I wish I was….

Saturday morning chaos has subsided in my household (big kids are outside playing and baby is down for a nap), and I have a moment to relax before I start baking. Yes, baking. I am no Paula Deen, but I can hold my own in the kitchen. I’m going to make my mother in law’s yummy coffee cake today. Usually reserved for Christmas morning, but why the hell not today, I say?

So, it’s Saturday and besides baking coffee cake, I was on Twitter checking out all the fun things my Twitter peeps have going on today and it made me come up with a fun list (and I love lists!)

So, it’s Saturday and I wish I was…

At the National Book Festival
SO many great tweets on this and it just makes me wish I was right there in the action! Jodi Picoult is speaking and was excited to meet Judy Blume… Apparently, the John Grisham tent is overflowing with thousands of fans…. David Baldacci is a great speaker…one of the Twitter peeps I follow was Sitting. by. Lois. Lowry. Lois Lowry!

Oh, it’s Saturday and I wish I was at the National Book Festival!

Instead, this is what I am doing…which is all good too.

It’s Saturday and I am….

Catching up on RealMomsGuide season 1
There is one more episode left in season 1 and I’m going back and watching all the episodes of this great Web Reality Series that follows 4 Real Moms of Arizona. It’s my guilty pleasure and you should check it out if you haven’t seen it. They are mini-episodes so it doesn’t take long to watch each one. I love the one when Vanessa talks about getting her boob job after nursing 5 babies and the one where Dana talks about her husband Hoop who is a stay at home dad. So many fun, relevant issues these moms discuss.

It’s Saturday and I am….

Lining up guest bloggers
Speaking of RealMomsGuide, several mom bloggers who contributed to the new funny book See Mom Run: Side Splitting Essays by the World’s Most Harried Blogging Moms by Role Mommy founder and author Beth Feldman are going to be guest blogging for two weeks in October to promote the See Mom Run book and tour.

In addition, there is a fun mommy blogger contest over at RealMomsGuide where you can submit your favorite post from your own blog for a chance to win a new Blackberry! Check out some examples from humor author and super cool mom blogger Kathy Buckworth, whose book and blog – Blackberry Diaries: Adventures in Modern Motherhood and The Blackberry Diaries – I’ve recently fell in love with.

It’s Saturday and I am also reading….

So I can’t be at the National Book Festival, but I am catching up some reading, writing and reviewing.

Best Fall Teen Lit
I’m having so much fun putting together my story on the Best Fall Teen Lit. Today, I’m starting Purple Heart by Patricia McCormick (which came highly recommended by teen lit fav Megan McCafferty in my Labor Day Book Picks Story.) about a young soldier who gets injured in Iraq and is putting the pieces back together after his head injury.

Megan had also recommended Adromeda Klein by the ultra creative and talented Frank Portman which I GOBBLED UP and included on my list.

Others that blew me away: Going Bovine by Libba Bray and Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater (move over Edward and Bella – new teen paranormal romance will blow them away!). Such great YA novelists and books out there right now – which makes it fun to write this story.

And I’m not done yet, so if you have recommendations for this story on great Teen Lit – let me know!

Pieces of Happily Ever After
I shared the book trailer with you on my Thursday Must List and now the book has arrived. It starts off with a woman who is holed up in her house because the paparazzi are outside waiting to get the scoop on something. Liz and Lisa highly recommended this book by Irene Zutell and gushed to me about her on Facebook. I think they are right- Irene Zutell is one to add to our fab list of women authors. Join us and follow Irene on Twitter.

Little Bird of Heaven
If I had to pick one all-time favorite author, Joyce Carol Oates would have to be it. And I’ve just gotten her new book, Little Bird of Heaven, in the mail. This is like her 500th novel or some crazy number. I’ve been hooked on her since We Were the Mulvaneys. And after just three chapters of this new book, I’m hooked again.

So, it’s Satruday… and now the sun is finally out (goodbye rain and fog!)… and I smell coffee cake!

Related posts:

1. Must-Read Monday
2. Thursday-Must List
3. Friday Reads/Spring Break

I’m posting a story from today’s Washington Post about authors tooting their own horns online. As I’ve blogged about before – and as this article backs up – most authors need to be self-promoting online where social media opens doors for instant, ongoing contact and conversations to expand fanbase and readership.

The pitfall is the fact that online self promotion, generating and continuing buzz is extremely time consuming and some authors just don’t have that kind of time. You also need to be PR savvy – planning, strategy and thoughtful execution – or your messages just get lost in the shuffle. This, of course, is where I come in – and other freelance/contract book publicists who work closely with authors and their in-house publicity teams when appropriate to supplement and expand publicity.

This is a great article on the importance and advantages of online promotion for any authors out there looking to beef up their book publicity. Enjoy!

On Web, A Most Novel Approach
With Promotion Money Tight, Authors Take to Online Sites To Toot Their Own Horns

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 24, 2009

Poor Kelly Corrigan, first-time author, didn’t get invited to this weekend’s National Book Festival on the Mall to plug her 2008 memoir, “The Middle Place.” She won’t be rubbing shoulders with heavyweight authors such as Sue Monk Kidd, John Grisham or Pulitzer winner Junot D?az. No major newspaper bothered to review the California mom’s tale about cancer and family and recovery when it was released. Her publisher didn’t send her on tour. All the old-school staples of book promotion — the book festival, the tour, the glowing newspaper review — Corrigan got none of them.

What was a newbie author to do?

She cobbled together a trailer for her book on her home computer, using iMovie software, downloading a free tune off the Web for background music, and stuck it on her Web site. Her agent helped get her on one network television morning show. About 20 friends hosted book parties, which she hit on a self-funded three-week blitz, selling books out of the trunk of her car. A guy shot video of her reading an essay at one of these parties, and she posted it on YouTube when the paperback came out.

A year later, the book has sold about 80,000 copies in hardcover and another 260,000 in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan data. It sat on the New York Times bestseller list for 20 weeks, peaking at No. 2. That homemade trailer has been viewed more than 100,000 times. The video of her reading has drawn 4.5 million hits. She’s in Washington on Thursday, speaking at the Congressional Families Cancer Prevention Award luncheon. Then she will plow into more than a dozen paid speaking gigs across the country in the next six weeks.

“I hand-sold at least 2,000 to 3,000 copies,” the 42-year-old said in an interview this week from her home in Oakland. “And while the hardcover was doing well, everything changed with that video from the reading.”

Corrigan, spending $3,700 for the Web site and her tour, figured out a path through the weird new-media maze of authors overseeing their own marketing and promotion, using the Internet and networks of friends to get their little-known works off the ground.

Book publishers actively market and promote authors, of course, particularly the big names, but for thousands of writers it’s a figure-it-out-yourself world of creating book trailers, Web sites and blogs, social networking and crashing on friends’ couches during a tour you arrange.

“Being an author has become much more of an ongoing relationship with your audience through the Web, rather than just writing a book and disappearing while you write the next one,” says Liate Stehlik, publisher of William Morrow and Avon Books. “You have to be out there in the online world, talking and participating.”

Authors are expected to behave like mini-entrepreneurs, says Kamy Wicoff, founder and CEO of She Writes, a Web site devoted to helping women writers promote their books. She started the site in June. More than 4,000 writers have joined.

“The landscape has altered so fundamentally and irrevocably that almost no one is immune from finding ways to participate in the promotion of their books,” Wicoff says. “Writers with small advances and limited resources are expected to treat their book as a new company, with marketing and promotion and PR.”

This trend is driven by the availability and ease of Internet marketing, the expense (and diminishing use) of author tours and the need to keep up with the competition. More than 560,000 books were published in the United States last year, a $25 billion pie of which everyone wants a slice.

“The fragmentation of the market is staggering,” says Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, a book audience research firm in New York. “Authors walk into bookstores and think they’re cluttered, and wonder how browsers could find their book in there. The problem is, the Web is giga-cluttered by comparison.”

For some established icons such as E.L. Doctorow, John Irving or Toni Morrison, the established round of reviews and readings at major festivals is promotion enough. For pop-culture mainstays like Grisham, Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, fans are primed and waiting for their next efforts.

Many other authors — the media personalities, the pundits, the politicians, the self-help gurus — “are actually selling their book long before they sell the book,” says Richard Pine, a literary agent for three decades and co-founder of InkWell Management. These people, he says, are establishing who they are and what they have to say and are building an audience years before they actually have a book on the shelves.

This reader familiarity is the biggest factor in sales, according to repeated studies carried out by Hildick-Smith’s firm. About 60 percent of respondents in surveys say the decisive factor in their decision to purchase a book is that they are already fans of the author.

But most authors are much more like Corrigan. Or, say, Monica Holloway.

The Los Angeles-based mom got good reviews for her first book, a 2007 memoir called “Driving With Dead People.” Her second, “Cowboy and Wills,” about her autistic son and his dog, is coming out this month. She’s hired a consultant to help with Internet publicity. She’s got her own Web site (which she pays for), hired a company to put together a trailer for the book, and commissioned someone to write background music for it. She’s worked hard to make sure the red on the Web site matches the red on the book cover, ensuring a professional appearance. She’s started blogging on the Web site of her publisher, Simon and Schuster, and is networking to set up book club appearances.

“It’s all Internet, Internet, Internet,” she says of the promotional process. “It’s crazy, you emerge from this place of solitude in writing and then switch into the hot glare of ‘market yourself now!’ It’s very uncomfortable, and you try to get past it with some sort of sophistication.”

Book trailers are one of the newest promotional outlets. Everybody’s got them, little video commercials for their books, something like movie trailers. Grisham’s are 20 seconds; Corrigan’s is about two minutes.

William McQueeny, chief operating officer at TurnHere Inc., a media production company based in San Francisco, has seen his company make “hundreds and hundreds” of these videos since it got into the business in 2006. He’s hired mostly by publishing companies, he says, but a bargain-basement video for a writer working solo would cost about $2,000.

“We’re not shooting talking heads in studios,” he says. “We’re capturing a story about the author, often on a location relevant to the content of the book. It’s a way to convey the meaning of the book in moving images and sound . . . and relative to the cost of a tour, it’s extremely inexpensive.”

So all these shiny things that go fast are really fun to produce, and some are even fun to watch. But do they move units any better than the old-fashioned author signings in a local bookstore? Do they help a book sell more copies, or merely keep pace with others in the marketplace?

Nobody really knows, a range of publishers and industry watchers say. There is not a clear-cut means of connecting Web site traffic, say, to results in sales, and some experts warn new authors not to go overboard.

“There’s so much you can do for free in Web promotion that it’s just crazy,” says Christopher Jackson, executive editor at Spiegel and Grau. “There’s been a lot of money wasted in publishing on slickly produced author Web sites that, in the end, really didn’t lead anywhere.”

Annik LaFarge, a prominent Web site designer based in New York, works with high-profile authors such as Mitch “Tuesdays With Morrie” Albom to help them stay in touch with their fans.

“I get calls several times a week from writers asking me to help them with their projects, but I encourage a lot of them not to do that much,” she says. “Unless you have the time and money to invest in it and do new things with the site and keep filing new content, it may not be worth it. . . . The main problem is the cacophony of the Internet. It’s difficult to make any sort of impression at all.”

Pine, the literary agent, says his best advice to authors is still “write the best book you possibly can.” After that, he says, put your name and face out there, no matter the odds. He names Stephen King as “the king of taking a chance on things digital,” and salutes Corrigan’s seat-of-the-pants success story.

“If you don’t try it, you don’t know if it will work,” he says. “Her videos could have not worked just as easily as it turned out they did. But she got out there, threw herself in the game and look what happened.”

Related posts:

1. Book Publicity: It’s Never Too Early for Social Skills

A look at social media, authors and publicity

I recently interviewed Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, and I asked her if she tweets, or plans to, and how she feels about fans who want more from her. After all, she barely has a website. I also asked for her thoughts on the Facebook group that was started: “Audrey Niffenegger, please stop painting and write more books!”

Her response was simple, “I do not Twitter, I don’t have a Facebook page. I also don’t have a television,” she said. “I think it’s important to pick and choose what you’re going to spend your valuable time doing.”

The reality is she doesn’t have to tweet about her books to build buzz and her success is not dependent upon having a compelling online presence through sites like Facebook. A lot of authors don’t do social media – but many authors (including some of the bestselling kind) do.

And, chances are, unless you are Dan Brown, you are one of those authors who will benefit greatly from social media and using those skills and sites to garner publicity for you and your book when it’s ready. (Let’s face it, PR budgets are always the first to get slashed. And if you are a debut novelist or just breaking out, your publicity budget probably won’t garner you the whirlwind press tour of popular, established authors.)

I’ve worked with many in-house publicity teams and, though they are amazing, they can and will only do so much. Some authors – like Jennifer Weiner (New York Times bestselling author) for example – have a PR person/agency in addition to an in-house publicity team and they still self-promote. Weiner does tons of self-promotion on her blog, Twitter and Facebook. When her newest book just reached the best-seller list, she immediately tweeted about it and received ^5s from around the social media world.

The bottom line is you will have to do some of your own publicity. And social media can help you do that.

In fact, I got a call from a debut novelist whose book is coming out early next year by a major publisher. She’s unsure what her publisher is going to do in terms of publicity. She’s a friend on Facebook and she’d seen some of my social media publicity for my author clients.

Her biggest question about Twitter and building social media skills and presence: “Is it too early?”

And I said to her, as I say to you all now, no it’s never too early.

Start building and expanding your readership – through your blog, Twitter, Facebook, whatever sites you are using – and those readers could potentially stick with you all the way. Finished 10,000 words? Got a request for a partial? Finally landed that slippery title? Got your dream agent and he’s a helpful, handsome guy from San Francisco or an industry icon in New York? Share it with readers and they will be more invested when you reach major milestones and your book finally does come out. And be smart about your audience – reach out to the people that make the most sense. Other readers, authors (authors are generally very supportive of other authors) and other industry people who are a good fit.

Oh, and regarding Audrey Niffenegger and her Facebook fans who want more from her?

“I spend large parts of my day in a quiet room, drawing or writing. But I am not a very fast writer, so any one who gets annoyed at me for my slowness is just spinning their wheels. I am not able to work any faster than I do now, alas,” she said.

Who knows, maybe one day your readers will be hammering you for more, more, more! But not if they don’t know about you first.

Related posts:

1. 5 Tips on Book Publicity & 2 Super Cool Contests
2. Novice authors must promote themselves, since publishers won’t