By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD Today’s younger drivers have never had the experience of pulling into a gas station and having an attendant run out to fill up their car with gas. When it comes to fueling their vehicles, all they know is self-service. I have a vague recollection of that time. When first offered […]
Social media and its wide reach on the Internet have given rise to word-of-mouth book recommendations. Given this trend, some book marketers wonder if there’s still a role for traditional advertising. Here are three reasons why traditional advertising is critical to promote books in a social media world: Advertising Influences Recommendations: We don’t form opinions […]
Have you heard of NaNoWriMo? It stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it happens each year in November. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel, or the first 50,000 words of a longer novel, in just one month. (Why they picked November, a 30-day month with a long holiday weekend, is beyond me.) […]
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD As a consumer, I have a love-hate response to surveys. Often I dismiss them and feel guilty. Other times I take them and feel I’ve wasted my time. I group surveys into four categories: Market Research: The first type of survey is market research. Those who complete the survey have […]
A friend, who is also a prolific reader, once shocked me. Talking about nonfiction books, he said: “I only read the first chapter. Then I page through the rest and stop to read anything that’s interesting.” My incredulous look encouraged him to explain. “Most nonfiction books pack their entire message into the first chapter. The […]
I just began writing a book, an 85,000-word book. It needs to be finished by the end of November. That’s a lot of words in a short amount of time. I made a schedule. I will write Monday through Friday and edit on Saturday. With a few exceptions, I need to write 1,750 words a […]
As authors, our websites are our home base, the destination all of our online activity points to. We need to make sure our sites are up at all times and working correctly. When there is a problem, we limit our ability to connect with others about our writing. Here are six things to check: The […]
Ever since I finished my dissertation three years ago, my plan was to turn it into a book. Actually a dissertation is already a book. Mine weighs in at 40,000 words. What I mean is that I want to turn dissertation into a marketable book. Dissertations are not marketable. They are academic and boring. I […]
I receive many email newsletters and would like to read them, but usually, I don’t. The reason is they aren’t user-friendly. Here’s how they frustrate me. But there are newsletters I will read—assuming they have relevant information that interests me. Good email newsletters are self-contained within the email. This might mean they can be read […]
Ever since I first heard of content marketing, I understood it conceptually. Content marketing is providing interesting and useful information to our audience without trying to sell them anything. But I didn’t comprehend what it meant in practice. I was unable to connect theory with reality. I think my confusion resulted because I was reading […]