An Intro to Cold Coffee Café

Charlie RayGuest post
by Charlie Ray

As hard as it is to write a book, it’s even harder to market it once it’s written. Advertising your book is time consuming, and can be expensive. There are, however, a number of ways to promote your work without having to spend too much time or money.

In fact, I recently discovered a site that allows you to promote your work widely, and, while there are promotional packages for a fee, you can also promote your work for free. Cold Coffee Café, Cold Coffee Press Site, allows you to set up a blog site where you can put links to purchase your books, book trailers, excerpts of works in progress, or just about anything else you’d like. Go here to sign up. Getting up and running is easy, and in the end you’ll have a personal page on the Cold Coffee Café site as well as links to other authors and author services. Continue reading “An Intro to Cold Coffee Café”

Finding Blog Readers: Bringing More Views to Your Content

helping readers find your contentDo you get frustrated with your blog? Do you spend a ton of time crafting your blog post to find only a few views each week?

One of the best ways to bring more readers to your blog is to optimize your blog for the search engines. The old days of using simple keywords are relatively ineffective with today’s search algorithms. However, the fundamentals of visibility are still pretty much the same as in the early days.

Here are the basics to optimize your post for search engines. Continue reading “Finding Blog Readers: Bringing More Views to Your Content”

Ten Blogs and Websites Every Indie Author Should Know

As Kristine Kathryn Rusch is fond of pointing out, writing is a business. At least it is if you hope to make more than a handful of spare change from your endeavors. All the activities involved after you’ve written your book until it is in the hands of the reader are the business side of publishing. If you don’t give it attention you might as well be one hand clapping in the forest (or something like that).

Here, in no particular order, is a list of websites and blogs I’ve found valuable and read regularly. Some might seem obvious, some are less well known. Continue reading “Ten Blogs and Websites Every Indie Author Should Know”

Start Tracking Your Mentions: A Web-Monitoring Tool

We have lots of tools within our various platforms to help us track who is talking to or about us. We’ve talked about commun.it, Hootesuite and Tweetdeck before, but they can only follow things on a limited basis. In other words, each is geared toward certain social media platforms.

There’s also Google Alerts that will send you an email when your “alert” is mentioned somewhere out on the Internet but it is preferential to things within its search engine.

Today I want to introduce to you a site that puts it all together—Mention. This social media and web-monitoring tool combines the specificity of the above platforms with the power of Google Alerts to display who is talking about you or your books. Continue reading “Start Tracking Your Mentions: A Web-Monitoring Tool”