Sandy Appleyard's Blog, page 11

Reviewing Books: Why Authors Should be Doing This

Book reviews, like social media, are a reciprocation thing; you want your work reviewed, so therefore you review other people’s work in hopes that they’ll return the favour.

But there are other important factors to consider in conducting book reviews, more specifically, book reviews from best selling authors.

When you read a New York Times Bestseller, chances are: a) it will be decently written and error-free, and b) you’ll learn at least a few tips about writing your own material based on the...

Optimizing Tweets Using Hootsuite and Buffer

Buff-Hoot-Twit, that’s the three headed monster I had become. I was at a standstill with new followers, retweets and mentions, and I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. So I tried a few things. I found the results really good, but I’ll get to that later. First, here is a breakdown of the things I did:

-Use lists to select tweets to retweet and mention each day instead of selecting from individual profiles and reciprocating each retweet/mention. More on this in another post.

-Select at least on...

(character interview) Police Chief Tame Suffers a Heart Attack

Image courtesy of Inmagine.com

Los Angeles Police Chief Mark Tame, who recently undertook convicted serial rapist and murderer James Gruber in a grueling standoff, was reported to have suffered a near fatal heart attack yesterday in his home.

He’s now listed in critical but stable condition in the UCLA Medical Center.

We caught up with his wife, Shelley Tame, to discuss his impending health.

Q: “How is Chief Tame?”

ST: “It was very frightening, and he has to undergo surgery today, but we’re prayin...

Book Review: Best Kept Secrets by Sandra Brown

Photo courtesy of Goodreads.com

Star Rating: 5 Stars
What the book is about

Alexandra Gaither, a lawyer working as assistant to a district attorney, has returned to her hometown. The sole reason for her return: to research evidence and seek out the person who murdered her mother.

The story unfolds little by little; very strategically introducing all parties allegedly involved in the murder. Each person she interviews is a potential suspect. But soon, she finds herself becoming personally acquaint...

7 Simple Ways to Write Distraction-Free

When we’ve cleared our calendars, run all our errands and finally have some time to sit down and write something….what always seems to happen?

We get distracted.

By smart phones, the internet, television; the list is endless. And that’s even assuming the kids, the dog and the noisy parakeet next door are all occupied.

So what can we do to help steer ourselves away from these distractions and focus on the task?

Now, I’m not saying that I’m perfect. Just because I’m writing this post doesn’t negate...

A Free Way to Promote Your Books via Createspace

Often times free ways to promote our books are right under our noses, but we don’t see them. They’re hidden in the fine print of contracts, about pages and descriptions. One tool I found over a year ago and utilized, creeped back into view and I thought I’d share it.

Unbeknownst to me, over seventeen hundred pairs of eyes had been viewing my last release ‘The Wife of a Lesser Man’. How? In a little portion of Createspace.com called ‘Previews’.

If you’re a Createspace.com user like me, and anyon...

WordPress Theme Hop: a Tour Through Author Themes

Image courtesy of Inmagine.com

In the past six months I’ve changed my WordPress theme about a half dozen times. The idea of hiring a website designer is quite frightening for me, not only for the costs involved, but for the lack of control. I like to know I’m free to update and change things whenever I want, and by surrendering to a designer I know I’m losing that.

So instead, I’ve tried several WordPress themes; both paid and free. One thing I’ll tell you is that if you want to try a paid them...

Banners: An Easy and Free Way to Create Them

For a very long time I’ve been seeing other authors displaying their books in a banner format on their website and social media pages, and I observed them with sheer envy. How did they get these? How much did they have to pay to purchase software for it, or worse, how much did they have to pay someone to create them from scratch?

I changed my website half a dozen times in as many months because I wasn’t happy with what it looked like. But what I realized was that it wasn’t my website I was unh...

Easily Turn your Text Widget Into Almost Anything

If you’re a WordPress user like I am, you can take advantage of one of the simplest widgets, instead of downloading expensive plugins or hiring a website designer, to do more complicated things on your site.

As an author, it’s important for me to be able to display as much information about my books as possible on each page. By utilizing my text widget in a specific way, I’m able to do this easily. But this method can be used for any blogger, marketer or the like.

The first step is to open up y...

Email Subscribers Lists: The Why and the How

Image courtesy of NIMP Mail.com

An email subscribers list can mean two things: subscribing to blog posts or subscribing to monthly newsletters. In this post we’ll be discussing the latter: subscribing to monthly newsletters.

Follows, likes, pins, friends, you name it; it’s all a measure of how we rank against others like ourselves. A lot of it can feel like a popularity contest, and some of it is instrumental in climbing up the ladder within our platform.

But there is one other thing that we all...