Doris-Maria Heilmann's Blog, page 34

Pen Names – Reasons Why You May Need One!

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Or even several!
If you spent years working on your novel you want to see YOUR name on it. But there are reasons to use one or several pen names, like many famous authors do and did in the past:

When readers found out that J.K. Rowling – Joanne Kathleen Rowling – the author of Harry Potter changed her name to Robert Gailbraith, writing The Cuckoo’s Calling, they stormed the bookstores. Within days of Rowling being revealed as the author, sales of the book rose by 4000 percent. Bestselling...

eBook or Print Book? Short Answer: All Three

Not only eBook AND print, but ALSO audio!

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A survey of book-buying behavior from Nielsen “Books & Consumers”, listed sales of books from January through September 2014:

eBooks accounted for 32 per centof book unit sales Paperback books made up 43 per cent of book unit sales Hardcover books were 25 per centof book unit sales

Surveys measured ONLY trade publishers who delivered to bookstores and large online retailers. Numbers of author-publishers (often without an ISBN) are different, but...

What We Learned from Thom Feeney about Crowdfunding

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You might have followed this IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign where 108,654 people raised 1,930,577EUR in 8 days – I heavily supported it on social media. On the second day IndieGoGo’s server broke down from the amount of visitors to Thom Feeney’s site. It also showed that people care!
It could have been one of the most successful campaigns if ….

really everyone in Europe (including children) would have donated three Euros for the cause the target wouldn’t have been so high: 1.6 billio...

Is a Literary Agent a Good Thing for You?

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So you want to be published by a major traditional publishing house and you have heard about literary agents, but not much on how anauthor can find one? Here’s how to determine whether you really need an agent.

Ask Yourself These Important Questions:

Did youcompare your manuscript / book idea with all the bestsellers in your genre. Does your work stand out against those? And is your manuscriptfully edited and proof-read? Is your work in one of the following categories / genres, then yo...

Napoleon Hill’s 13 Steps for Authors

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Photo Wikipedia
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Duringthe 1930’s Napoleon Hill, a journalist, studied over several years 500 rich men and boiled down their success into 13 steps. You might have read his book Think and Grow Rich – or let’s change it in the following paragraphs for these author success tips into:

Think and Become a Bestseller Author.
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1. Desire: You have to want it – Success,Happiness, Money, Health …
Hill explains: Wishing will not bring riches. But desiring riches with a state of mind that becomes an...

Discover Twitter’s Secret Feature

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Fantastic Twitter Feature
THE greatest feature on Twitter is almost unknown… Make it as easy as possible for people to locate your most important tweet content. Otherwise followers might never see this important tweet. After all they are not 24/7 on Twitter. Stats show that only 1% of your following is online at any one time. Even if you have ten-thousands of followers, only a handful will see your tweet when you only post it once a day or once a week. And very few can / will re-tweet it...

Open Letter to Amazon – How to Improve KDP

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I always meant to write to Amazon – not to their “customer-service” email – but as a registered letter, addressed to their CEO, responsible for customer / supplier relations or Jeff Bezos. Being too busy, I never got around it. Just now I found by chance a former blog post by David Gaughran who had done exactly this: At a London Book Fair, he tookthe opportunity to meet representatives from Amazon and present a list of feature requests and complaints. This list sheds a light on a lot of...

Best-Ranking Keywords in Amazon Categories

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Many trade publishers and author-publishers don’t understand Amazon’s categories and fail to use the system to their advantage. They either don’t use all categories available to them or, without drilling down further, they choose something generic like Fiction, which is useless as a category unless being at the very top of the Amazon rankings. When you are picking a category you don’t want one with a broad, busy market, you want a category that’s narrow. Why? Because Amazon’s algorithm is...

How to Start Your GooglePlus Presence

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According to the Digital Buzzand Huffington Post statistics, more than 625,000 People join Google+ EVERY DAY. What better then to combine Social Media Networking and visibility on the Internet at once! Participating on Google+ – also written GooglePlus – gives you an advantage at their search engine results: your posts are automatically included inGoogle’s Search Engine.

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Start Here:
As we receive so many questions how to start with GooglePlus, geta short introduction how to sign up w...

Award-Winning Author Fiza Pathan

Fiza Pathan’snext book is in the editing process right now …… and according to first readers even betterthanNIRMALA. It might shock readers even more than the prequel, and it might get an award – as so many of her books.
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Fiza Pathan is the recipient of the following AWARDS:

The Mom’s Choice Awards has named
Classics: Why we should encourage children to read them
and
Classics: How we can encourage children to read them
among the best in family-friendly media, products and services.
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